How to Blog With Emotion

Have you ever noticed that some of the most popular blog posts are the ones that are filled with emotion. When you read them, you can sense a lot of emotion.

They might read like a passionate rant or a sad lament. Some are very positive and you can quickly tell that the blogger is very happy.

No matter what emotion a post reveals, emotion is a great way to attract readers. Emotion makes you more personal to your readers.

It helps you relate better to them. See we are emotional creatures. And as behavioral studies show, we usually use emotion to make decisions rather than logic including purchasing decisions.

On the contrary, think about blogs that read like boring college textbooks. If you’re like the vast majority of people, you don’t read these blogs regularly.

So, how can you portray emotion in your blog posts?

Adding Emotion to Your Blog

Think of areas in your niche that triggers an emotion.  If you’re passionate about your industry, you should have topics that make you happy, mad, sad, or any other emotion.  As you write posts on these topics, your emotion should shine through in your posts.  You can even try the basic tactic of just writing why that topic makes you feel the way you do.

For example, the following type of posts are often winners:

Why I Love Traveling to Paris
7 Reasons Why Microsoft Makes Me Mad
A Tribute to Heath Ledger, RIP

Sometimes it’s hard to get emotional, so you’ll have to find an emotional trigger. One of the best ways to do this is just to keep up with the content in your space. If you do this, you find something that stirs you emotionally. This could be a forum post, an article, a video, a podcast, a Facebook message, or a blog post. If you have a robust online network, you probably receive emails that trigger an emotion.

Once you run across one of these triggers, respond with your emotion, or save the link and then find time later to respond.  However, in my experience, it’s much better to respond right away – even if you only have time to craft a couple of sentences.

Then, take your response and use it as the basis of a blog post.

Much of our communication online is great fodder for quality blog content. Yet, many of us will communicate ideas through sites other than our blog but those ideas never make it to our blog.  Don’t be afraid to recycle those ideas.

For example, I’ve been active in the last couple of months on a forum for my gaming blog.  I’ve found it much easier to create content on the forum because forums naturally lend themselves well to responding to others.  While browsing the forum, I’ll usually find a forum thread that causes me to respond because I want to share my opinion and expertise.

After a while, I realized that I should recycle my content on the forum and publish the same ideas on my blog. This strategy has helped in overcoming writer’s block.  I’m publishing blog posts more regularly and the posts are more emotionally driven and personal.

Finally, write like how your talk. When we’re talking to others, our emotion naturally comes through.  We can’t hide it unless we try.  But something happens when we write.  Emotion can often get stifled by writing.

Therefore, try these tactics for having a more personal voice.

• Read your posts out loud and edit the parts that seem too robotic and bland.
• Try using voice recognition software.
• Think about the question that your blog post is trying to answer.  Then, pretend that you’re in a chat room, when someone asks that question.
• Pretend you are sending an email to a person.
• Separate the writing process from the editing process.  The editing process can slow you down and stifle your fresh emotion.  I sometimes close my eyes while I type if I find myself trying to edit while writing.

Over to You

How do you let your emotion come through in your blog?

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