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Sunday 25 March 2007

Why Bloggers Need a Personality

By know most people have heard the phrase 'content is king' and all that jargon about the importance of creating original and unique content. The 'business' reason for this is that content forms the basis of SEO. In short it does this by providing material for the search engines spiders to crawl and a way to categorise and rank a site. Secondly good content creates linkbacks; this sort of content has become known as 'linkbait' and is a productive and honest to make your site popular. My example of this is Maki from DoshDosh who has been cranking out post after quality post, which has created numerous linkbacks and brought popularity to DoshDosh.

So what does having a personality have to do with it?
In this day and age it is very hard to find a totally unique original topic that has a demand for it. This means bloggers have to develop new ways to make their site stand out from the competition. One of the easiest way to do this is to be honest and speak your mind. You don't have to follow down this line of thought very far to see why it works. Whatever your beliefs about life, the universe and blogging, everyone has experienced something different in their lives which makes their views unique.

Everyone has clicked on different pages on the internet and read different articles about blogging (well at least all bloggers have). This means all our views are going to be slightly different! My example of this is Kumiko from Kumiko's Cash Quest. She is gradually becoming known for writing quirky posts that are never quite what people expect. It is important to remember at this stage that repeatedly writing controversial posts isn't going to get you anywhere. Providing you have read enough about any given subject you will have formed a view of your own and there will be no reason to exaggerate your views.

A wise blogger (I can't remember who) once said that there are two paths to becoming a successful blogger. Either, by becoming an expert in your niche, or by becoming a well-known personality. My example of this is John Chow. The chances are that if you read this blog you also read JohnChow.com. This is because he has become both and expert in his niche (making money online - ish) and he is a bit of a celebrity. He shows what happens in the rare occasion someone manages both.

There are other added bonuses of 'having a personality'. These include the worship and fan mail of readers as well as hate mail and devastating spam attacks. Hate mail is a bonus simply because it ads some excitement to what at times can be a (dare it say it) boring profession of blogging. Perhaps I am being naive having never experienced hate mail, buy you know what they say, don't knock it till you've tried it.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, personality . . . it's a weird thing for me. Write about books, I have it in spades. Try keeping a diary of my participation in the Million Dollar Experiment, it deserts me. I guess I'm better at reading than I am at raking in cash!

Ravi Karandeekar said...

Hello Matt, yes, i very much agree with you. It is very important to have a personality. It should reflect in you writing. Your readers should be able love and relate to it. When this happens you create emotional bond with you readers. This bonding creates you Brand! Thanks, for making this point.

Johnny Cash said...

Agree with most of your points. However, I think most people read Dosh Dosh's blog is because it has TONS of information about online money making. It has more to do with content than personality.

DotMySpot said...

Hmm.. i didn't put any personality on my blog @@" maybe i should put a little picture of myself :P hehehe

anyway i noticed once thing is that mostly women have the upper hand when it comes to money making sites :( @@" don't know why... anybody think the same way also?

608 said...

Thanks for your views guys n dolls,
Michael if Women make more money then why are you sad about that? - you put :(

Marcus said...

It's a challenge to infuse a post with personality.

How do you guys go about including personality? Anecdotes? Opinions?

608 said...

marcus it's just the same as real life. If you spend long enough learning about something you WILL form an opinion about it. Jokes are also great too.

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