Finding Your Blogging Style By Stepping Out Of Your Comfort Zone

When you first begin your blog, starting with the very first idea that you may want to create a blog, there are a number of obstacles you will come across. Usually the idea or inspiration comes first, and then comes thoughts of layout and design. So after a month of back and forth setting up the perfectly thought out theme weighing all your choices, you can now sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. However this is actually point where you will encounter the most difficult part of blogging. Finding your style. When you have no traffic its almost impossible to know what the masses of people expect from you.

Your first few rounds of blog posts kind of feel like open mic night at a local pub. You most likely have been working on some material up in your head for some time now, but until this day you’ve never actually said it out loud for people to hear.

The key to this is for better or worse to just put everything you’ve got out there then sit back and watch the people react. In the beginning I found myself going from one extreme to the other, trying to appeal to a variety of readers. However the more I tried to get the attention of everyone, the more I succeeded in gaining the attention of no one.

Somewhere in between is where my true personality lies and that is where I have found the most success. Between the Comedy Goldmine and Cnet News Blog is where the green grass grows. While both of those sites may be good and popular, and you and your readers may enjoy both. It does not mean they want them both at the same time from the same place.

What’s your style?

My first few posts were often sarcastic and arbitrary, and did not gain much attention. Later I got more serious and it seemed like more people were listening. However with many newfound readers I was unsure of what they sought to gain from reading my blog. Recently I decided to perform an experiment. I posted a news story coupled with an absurd picture to see if there was any reaction. I felt like the picture was funny but could be offensive to some, but I went with it anyway because there is no other better way to gauge the age or temperament of the readers. If everyone listening in is in the 14-20 range then I may have gained in popularity, oppositely if they were say 21-40 range then it was less likely to gain me any traction with them.

Overnight I saw my RSS reader count drop from 14 to 7. So I took down the picture and decided to report the results here. I consider the experiment a success though. Despite losing half my readers I would rather lose 7 today than possibly lose several hundred down the road by not knowing what I now know.

The moral of the story is that you should not be afraid to step out of your comfort zone, and try a few different things with your blog. Most likely it will take many mistakes before you find your perfect style and if your readers are loyal then they will suffer through a few bad posts with you. If they are not loyal then they are not the kind of readers you really want anyway.