The following article was written by blogging about blogging extraordinaire, Lorelle VanFossen. She has one of the oldest personal blogs in existence, Taking Your Camera on the Road, which began in 1994. She is also the author of the awesome book “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”. She and I talked quite a bit about personal blogging back in September on PreviewCast #044, and so I asked her to contribute some more thoughts on the importance of personal blogging. Enjoy! –Douglas

The Art of Personal Blogging

When I started my first website - an online journal back then - it was a combination of technical articles and stories about our life as we prepared to quit our jobs and take off six months to a year to travel full-time around North American. Fourteen years later, and still living on the road, such a site is called a blog - a personal blog.

A personal blog is the story of your journey. No matter where it takes you.

There are a lot of names and purposes a personal blog can have. It can be about your day-to-day life, a sort of online diary. It can be a place where you can rant and rage without censors. It can be a place to tell your stories. It can be an online classroom where you share your knowledge and expertise.

Which makes it hard to define a personal blog as it can be anything and everything.

However, there is an art to personal blogging that makes it work for you and be the success that you want it to be. It begins by defining what personal success is for you and your personal blog.

What is Success?

A successful blog is measured in many ways, including:

• Blog traffic
• Number of comments
• Incoming links
• Feed statistics
• Others talking about your blog
• Statistics on offsite charts such as Technorati, Google’s PageRank, Alexa, etc.
• Personal satisfaction with the work
• Increase in personal support network (friends and contacts)
• Personal satisfaction in being published

Your blog is a success if it gives you want you want out of it. If you blog to get more friends, and it works, that’s your reward. If the joy of seeing your writing in print, so to speak, fills your insides with joy, then it’s a success. Who cares if anyone comments or not.

If you blog for the traffic, to build up your readership as much as possible and encourage incoming links, then you have to do what it takes to attract and keep readers coming back to your blog in order to make it a success.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things. Whatever it is, you need to plan your blog’s content towards accomplishing the goals by which you measure your blog’s success.

Focused Content and Style

Many claim that a personal blog has no rules. It can be anything and everything. However, if the content and style isn’t meeting your personal goals, what you are doing isn’t working.

I wrote recently about a teacher I had in an adult language class who was all over the map in her teaching style. At first, I thought the problem with my inability to learn the language was with her. It didn’t take long to realize the problem was with her, especially when the class size dropped from 40 to 4 in a few weeks.

If your blog’s content and presentation style is all over the map, you will lose readers. Sure, you’ll keep the friends you’ve developed strong ties with you, which might be just what you want, not needing more. This teacher was a likable woman. Everyone liked her. She was cheerful, fun to be with, and really nice. But her teaching style stank. While I’d love to be her friend, I didn’t want to be her student.

Maybe you’re content with the status quo, but if you aren’t, your blog needs to have a focused and consistent style your readers can expect and count on.

Since a personal blog can be anything, you have to look at what your goals are with the blog in order to align the blog’s focus with your intentions.

If your goal is to increase your support network, then your blog’s focus must involve creating an atmosphere of creative conversation. You want to get to know your readers and your readers to know you, so you write in a friendly, open manner that invites them to participate in the process.

If your goal is to increase readership numbers, then your blog’s focus is about “the returning customer” - giving your readers what they want so they will come back, tell their friends, and bring them with them on their next visit.

Ask yourself what you want to get, then explore what you have to do on your blog in order to get it. Then go get it. It sounds simple, and in many ways it is. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

The Hilly Country Bird Babble Blog

Sally Fish, our lovely hypothetical blogger, loves birds. She enjoys going out early in the morning to a local park before work with her binoculars to look at the birds. She takes trips on weekends to find birds further afield, but she’s lonely. There are no bird clubs or groups in her area and she wants to meet people who enjoy birding with the same passion she does.

She starts by hanging out on other bird blogs and forums, discussing how all this bird-friendship business works, and gets a few ideas about how she would like to get to know other birders, specifically those who live in her area.

She opened up a free blog with the title “Bird Babble” and started writing about her bird discoveries and the places she had been looking for birds. After three months, she gets two or three comments and only 10-20 people visit irregularly. She wonders what she is doing wrong.

We talk and I tell her to be clear about her goal. “I want to meet other birders in my area and go birdwatching with them.”

We start making changes. The first one is to change her blog tittle from “Bird Babble” to “Hilly Country Bird Babble.” With the name of her geographic location in the title, it will catch the eye of other birders searching for bird information in that area.

She starts planning a bird watching event, writing it up on her blog. She emails fellow bird bloggers asking them to help her promote the event, and posts about it on various bird forums, using the keywords for the location and the types of birds expected to be found.

She gets a few emails and comments on her blog expressing interest, but she isn’t sure who is going to show up. She arrives at the park early on a Saturday morning to find eight people have shown up. Eight possible relationships. All fans of birding. She is so excited.

She emails everyone who attended thank you notes that afternoon and writes up a summary of the event on her blog, pointing to the blogs of some of the attendees. They write up their experience of the bird trip on their blog, linking to hers.

A year later, she is putting together two to four bird watching trips and events a month for her area. She helped found the Hilly Country Bird Group with more than 20 steady members. Her blog traffic is up, and the audience is focused on the local area birds, which thrills her to no end. She’s even had another bird fan in her area with a blog guest blog on her blog, and she’s blogged on his.

Her blog is now meeting her blogging goals.

This is a simplistic summary of a hypothetical blogger, but one that closely matches many of my clients’ and readers’ experiences. The more clear you are about your intent, the more your blog focuses on that intent and meeting its goals, the more likely you are to achieve those goals.

What do you want out of your blog?

Tags: Blogging, content, goals, guest blog, Lorelle VanFossen, Personal, personal blogging, style, tips