Personality in your copy is essential for engagement, earning trust, converting visitors, and claiming your own space online. Building a brand that portrays your company accurately and welcoming is vital to any ongoing successes you expect to have. And, your content is one of the fundamental building blocks of your brand. Following the rules of blog writing, here are eight ways you can give your web content more personality.
Giving Your Content Personality
Big words are for term papers. This can be tempting, we all want to sound smarter right? Unfortunately, this is usually a turn off to readers. The fancier the word, the more you look like a show-off. Not to mention this often “stumbles” the eyes, causing the reader to sometimes skip the content altogether.
Pretty hardcore vocabulary for a social network description huh?
Who gives a damn, cuss if you want to. Just be yourself. Yeah, you may offend some people, but you’ll make a big impression on the people that you want to be reading your content anyway. The tightwads can piss off. Below is an example from Moz.com, one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world.
Well, shit.
Write like you can walk on water. Internet readers are like animals, they can smell fear. If you write like you’re unsure, tentative, or just too passive, they’ll gobble you up and spit you out. But there’s a fine line, be careful your writing doesn’t come off sounding like you’re a conceited jerk though.
You’re not in college anymore. This isn’t an assignment that will be checked for run-ons, prepositional phrase usage, and “correct” punctuation. Many of the rules that were taught in your educational college curriculum are in the minority when it comes to web copy. Be yourself and don’t be afraid to bend the rules.
Write how you talk. If you can hold a conversation, you can give your content personality. Speaking in a casual manner as if you were right in front of the person can establish trust and common ground. They want to listen to you, so connect with them through conversational content.
Ready to hear more.
Spice your content up with humor, care, and opinions. Whatever it takes to throw your readers a curve ball and keep them on their toes. Make fun of yourself, share a touching story, or be controversial. Just get their attention. Your readers will appreciate this and want to come back for more.
Tell a story. Humans have been storytelling for as long as they’ve been around. Using this is as good a tactic online as it is offline. It’s entertaining and makes the information easily remembered because of how your words engage them in fashion that they can relate to.
Original and catchy. Hook, line, and sinker.
Be helpful. Obviously, the content itself needs to be helpful, but this also encompasses where you link out to, having informative title tags (not keyword stuffed), and making sure you actually get a point across in your writing instead of just filling whitespace.
In the end, the goal is to somehow make money from your blog, but you won’t get very far if you don’t know how to engage people. So, use the tips above to give your web content more personality. Your readers will thank you!
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