The Importance of a Blogger’s Voice

In Sean Penn’s Oscar winning performance on Milk, I remember how he walks to a street where everyone is walking placidly by and he starts a speech with the following words:

“My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you!”

A powerful image that came to my mind when I was trying to think about the process that we, as bloggers, go through when starting a blog. People are just surfing the web, reading headlines on an RSS reader and here you are, trying to catch their attention. Your promise to them is that you will become their leader or mentor in an area where they have no experience or are not able to learn by themselves. But they all want something for sure: a person to guide them.

I had this thought the other day over at Friendfeed: if Twitter’s prompt is: “What are you doing?”; Your blog’s prompt should be: “What are you thinking?” I’ve talked in the past about how important your post headlines are, but it goes beyond that. You’ve got to have a strong voice and you have to try to take people to another level. It’s not about “can you please listen to me?”. It’s about “come with me, you need my advice, I will guide you to a better place”. They want you to tell them what they can’t hear anywhere else. They want you to teach them something new. They want to be taken to a place where they could not go by themselves.

That’s how you build followers.

Your blog needs a voice. Say things the “real you” way, not mimicking others.

It’s always a good time to start. Try to read all the stuff you’ve written in the past 6 months. See what you get from it. See the personality that you are drawing with your posts. Are you just another blogger, or are you saying something different?

As you might read in dozens (or hundreds) of writing books, a voice is the unique way that every author expresses himself. Many people can experience an event and each one will write about it in a totally different point of view. The most amazing thing is that each one of these stories, if truly told from within, can be all different but interesting.

I’ve thought about this because my blog will be one year old in a matter of days, and it has not done as well as I’ve wanted. Does that mean I stop? No. It means I need to tune and analyze and make a better blog.

I will write a post about an important metric that led me to this conclusion. But for now, I  want to tell you:

“My name is Jorge Escobar and I want to recruit you.”

Tagged as: tips, voice, writing