Your blog has its own personality, regardless of whether you actively cultivate it or allow it to develop haphazardly. Your readers are attracted to your blog for a reason, and its personality plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors and converting them into regular readers.
When your blog slowly converts passerbys into regular readers, a relationship of trust develops between your blog and them. It is this trust that forms the basis of how your blog deals with its readers and as such the blogger (you) must do what it takes to establish and maintain that trust.
This is where your blog’s character comes in.
Let’s discuss for a minute what I DON’T mean by character:
- I’m not talking about being morally right (immoral content goes, as long as that’s what the blog is designed for).
- I’m not talking about reporting only the facts (rumours work, as long as that’s what…you get the idea).
- This has nothing to do with the blogger (well, maybe a bit) – quite often the blog takes on a completely different personality from the blogger, and if that sells, that’s fine too. You don’t HAVE to be your blog, and your blog doesn’t HAVE to be you.
So what am I talking about?
Character in a blog means:
- Delivering on what you promise (integrity and reliability are cornerstones for building trust).
- Doing what you do to the best of your ability (effort and quality will be your secret weapons for converting visitors).
- Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success (don’t allow short-term results to distract you from long-term objectives).
You may not have the most popular blog, or the best looking, or the most profitable. All those things are important, and we’ve talked about how to achieve all these things at Performancing. You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.
Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.