If you’ve read famous bloggers like John Chow, you know that they earned a big part of their fame to their personality. You have to stand out from the crowd to get regular readers and loyal fans.
Paul Newman said it so well:
If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.
You might not want to go as far as to get enemies, but if you already have character, and don’t dare to express that character on your blog or home page, use this little workaround to help you.
Be Somebody Else
At home, we laugh a lot. We even sometimes make small sketches on the fly between us (my husband and me). But when it came to writing on my English blog, I cleared my throat, and took on my most serious voice:
Ahrem, guys and gals. Now I’ll tell you what to do…
Yeah, I even found that a bit boring myself, to be true. So I created a few characters to let my inner Whoopi Goldberg out.
First a night elf.
Yup, in World of Warcraft, I made a night elf, and later on a second, and a draenei. And every one of my characters had a slightly different personalities. My rogue was very hot tempered, my hunter was engaged to a blood elf, my shaman was a loner and serious person.
Next I created an alter-ego on Twitter.
This character also took on her own life. She actually made joking and sarcastic remarks to other twitters, and SHE dared to be funny.
I got to like this Twitter-character a lot, and from my youth research into how to deal with split personalities, I knew that it’s all about melting them into one.
So I shaked the hot tempered and daring rogue, Shadel, the daring and more funny twitter-character, my serious self into the new Britt Malka, who’s writing this blog.
My true inner self might not be totally evolved, but on the other hand that would just be so boring, if I didn’t still have more to learn.
Does this help you? Or have you never had a problem with expressing yourself in a way, you felt was the true you?
Yeah, you guessed it. Tell me so in the comments 😀
I have no inhibitions whatsoever, so I just move along. Without getting dirty in my mouth or otherwise losing credibility, I still find it very easy to express myself in writing. Though I must admit I find it very hard to do so on the telephone. I hate phones.
I worked for three months in a call centre where we took phone calls all day, and even though you are professional – and hidden behind a company logo – I still found it annoying to speak with strangers.
Perhaps some minor phobia, but I do prefer written media. It gives me the freedom to express myself up to the point when I hit Submit.
Yups, you certainly speak your mind…
… Didn’t noticed you had a problem with that.
Signed: the husband (running away to hide)
I sometimes feel the fear and do it anyway, but I’m not sure how much “personality” gets involved. I try, but like you said, I often feel the need to have a professional persona. One thing I have done on my healing website that I was afraid to do before is share intuitive readings. I actually plan to share one tomorrow as my blog post. In the past, I would only do that on the phone with clients or one-on-one in emails.
I like the idea of an alter ego, though.
Wonder how that would impact my writing? I will be musing on that very question…
Jeanine
Oh, Jeanine, I’m sorry. Your comment ended up in the spam filter for some reason. I’ll check your blog to see if you did make the online intuitive readings. Sounds interesting 🙂