My mother in law passed away a little over 4 months ago.
I felt sad but relieved as she suffered quite a bit over the last year of her life. I noted her passing on my blog a number of months ago. I did not feel uncomfortable, scared or resistant to being vulnerable. We are human. Death touches us all. But I thought about fellow bloggers who feel highly uncomfortable, scared or resistant to being vulnerable, open, honest and human.
Anyone who feels such a way receives a clear warning sign of being on the wrong blogging path. Why? If you build such a carefully crafted brand persona, you lack the genuine, human touch needed to be credible, trustworthy, and believable.
I ponder some bloggers who appear to live perfect lives. Sure I respect how some choose not to integrate their personal life into their blog, brand and business. But how human does that make you? How can you raise your blog to epic heights unless you are transparent? How can people connect with a human being behind the blog and accelerate your success by endorsing you, if you do not emit a human, authentic, vulnerable brand image? Impossible.
Slap a slick headline across your blog, call it fictional entertainment, and maintain that same brand voice, for fantasies, but not for reality. Imagine if I endlessly posted content about my brilliant, dreamy world travel pictures, and the highest of high points from foreign land excursions. I could talk about the stunning beauty of places like Fiji, New Zealand, Bali, Thailand and Costa Rica, and nothing else.
Being human, you would perceive me to live a dreamy, movie-worthy life void of hardship, loss, death, obstacles, and hell, void of the human experience. Life is sometimes sunshine and roses, other times, rainy days and rotting vegetation and other times, something in between. I vibe high mostly but felt pretty down for a few weeks after my mother-in-law passed because we built a close bond.
I know her soul is free but still miss her, and miss our chats. I am human. I am not an enlightened being, even though I spend 3-4 hours daily meditating, doing Kriya yoga and doing yin yoga. Readers – all of whom are fellow humans – can relate to the death of loved ones, and other trials and tribulations humans face. Share these aspects of life on your blog to connect with people and to accelerate your success.
More importantly, be careful about conveying a perfect image on your blog. I have no issues with choosing not to integrate your private, personal life, into your blog, but sharing only the most brilliant highlights because you intend to convey a perfect brand persona makes for a pleasant fiction, but certainly not the human, vulnerable experience. Going this route serves as a red flag, a warning sign, that you are taking the wrong blogging path because you cannot feel genuine sharing only the highest of highlights from your life and nothing else. This is fiction in a way because any time you hide the messy experiences from your life you do not share a truthful recount of your full life experience.
Not only does this feel contrived and forced, your readers tend to question your credibility, or to build you into some type of a god who has no bad experiences, which is an awkward, unpleasant experience at best. Plus you do readers no favors because you influence them to strive for some perfect, spotless life, completely grounded in delusion, because only enlightened souls achieved this feat, after years of training, traversing through a maddening, spiritual jungle of the mind and body, in moments.
You and I worldly bloggers live a different experience. We are touched by death, other traumas and failing at times because all humans stumble sometimes. Do not hesitate to share your stumbles. Let readers know the rest of your story. You decide where to draw the line as far as transparency but err on the side of sharing more struggles and failures to be more credible to your readers.
Human beings relate to pro bloggers who share wins, losses and everything in between, on their way to becoming a pro.
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Ryan Biddulph
A Blogging Geek from Paradise.
Ryan Biddulph inspires bloggers with his 100 plus eBooks, courses, audiobooks and blog at Blogging From Paradise.