This past week I was out with a friend, and I was telling her about some of the touching comments and feedback I have received from my writings as a blogger. She said to me, “It sounds like you’re finding your voice as a writer.” For someone who has no formal education or training and who struggles to even consider himself a “real” writer, what a wonderful compliment! As bloggers, I believe we create our own piece of art; not on canvas, not on paper, but on our WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, and Posterous blogs. In any event, I believe what my friend meant to say was, “It sounds like you’re finding your voice as a Blogger.”
Most of us have heard the expression “finding your voice as a writer”. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous Self-Reliance dives into the concept of finding one’s voice.
But how do you “find your voice as a blogger?”
Blogging today is comparable to the journaling, writing, and publishing of a hundred years ago, but with over 100 million blogs on the Internet today, and with numbers ever-increasing, how do you find your voice? How do you set yourself apart, affect and inform readers, and simultaneously be heard with all the noise there is on the web?
The difference is that now we can write, edit, publish, distribute, and promote all within minutes via the Internet. Does that make you, as a blogger, special? I don’t believe so.
For me, I love to write. People seem to enjoy reading my content, and if I affect at least one person, then my job is done. However, finding your voice as a blogger is what will make you remembered, unique, interesting, authentic, and most importantly – subscribed to!
Here are a few simple tips that you can use to find your voice as a blogger:
1. Think about what do you absolutely love doing more than anything else in life and blog about that.
2. Blog the way you think. This is what makes the “authentic you.”
3. Remember: Nothing you can say is wrong. Too many people get trapped into being someone they are not, and finding your voice is nothing more than being truly yourself. This is what makes you special as a blogger. Insincerity comes off the same in a blog as it does in real life, and no one likes to read something they cannot relate to or identify with.
4. Ask yourself: Where do you feel life is directing you? What do you feel your purpose is? Follow that. Your intuition is always correct, and the uniqueness of who you are and what you have to offer via your creativity and passion is what will make you a great blogger.
5. Write consistently and regularly. Every great skill comes with deliberate practice and continued repetition and improvement.
6. Dedicate yourself to constant improvement in regard to both the blogging industry and the grammar and vocabulary of the language in which you primarily blog.
7. Learn to participate in continual trial and error.
8. Define your niche and work at becoming a Thought Leader in that niche rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
9. Contemplate and focus while writing and before posting.
10.Perseverance (This is most important)
