The personal blog is the passionate beating heart of the internet. Without personal blogs the internet would be a dull and dry place, monopolized by business and corporations, and generally not a very nice place to spend time. What does this mean for bloggers who blog about a particular topic, or those who blog to make a business connection with customers? Should business blogs and topic or authority blogs have a personal touch? Is it a good idea to share some of your personal life with your readers?
Some sharing of personal information is probably inevitable, albeit indirectly. For instance, it doesn’t take much to find out who I am and a little bit about me given that in my first post at Upstart Blogger I introduced myself and shared some basic personal information.
Bloggers often have to walk a fine line between being too cold or being too personal. Sometimes readers like to find out more about you as a person, especially when you are running a blog on your own, recounting your own experiences and sharing your own knowledge. Other times, on a corporate blog for example, readers just want the information without any informality. In these cases being too personal could make the blogger appear amateurish and drive readers away.
Another solution is to simply run two blogs, a personal blog and a business blog. I’ve played with this idea in my head for sometime and feel it would be a good way to keep things separate, giving people the option to find out more personal information if they wish, rather than forcing it upon readers who might consider it inappropriate.
So, what do you think? How personal should bloggers get?
Like you say, I believe you can get too personal. Share too much about yourself and readers may think, “So what? Who cares?”
But sharing some personal details is good. People tend to buy from those they know, like, and trust. So you have to be open with people to build that kind of bond.
Even with a “company blog,” it should be written by a person… and that person should share at least a little bit about themselves. Otherwise, not knowing who the writer is, there is little basis for relationship. In other words, I need to know about the person who is doing the writing if I am to value the writer’s opinions.
Nice post. I believe that it’s more benificial to run two seperate blogs. You never know with a personal blog when your own personal opinion may upset a potential client.
I don’t have a business, but the same problem can be applied to blogs about a certain subject – should you add personal content to them? On my old WordPress blog I did, but when I moved to my own server with the intention to start earning money from my blog, I removed the personal posts that had nothing to do with the chosen subject.
I prefer having a separate blog for more personal posts, so people who aren’t interested in them don’t have to read about my personal life :P
But now I’m not being accepted in the paid review sites like Social Spark, because apparently I have too much sponsored content on my blog – but the truth is, I have no sponsored posts on my blog at all! (unless the few posts about contests I’ve entered count). My posts are relevant to my subject and useful to my readers (tutorials, reviews, interviews, comparisons), but apparently if a blog hasn’t got personal info it’s not considered good enough :(
So what to do? I really don’t know.