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Can you comfortably express your personality online? Or do you find yourself writing bland text as you try to write “businesslike”?
Do you remember Ben Stein as the Clear Eyes spokesman? I don’t know if it’s still accessible but when I was writing this, YouTube still had a bunch of those commercials posted on this page:
Clear Eyes Commercials
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clear+eyes+commercial
Writing Like He Talks
He was a master at speaking in a slow, plodding, boring voice. It was a great twist on product promotion, but can you imagine listening to Ben using that voice in a 2-hour training video? Would you use that voice in your video ads? I wouldn’t recommend it. Trying to use this type of presentation to promote your products or affiliate links would probably run people off. This all raises the question – can you write with “Personality”?
Yes, you can express your personality online.
I think you can. You may not be able to come across as Chris Rock or Jerry Seinfeld when you write. On the other hand, you definitely don’t have to write your content like a high school term paper. Let’s admit it, high school term papers were, for most people, boring reports written in boring prose for the purpose of completing the assignment. Nothing more.
Taught To Be Bland
Did you put any “personality” into your school papers? Probably not. In High School and College for that matter, most of us were taught to present the facts and leave it at that. No exclamations, no contractions, nothing of interest. Just the facts ma’am. That’s one reason you might find it difficult to express your personality online.
Well, like a lot of things we were taught in school, it’s time to break the rules you were taught. And if you didn’t get a degree, that’s OK. Not confident in your writing ability? Not sure you know good grammar? That’s not a problem. Use Grammarly when you write. Then, once you have finished writing, ask someone to proofread your composition.
When writing copy for your emails or your site, there are a couple of situations that tend to let your voice and personality come through.
Share Your Experiences
One is writing about something with which you have experience. When you share experiences it gives you a narrative to follow as you compose. In other words, you can basically describe your experience which minimizes the amount of verbiage you have to “dream up”
You can also write about things that make you emotional. Whether it’s something that makes you joyful, makes you laugh, or makes you angry. Any of these emotions can motivate your writing. Did you have a great experience with a course on driving traffic? See if there is an affiliate program for that product and start telling people how great you found it to be. Now, take a look at the second and third posts of this site. They are both basically rants. But they helped me get rolling on creating posts for this blog.
Finally, there’s a rule of thumb that I have read for years, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Now, I want you to pay close attention. You don’t want to miss this….always write to one person. The way I am writing this to you. Not to all the other people reading this. I’m writing to YOU. Now I want to say thank you. See how that works? Writing with a sense of communicating with a single person makes it more personal. People are more likely to remember your material or be motivated by what you are telling them.
Practice, Practice
So practice your writing, and remember, you don’t have to write directly on your live blog. An approach that I use frequently, is to write a rough draft in my computer’s text editor or word processor. Then edit it and refine it until you are ready to copy and paste it to your blog.
Also, don’t forget that you can build your post(s) as Drafts in the WordPress admin panel.
One of the hosting services I use, BlueHost, automatically sets a “Coming Soon” notice on any WordPress blogs I install. If your hosting service doesn’t do that, you can get a “Coming Soon” or “Down for Maintenance” plugin.
Now, go write!
Until next time,
Dave
Owner/President of DUH Web Media Group
Sites:
DUHWebMediaGroup.com
DUHWebMarketingInsight.com
DUHWebMarketingReviews.com
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