Are you ready to wield the Force as a Jedi blogger?
Learn first the 13 secrets revealed in this post you must to awaken the blogging within you.
You will find only what you bring in. –Yoda
1. Be Interesting. With somewhere around 300 million blogs on the internet, what exactly makes yours so darned interesting that it stands out from the rest? Answer this question and magic can happen.
A good place to start discovering how to be interesting is with the blog posts you read today. What makes them interesting to you? The rest of this post will also help you realize how to become more interesting.
(Blog Statistics Worldometers keeps track of how many blog posts are published per day, and so far, as I write this, 1.1 Million posts have been published today.)
2. Be Informative. Every good blog provides relevant and useful information. What do you know best? What have you learned that you can pass on to others which will save them time and frustration? Share all that you know as generously as possible. Share your knowledge relentlessly.
3. Be Brave. Write what you mean and mean what you write. Try not to waste your time or your readers time by writing watered down stuff that means nothing to you and even less to us. Be brave and write about what truly inspires and motivates you to get up in the morning.
4. Be Passionate. When you’re brave the passion will shine through your writing. Write with fire in your fingers. Show how much you care. Go ahead and use those $50.00 words you’ve been harboring, instead of dumbing down and using those cheap $1.00 words. Set higher standards for you and your readers. After all, blog readers are smart people. Being passionate will make you braver and being brave will make you even more impassioned.
(The term “dumbing down” originated in 1933 as movie-business slang, used by motion picture screenplay writers, meaning: “[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence.” Source.)
5. Be Vulnerable. Here’s the thing, most people writing in public act like they’ve got it all together and know all the answers. That’s BS. Worse: It’s fake BS. Don’t be one of those people. Admit it, you’re more like me, you make mistakes and you embarrass yourself from time to time. You’re human. So make sure your blog is written by a human writing as a person and not writing as a robot. We’re imperfect. And that’s okay.
6. Be Honest. This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. When you’re honest you never need to embellish, so don’t. Simple honesty is always more interesting than exaggerated poppycock. If you hate something – say it. If you love something – say it. If you don’t know – say it. Just say it, honestly.
7. Be Willing to Make Mistakes. Blogging is hard work. There’s very little that is easy about doing this, so give up any perceptions that you’ll blog mistake free or that you’ll never post something you will later consider deleting. Bloggers make mistakes. The best bloggers are the ones who have tried enough to make the most mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes. Keep writing.
8. Be Surprising. The bloggers and writers who stand out do an outstanding job of surprising their audience on an irregular basis. This is by far the hardest thing to do. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. You know that. But what you might not know is that surprise is really the art of being unpredictable.
(Researchers from Emory University split study participants into two groups. One group received a squirt of fruit juice into their mouths at predictable intervals, while the other group received juice shots randomly. MRI scans revealed that the group that received the juice at unpredictable moments exhibited more activity in the reward center of their brain. Source.)
9. Be funny. Blogging should be a lot of things, but perhaps what too many of us forget is that it should be fun too. Your readers would love it if you lighten up and say something totally off the wall every once in a while. But don’t tell jokes merely for the sake of telling jokes, do it when the time is right. When’s the right time to be funny? That’s the question, isn’t it? Don’t look at me. I’m always late.
10. Be Persistent. Don’t give up. Being persistent is the only way to find your authentic writing voice. If you do keep at it you’ll put yourself way ahead of 95% of the want-to-be’s.
Do or do not, there is no try. –Yoda
(According to the New York Times, 95% of blogs are abandoned. Maybe those bloggers weren’t being honest about why they were blogging.)
11. Be Remarkable. Too many bloggers, writers, and well, humans from all walks of life get it wrong about what it means to be remarkable. We tend to believe we need to do something grand. You and I will not become remarkable for any one big thing (or one post) that we do.
Instead we’ll become remarkable for all the little things we do persistently. Remarkable people always have something going on, they’re always doing things worth remarking on, such as being generous, challenging the status quo, and standing up for something that matters.
12. Be yourself. Really, there isn’t a better person in the world to be and you know it. Too many people are trying to be what and who they’re not and they wonder why they feel so empty inside. Forget the Joneses. They’ve got nothing on you! Be you. Be authentic. Life’s too short for anything else.
13. Be Awesome. The good news is that if you put all of the aspects I’ve mentioned above together and use them relentlessly, it will be impossible for you not to be awesome.
So, hey… go, be awesome!
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May the Force be with you.
