Your Blogging Personality

On the topic of blogging...

You need to develop your blogging personality. 

This is basically a combination of you, what you believe in and represent...and your audience.  Consider who is going to be "listening" to your rantings.  Your audience is who you're writing for.  If you didn't think you'd be writing for an audience, you wouldn't be writing on the web, you'd be scribbling away in your private notebook or journal in your garret, and no one would ever know you'd penned a word until one day, long after your death they discover your "writings".

Back to your blogging personality...

You want to consider who is going to be reading your blog, and address your posts to that audience.  Generally speaking, you'll be addressing like-minded people who are interested in what you have to say, what you have to share with them.

In the case of Auntie Kit and Cousins, she is blogging to a community of people who hold family life, homespun goodness, and simplicity above all else.  With that in mind, she needed to "decorate" her blog to reflect that audience.  When people land on a blog that makes them feel "at home" they tend to linger a little longer.  There are many ways to get your viewers to linger, but the very first is to make sure their initial exposure to your blog will keep them there.

This means you have to decorate it appropriately.  In "Auntie Kit's" case, she needed to reflect the warm glow of simple yet elegant living with an appropriate wallpaper.  She was able to find one from among the myriad of free offerings available on the internet.  Once she incorporated that wallpaper, her hits began to increase dramatically.  Her first two weeks she got about 50 visitors.  By her third week she was up to 150 visitors.

While I know that she's actively trying to direct more traffic to her site, she is now getting responses based on how her site "feels" to the people who land on it.

If you don't keep your target audience in mind, you're doing no more than scribbling into a notebook.  If you really want your blog to be read, you need to make it visually appealing to the people who land there.  If they're your target audience, make 'em feel comfortable!