Lately I have been in some sort of write-about-blogging-itself-mood, if that’s how you can call it. You might have recognized it about my entries on the importance of commenting, how and why to use the timestamp and windows live writer, a great blogging tool to increase efficiency. Today I would like to discuss with [...]
Lately I have been in some sort of write-about-blogging-itself-mood, if that’s how you can call it. You might have recognized it about my entries on the importance of commenting, how and why to use the timestamp and windows live writer, a great blogging tool to increase efficiency. Today I would like to discuss with you what sort of subjects one can write about on a personal blog and what you should try to avoid if you’re writing for a certain readership.
There is a great deal of things to blog about, yet when making a personal blog it’s also one of the hardest things to choose. Since of course you could blog about the average things like how to become a professional blogger, what’s the latest in the blogosphere, SEO and all that other sort of stuff but where’d be the personal touch in that?
What makes a blog personal
This is a very important thing to realize up front before you can even get started, what exactly makes a blog personal? Does it require you to write about everything you did during the day into the most horrific details?
I woke up later than average this morning, around ten past eleven. Since I didn’t want to get up yet I kept lying for some time and watched cartoons, Pokemon was on. Ash turned into a pikachu in this episode due to some magic, it was kinda weird but let’s say funny. As the episode ended I got out of bed and went taking a shower, I felt sort of tired still but the shower slowly woke me up.
With the shampoo I washed my hair making it nice and soft again, the way I prefer my hair. I just don’t want to walk around with greasy and fatty hair after all…
This shows an entry like you’d read it in a diary, the difference though between a diary and a blog is that a diary isn’t meant to be read by everybody. On a blog many people aim their blog to be read, entries like this aren’t going to make that happen any time fast.
Even if it’s personal, it does have to hold a value of interest for people, and to be quite honest I doubt many could care about how you would have watched Pokemon and washed your hair with shampoo.
So what exactly would make a blog personal? I think this is a hard thing to truly answer since you can make it personal on many levels but one important side is the first thing someone sees. The design of your blog plays a very important role, if you’re going to try and copy a pro-blogger or go very minimalistic you will not be looking like a personal blogger. You should look at yourself as a person, what are your interests, how do you look like, etcetera and try to reflect this in the design of your blog.
If you don’t have the experience to design your own blog then don’t worry, Pro Blog Design which I frequently visit has some great other tips on how to add unique elements to a personal blog.
What to write about?
Usually when you create a blog within a certain niche, you’re stuck with that for the rest of the blog. Personal blogs on the other hand tend to evolve around the interest of the blogger, the subject isn’t so much of main importance anymore.
There are examples of blogs which write about probably 20 or 30 different things without any real structure but the readers wouldn’t want them to change anything about it, because it’s personal and makes it different from the rest.
So figure out what it is what you like, even if it stands out completely from one and each other. In my case in example you will see me writing about blogging, medicine, art and every now and then something from my daily life mixed within. It creates variety within the different entries, but that’s definitely not a bad thing. You can even use it to your advantage.
One way to use it to your advantage is by preventing a so called “writers-block”, when working within a single theme that might occur quite easily after you’ve written about it for a couple of weeks or months. With multiple subjects though to write about chances are low you’ll run out of something to write about.
My mistakes in the past
For a long time I probably was like many personal bloggers, I didn’t care about my readership that much and slowly began ignoring the quality of my entries a bit with the excuse of “it’s personal anyway, success doesn’t matter” but that’s just not true.
Even if the amount of readership I received during that period slowly increased, it wasn’t truly noticeable and input was far from visible. This all changed for me a while ago when I decided to treat my blog more seriously, start giving more attention to my entries and rather than going for quantity focusing a little bit more on quality.
Within just two weeks of this change I have received about 30% of the amount of comments which I received in the 14 months before that, now that’s a significant increase right? Readers became a lot more responsive even though I kept on writing about the things I liked.
My visitors have also skyrocketed, from about 300 unique a day which I had at first for quite some time that amount about doubled quickly, with some peaks being even three times as high and I’ll be waiting for the first day on which I’m going to pass a thousand unique visitors within a 24 hour period!
Readership, all to go for?
Keep your audience in mind, but it is less important than with a professional blog. You’re not going to have to make a living out of your blogging with a personal blog, so don’t let your writing be directed too much away from your own taste and starting to blog about what one supposedly should be blogging about.
Believe me, it will quickly take the fun out of blogging and many of your solid readers will probably not even like the change because they came there to see your style in the first place.
Writing about SEO can still be personal
In the beginning of this entry I mentioned a couple of things which had somewhat less of a personal touch to them, but if it’s within your interest of course you shouldn’t decide to simply skip it because it might look less personal. Personalities after all can greatly vary, one could really love Britney Spears and riding ponies resulting in a ton of entries written on those subjects with probably quite a lot of standard girl talk along whilst there’s quite a bunch of guys with interests in web development, SEO, scripting and the like.
The key to keeping it personal though is the way in which you write it, ruelicke.net in example which I visit every now and then is a pretty personal blog but does tend to write on subjects which could be seen as less personal. When writing on validation tools for html and css though you can see how he added a personal touch by not going in too much detail on the subject along with bringing forth his personal opinions on the matter rather than writing objectively.
There’s a lot more to it still
I just highlighted a tip of the iceberg here, there’s a lot more to it when it comes to making a blog personal but I hope you find these tips useful. I tried to show that a personal blog doesn’t instantly have to be boring, better yet it shouldn’t even be.
The subject in which you write doesn’t even have to matter, as long as you write subjectively. Where as in a professional setting you might want to restrain from personal opinions too much and try to go for facts this isn’t the case in a personal blog.
And last but not least, if you’re interested in writing about multiple subjects then definitely don’t be afraid to do so. Let your readers know what you like, enable them to get in touch with your personality and interests just that little bit more.
If you got more tips on how to work well with personal blogging, let me know by commenting! I’d love to hear what other personal bloggers have to say about what they think what makes blogging personal.
Oct 16 at 5:35 am
Comment: #1
Hi Slevi,
You write:
You forgot the difference between a diary and an online diary
Oct 16 at 1:25 pm
Comment: #2
“Lately I have been in some sort of write-about-blogging-itself-mood”
Funny, lately I’ve been in the opposite mood. Too many people are metablogging these days and the topics have become saturated and seriously cliched.
Look at your ‘The Best Around’ list in the sidebar. How many of those are metablogging topics?
Oct 16 at 6:58 pm
Comment: #3
@Damien Riley: Online diaries is something I don’t really “believe” in, or how to say :P. If people write it in a diary form they either tend to make it private or apply some form of censorship over it from whatever I’ve seen in online communities. So I guess you could use that censorship to define it as an online diary, but could also just name it a personal blog directly then :P.
Could be of course that I completely missed out on real forms of diaries online, I must say the average community in which I am/have been active isn’t much more than a place filled with teenagers and people in their early twenties of which most probably haven’t touched a real diary in ages or even never in their entire lives making online diaries more like what they’ve seen on blogs or from others usually including those “games” sent around and such in which you fill in song titles or answer personal questions, etcetera.
@TDavid: Most of it due to the top popular posts plugin being flawed and giving score to spam comments caught by Akismet shouldn’t even be there, but it’s completely bothersome to have to keep manually going for the delete spam comments over and over.
A flaw which I at first wouldn’t have predicted within the plugin, but unless it gets fixed might be a reason to ditch it for an alternative one day.
As for many people blogging about it, that’s not really something I care about :P. I mainly write what I feel like writing about, something which switches from time to time. Whether it’s something a lot of people have already written about or just some I don’t think it matters, as long as you enjoy writing about it.
That on itself I’d say is something which makes a blog personal, the freedom you give yourself of varying within subjects just since it’s within your field of interest (at that time).
Oct 16 at 10:59 pm
Comment: #4
The first blogs were called “online diaries.” It’s an art form whereas a diary is an exercise. What to give them? What to hold back? It’s like a PR campaign sometimes. Your “grade” I suppose is in how many people follow your stuff.
I like personal blog or online diary but online diary connotes a more personal “revealing” color and a certain audience is drawn to that I think. I could be wrong about these things, blogging is not a science.
Oct 17 at 1:18 am
Comment: #5
The first blogs being called online diaries I still recall yeh, but they’re nothing compared to what I see called as online diaries these days.
It’s more like before someone gave web2.0 like stuff that name it was present there already as well but just called differently, doesn’t really make it different in essence though.
I think though that the entire concept of blogging has changed a lot since then as well, the world wide web was a lot less “wide” back then. With search engines barely being used and even there yet and such along with the lot less people using the net you could be a lot more free on what you wrote about.
These days, try to get a job and within some countries it’s completely normal for your future employer to dig you out on the net first, so if you write too much personal stuff online in the public it can easily be used against you.
Outside of that though it can also be easily found by everybody, just like myspace is the thing in the US here hyves is all over the place, I have to just give in a random school, university, work place or whatever more and I get hundreds if not thousands of profiles.
Since I believe it became standard for profiles to only be viewed by friends unless set otherwise privacy is kept more in regard, but on a lot of places on the net that’s not the case and everybody can read it. Do you really want to expose yourself that much to the world like you’d do with an ordinary diary? I guess that’s what keeps a lot of people back from doing so and gives the preference more to those games floating around there like memes on blogs.
And personally I think it’s not too bad that real online diaries aren’t present too much, although some blogs are quite personal many aren’t like a diary too much. People would just end up placing way too much of themselves on the net and that absolutely should be done with caution since the consequences can be great, a shame but true.
Aug 22 at 7:04 am
Comment: #6
[...] I always classify myself as a personal blogger as I write on whichever subject I come across which is of interest to me, rather than sticking to a [...]