Building Your Blogging Voice

December 1, 2008

Once you’ve tackled the technical hurdles of getting your blog up and running, you face an even more daunting challenge: what do you write?!

Leo Babauta of the Zen Habits blog provides a very long and detailed blog post about how to build your blog brand.  My key takeaway?  You must, must, must figure out your core message first.

If you’re just starting your blog, don’t just fire off random posts!  First, take a step back and figure out where you’re going.  And that starts with figuring out who you are writing to, because it’s all about them and their needs and interests.

Creating Your Core Message

Leo breaks creating your core message into five steps:

1. First, figure out who your target audience is. Who are you trying to help with your blog? Who do you want to attract?

2. Next, figure out what desires you’re going to be tapping into. Every reader goes to a blog for a reason — some desire they have that the blog will potentially fulfill.

3. Then figure out what message you’re going to send to them that will tap into specific desires. This is key: every blog sends an unstated message to the reader.

4. You need to be consistent about your message in everything you do. Once you’ve carefully crafted your core message, you need to align everything you do with this message. If you do things that conflict with the message, you will be sending confusing signals.

5. Finally, you need to repeat your message as much as possible to your target audience. A great brand with a great message is worth nothing if the target audience never hears about it.

Your Core Message Can Also Boost SEO

Leo describes how including this core message in everything you do — from emails to graphics — will build your brand.  But a few of his recommendations stand out to me, because they will also help your blog post get found by search engines:

Title and subtitle of your blog.  What message does your blog title (and subtitle if you have one) send to readers? (Did you know that if you include keywords and use H1 and H2 font, search engines will crawl over your subheads too?)

Content. The topics and titles of your posts, as well as the images and other content you use, should all be consistent with your core message. (Again, make sure your posts are chock-full of the keywords your audience is looking for.)

Off-blog comments. You are representing your blog every time you comment on another blog. What message are you sending when you do so? (Did you know that commenting on other blogs, and including a trackback to your own site, is a great way to improve your site’s page rank?)

Building your blog’s brand — and traffic — comes down to having a thorough understanding of your audience’s needs and desires, and giving them what they want.

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Posted in Blogging, Featured Posts, Search Optimization