Blog like there’s nobody reading

You know how the saying goes, dance like there’s no one watching, sing like there’s no one listening. I think the same is true for blogging.

A close friend of mine stared blogging many years ago. She was a pioneer, sharing her innermost thoughts with the world.  Oh she got all the feedback about, “why share your diary with strangers?”, “what will your colleagues think?”, “Aren’t you scared of stalkers?” but she took sensible privacy precautions and opened her heart.

In the early days her blogs were a touch guarded and I could tell that she was holding stuff back in case a parent or family member was reading, but as time progressed and her style became more confident she would share more and more intimate details with her readers.

The results were self-evident, as she shared more, her audience became involved. A crisis at home, a fragile relationship with a friend or even a personal health “life-changer” moved from being an abstract concept to something affecting a “virtual friend”.

What had changed was the style, a style that started talking from the heart.

A lot has been written about Web 2.0 and interactivity with audience. My friend understood this intuitively. She wasn’t responding to comments because she felt she had to keep her linky-love going, her audience cared about her and she cared about them.

So if you are writing a personal blog and wonder if anyone is ever going to read it, go hard or go home. Either open up and bear your soul or blog about bee-keeping.

I wrote my teenage diary as if somebody might read it at anytime – I regret that. It lacks the passion and torment that I remember feeling in my heart at the time.  It’s only when you expose your weaknesses and vulnerabilities that you truly find yourself. And you audience  finds you.