James Chartrand writes a great post on Copyblogger about Why You Need to Transform Your Website Into a Story. He says,
Facts don’t stir emotions and encourage people to take action. Facts don’t sell until people look to rationalize the buying decision they’ve made at an emotional level."
I agree. People do business with people, not companies.
So when I left on vacation I wrote a post in which I expressed gratitude, shared some personal information, and explained I would be re-publishing an important series about better business blog writing.
But I got a critical email from a reader who thought this was inappropriate. Here's what happened:
On Thanksgiving day I wrote a post to thank readers for continually motivating me to research and write relevant posts they can use for writing better blog posts. I was feeling gushy, and excited because I was leaving for a week's holiday with my favorite person, whom I call The Hubby, to play tennis and relax in Puerto Vallarta.
I was so excited I posted a picture of us from last year's trip. We looked happy and fit and I was proud to share our picture with readers.
However, reader emailed to say it was inappropriate to:
- Tell readers I was going to re-publish previous posts while on vacation, instead of writing fresh content or just not writing anything at all
- Put a personal photo on my business blog that would have been more suited for Facebook or a social networking site.
We exchanged a couple of emails about this with me basically defending my preference to occasionally share personal information with readers, and also defending my practice of republishing content that is evergreen – that is, always valuable and pertinent to writing better business blog posts.
To this reader, I lost credibility because of the personal photo and republishing material. Like most things in life, it's not so much what you do as the way that you do it. Perhaps I should have just skipped the photo. Perhaps I could have rewritten or repurposed the posts to create new posts.
Perhaps you readers would agree with him and tell me so, or perhaps it was just fine the way I did it. It matters to me, as long as I am being honest and focusing on what my readers want.
I want to keep you readers coming back here to read quality posts about writing good content that markets your businesses. And I believe that to do that, my writing has to be peppered with a little personality and personal information.
Hope you got something out of this story. My desire isn't to get you to side with me, only to make you think about how to use your own stories on your own blogs, and how to do it better than I probably do.
P.S. Here's a photo from my vacation! Hah!
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