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Back to Basics #24: How to Find Your Writing Voice

If you’ve ever posted an update on a blog (or even thought of starting a blog!), then you’ve probably thought about how you would like to address your audience. Unless you’re writing your own personal diary, it’s absolutely necessary to figure out your writing voice—because how you appeal to your readers will have a direct effect on who chooses to come back to your blog, and who decides that it’s not for them and navigates elsewhere.

Whether you want to inform visitors about how to build and care for pools, or you’d like to provide tips on how to dress professionally for work, a blog can be a great place to start out. In this article, we’ll go over some of the basic things you’ll need to know to find your writing voice—and be well on your way to blogging success!

 

Define Your Audience

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This is probably another phrase you’ve heard before. But there’s a good reason for it: It’s the most important step to take before you begin publishing your posts. When you know who you’re writing for, coming up with post ideas and defining your goals becomes much easier.

To define your audience, ask yourself:

  • Am I selling a product or service to someone?
  • If yes, what makes my product unique?
  • If not, what am I offering my visitors instead?

Once you know this, then you should think about:

  • What are my audience’s interests?
  • What are their ages?
  • What is their education level?

And finally, you’ll want to know some important personal data:

  • Where do most of my customers or visitors come from?
  • Are they male or female?

So, let’s say you’re selling handmade soaps to your visitors. They tend to be casual shoppers who are looking for an alternative to soaps made with chemicals. They are interested in health, beauty, and natural living. Most are female, from the United States, and tend to be from wealthy metropolitan areas. They are educated, and between the ages of 35-50. So with this audience, you wouldn’t want to write in an ultra-casual manner like you would with, say, a vaping or e-cig store. That much should be obvious!

That’s a lot of information you’ve gathered! But now, after all that hard work, you also have an incredibly well-defined audience. Knowing these statistics will help you come up with effective advertisements and well-informed posts that your audience will love to share. Plus, you’ll easily be able to find topics popular with your audience and build your posts around those ideas. But first…

What is the Focus of Your Blog?

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Now that you know who you’re writing for, you need to know what you want to write about. In our example, you’ll be writing about health and beauty topics, particularly those linked to skin care—so you can really let your soaps be the star of the show. But even within this in mind, there are still a number of routes you could take. For example:

  • A how-to blog: How to make your own soaps, how to use natural soaps, etc.
  • A sales blog: Tips for better sales with natural products, or you can purchase a soap starter kit and be a part of the soap-selling team.
  • Better living blog: A guide on how to live frugally or lower your carbon footprint.
  • Beauty blog: A blog covering all kinds of new products, with the focus on your soaps and how they’ll fit into a beauty routine.

As you can see, it can be a tough decision to make. But once you’ve chosen a theme for your blog, you’ll want to stick with it. It can be confusing to readers to have a blog offering skincare advice in one post, and then how to make your own soaps in another. Chances are, these are two different audiences. (Although of course there could always be some overlap!)

What Purpose Does Your Blog Serve?

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Now, this might sound obvious, but you’ll have to remember why you’re writing a blog in the first place.

For many people, they want to start a blog to make an income. Others, however, want to add a blog feed to their existing website for a little extra information. Still others want to have a blog simply for search engine optimization purposes.

We’re not here to tell you why you should have a blog—but you should know why before you begin this project! If you’re aiming to make sales through your blog, you’re going to have a different approach than you would if you were just using it to post occasional how-to articles and company updates.

So before you get posting, be sure to figure out exactly how your blog fits into your business and marketing plan.

How Much Time Do You Have?

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If you don’t have a lot of time to update your blog, you’re going to want to keep your posts simple and short. On the other hand, if you have a lot of time to devote to crafting articles, then you may want to write in-depth pieces. You may even want to add beautiful photographs that your viewers will want to share! It all depends on your schedule.

The short, to-the-point articles work great for company updates, brief how-to’s, or making a “listicle” that is helpful to your visitors (For example, 3 ways to get snow off your roof without falling and hurting yourself!)

The longer articles work well for those who want to get really in-depth—like photos of those handmade soaps accompanying an in-depth article about the different uses of natural cleaners.

You might choose to mix and match, and that’s fine, too. But make sure to realistically look at your schedule before you begin posting. You’ll want to stick to the schedule you make, so if you think you’re pushing yourself too hard, err on the side of safety and cut back on your posts.

So Now What?

So now that we’ve talked your ear off about how you can get everything ready for your blog, you can finally take a look at everything you have figured out and decide how you want to write. Your writing voice will probably come naturally once you know who your audience is. Most of us already know what our customers like, and if we don’t, we can always ask for feedback to make sure we’re doing everything right. Your job now is to make sure that you deliver your own, original, fresh content to your readers when you say you will. Stick to your schedule. Don’t mix personal rants with your business updates. If you want to focus on how-to videos, don’t throw in an article about why one brand of snow-blower is better than another.

If you’re writing for mothers, don’t use abrasive language. If you’re writing for potential college students, appeal to their hopeful attitudes while assuaging fears of failure. If you’re writing for people who test the strength of rebar, don’t focus on the difficulties of the job—provide solid statistics and ways to interpret test results.

Finding your writing voice doesn’t have to be difficult. It just takes a bit of time and research. And you know what? Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you will find that you naturally fall into that mindset as you write. Plus, you’ll hear from your readers through blog comments, social media updates, or even emails, and they’ll give you helpful advice to follow.

The Long and Short of It

To summarize:

  • Learn who your audience is and what they like.
  • Decide which topics will be the most important to your readers.
  • Determine whether your blog will be used to drive sales, supplement your marketing strategy, or simply provide regular company updates to readers.
  • Create a realistic schedule for updates—and stick to it!Use language appropriate to your audience.

Do you have any other tips? Let us know in the comments below!

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