Is your blog authentic?

By Jayvee FernandezBlogging

Hi, happy weekend! I’d like to share with you a little thought that borders on being a devil’s advocate when it comes to the new media industry. I wanted to zero in on the talk about “authenticity” — and ask you to reflect on these questions:

Is your money making blog authentic, or is it a fake Problogger.net?

Is your entertainment blog authentic, or is it just a fake Perez Hilton?

Is your tech blog authentic, or is it a fake Engadget?

With thousands of blogs created everyday, what makes yours authentic? In the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, authors James Gilmore and Joe Pine expressed how at times we create products that try too hard to emulate the good practices of something superior, it ends up becoming an inferior copycat.

When we were young, we were brought up to think that we were the unique child that filled mom and dad with love and joy. As we grew older we realized that we needed to fit in a social group lest we suffer the social consequences of being called an outcast. The same applies to when we worked for a company and the attitudes, values and business acumen were passed down enabling us to behave in a certain way. When we entered the blogging industry, we learned that there were certain rules to finding great keywords. We learned how the big sites accumulated traffic. We learned link baiting, keyword research, template design optimization and many more.

Do the hundreds of thousands of blog templates truly emanate who we are? Do we sacrifice our writing style for optimizing our blog post for keyword search? Do we write about topics that contextually yield more money than our true passions?

These are general questions, and wise guys can easily contest most of these. But I must drive my point down — in today’s blogs, how do we know that something is authentic?

5 thoughts on “Is your blog authentic?”

  3. I only write whatever is in my mind and I don’t know anything about keywords nor traffic. However I regard my blog as a product of envy because I designed it based on the beauty that I see in other people’s work. Am I authentic? Or am I a fake?

  5. You ask some good questions and make some good points. A lot depends upon the purpose of your blog and what you mean by authenticity. If you are using your blog to “make money online”, then you probably have a goal of profitability. You are going to do what it takes to generate traffic and make your sales. You will probably work to provide authentic customer care and work to connect with your customer in a business relationship and more than likely go no further. This is not necessarily a bad thing, And I believe you are being genuine in that your actions are in harmony with your goal.

    Others have a purpose of sharing a hobby or interest. In this case to focus on traffic generation, blog optimization, or key word domination can hurt you in terms of authenticity as you may end up sacrificing it for technique.

    In my case, I write about what interests me. Twitter, FriendFeed, motivational thoughts, political thoughts, jazz and anything else that captures my heart. I’m not interested in generating tons of “niche” traffic. I’m interested in simply sharing who I am and entering into a genuine relationship with those who chose to read what I write. Authenticity for me requires that I spend less time on traffic building techniques and more on expressing my thoughts and developing community. If I reflect an opinion that comes from someone else, so what? As long as it is an opinion I genuinely agree with, then it’s not fake.

    Does this make sense? Authenticity means be who you are, no more and no less. Make sure your actions match your purpose. Just my 2 cents. 🙂

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