Week 10, Part A: Benefits of Enhancing Blog Posts with Personal Human Touches

Adding anecdotes about personal experiences to a blog can reassure people that they are making the right choice by potentially following the blog writer’s advice. By adding personal anecdotes to blog posts, blog writers essentially show that they care about users by sharing knowledge or information that they might have had to spend time seeking on their own if the blog writers did not voluntarily give away this knowledge for free. In addition, since adding personal touches can be a great way of eliciting feedback from one’s readers, this feedback can be a valuable tool for understanding one’s readers and predicting what kind of content that the readers want to read about in the future. My personal experience with social media is that people are more likely to leave responses to topics that they can relate to, or even already have an opinion about. For blogs with large audiences, adding personal touches to blog posts can be effective way for bloggers to increase their revenue streams through their blogs. In addition, blog audiences seem to appreciate personal anecdotes because they suggest that bloggers have originality, which makes their blog posts more intriguing and more likely to stand apart from other blogs that discuss similar subjects (but in a less interesting way). Personal anecdotes, therefore, suggest that bloggers are genuinely enthusiastic or at least interested in the topics that they are writing about.

Sharing personal experiences can make blog writers seem more accessible and not so distant. After all, people are probably more likely to contact bloggers and leave them comments on their blogs if they feel they can relate what they are saying. In addition, sometimes more complex subjects can become easier to understand if people add a few personal experiences to their blog posts that make the information easier to digest. People’s eyes may start to glaze over with weariness if they scroll through a blogger’s website and notice a line of long posts, but they might be more likely to read them if a personal story “hooks” them within the first couple of paragraphs of these blog posts. In addition, if personal touches like colorful photographs, cartoons, or interesting fonts are added to blog, people are more likely to read these blogs because the illustrations and images on the blogs elicit their curiosity and desire to learn more about these blogs’ content.

There are key times to add personal touches to blog posts. These personal touches can be added when writing product reviews (bloggers can write about their personal experiences with using these products and why or why there would not recommend them to other people), when writing about if they had success with making something (such as a new cake recipe from the new coconut flour that they have never tried before), or when explaining how to do perform a task step-by-step (especially if certain tips that they tried helped them perform these tasks more efficiently). Obviously, people who read more socially-oriented blogs such as lifestyle blogs, spiritual blogs, and travel blogs because they enjoy experiencing bloggers’ experiences vicariously through hearing about them often appreciate personal touches more.  They also often want to embrace some of the pieces of advice that these bloggers offer and try them themselves. However, there are also times when it is unnecessary to offer personal touches to posts. For example, it is not necessary to post about personal experiences when bloggers are writing purely informational content about a subject. Generally speaking, biographical blog posts, blog posts about items, non-human entities or abstract ideas, or events should not contain personal touches. For example, a blogger writing about the French Revolution probably should not add any personal touches to such a post because the blogger did not live through an event that happened 220-230 years ago. Bloggers should also not offer any personal touches to blog posts that are written as part of an official company blog or website because such blog posts are meant to represent the interests of an organization, not an individual blogger or freelance journalist.  In general, it could perhaps been said that blog posts that focus on more formal, academic, or work-related topics probably should not contain any personal content within them.

Comments for Classmates
I have commented on Eva Whitburn's post, Chade Montgomery's post, and Mathew Ward's post.