Finding your blogging voice is essential if you want to make your blog stand out among the millions available online. This voice can be either a reflection of your own personality or a unique personality created by you specifically for this project. It’s affected by word choice, grammar, style, and rhythm of your writing.
4 Easy Steps to Finding Your Blogging Voice
1. Seek inspiration (while assessing possible competition)
As a wise man once said: “A great part of art consists in imitation.” Today we call it seeking inspiration. However, the idea lying at the core of this process is imitation of the pieces that you personally love. As long as you don’t copy them outright, this won’t be considered plagiarism.
Studying other blogs on the topics you yourself want to write about can not only inspire you but actually give you some helpful ideas. In essence, these blogs are your competition, so you can assess them, find their weaknesses, and make your own blog better.
When focusing on the voice, you should study not only blogs but other publications, and especially your favorite books. Make a list of the parts in every writer’s style that you like most and build upon them to develop a style and voice of your own.
2. Connect your words with your visuals
Finding your blogging voice isn’t only about developing a writing style. Finding striking visuals that will reflect and enhance your blog is a must.
Be sure to look them up and assess their size before you find web hosting. You’ll need to choose a reliable host and package with enough bandwidth to ensure your visuals launch fast. Nothing loses you an online audience as much as making people wait for a page to load. In fact, over 40% of them will leave if it will take over 2 seconds to do so.
The presence of as visual boosts recall of the textual information by over 65%. This means that by adding images and videos into your voice-seeking quest you also increase the memorability of your blog. However, you should never forget that only images relevant to the content and therefore your overall style, are able to produce this kind of positive reaction.
3. Think about the others
The most important thing to consider when you are busy with finding your blogging voice is that this voice needs to be appealing not only to you. In fact, you liking it matters very little compared to the way your target audience should like it. Unless your blog is 100% personal and its only purpose is to be an online version of a journal, you have to consider the people you are creating that content for.
• What are their interests?
• What kind of voices do they like?
• What do they hate?
• What are their ambitions?
• What are their voices?
Answer these questions to determine if your blogging voice will appeal to people like this. If you have yet to find your target audience, check out this guide.
4. Don’t limit yourself with grammar and stylistics rules
Grammar rules are important and texts on your blog must be written without mistakes that interfere with understanding your message. However, the beauty of developing a unique blogging voice is that you can be more flexible with grammar.
Write in a way that expresses your feeling or thought best, even if you have to overlook some grammatical regulations. However, don’t forget that breaking the rules a few times for increasing artistic value is allowed. Creating a post full of basic grammar mistakes is not.
Most importantly, remember that finding your voice doesn’t mean that you have to stick to it religiously. Allow yourself to experiment, grow, and improve with new inspirations and experience.
