Finding the Right Voice for Your Blog

Publish date: 2024-05-31

One of the silliest yet most important questions asked when starting a blog is, “What should I blog about?“.

Nearly everyone will ask this question before they start a blog, but many will grab a domain name, setup their hosting and then ask themselves this question again. It happens all the time, so if you are asking yourself the same thing, don’t worry about it.

Before actually writing your first blog post, you need to ask yourself a few questions.

All of these questions are extremely important and if any of them are out of sync, the life of your blog can quickly fall out of order and likely to fail over time.

Thinking About the Future of Your Blog

I will now answer each of these questions in detail and answer why you need to have the correct answer for each.

Am I interested in what I am going to blog about?

It’s easy to start a blog and be excited about the concept during the initial product. There are also a million ways to make money online, but if you quickly lose interest then you will have no passion to work and grow your project (the blog). If there is no dedication and passion behind the success of your project, then it is already destined to fail. I’ve done this a hundred times before and it never works out. I will come across a new idea or concept for a blog that would definitely make money if I was into that topic, but instead I lose interest and wasted valuable time, money and effort on an uncompleted project.

Do I know enough about my blogging topic to make me an authority?

The passion of your blog also falls into the knowledge department as well. To become an authority figure in your niche, you need to know what you are talking about and have an awesome amount of knowledge on whatever it is you are blogging on. For example, if you have been following a sports team for the majority of your life you probably know all about the players, how far they got each season, what your favorite players are… and so on. It would be pretty easy for you to create a blog around something you enjoy, simple because you enjoy it! Now if you were to start a blog about “solar panels” (which makes good money), how much fun would that actually be for you? Not much fun… and since you aren’t passionate about it, you probably don’t have the knowledge to make you an authority either.

Can I continually come up with new blog content 1-3 years down the road?

Let’s just keep the concept flowing… if you aren’t passionate or knowledgeable about something, would you still want to be writing about it several years down the road? Probably not. The longer a blog sticks around, the more likely it is to find success and build a loyal following. Here we are 7 years later and I’m still writing content for ZacJohnson.com. I love marketing, blogging and everything in between… I’m good at it and I have a ton of experience. I plan on blogging on this site for many more decades to come. When you start a new blog, make sure you have that same mentality.

Is my blog going to be as a fun hobby, a business or just to figure blogging out?

One of the last (or first) and most important questions you want to ask yourself is why are you blogging in the first place? Many people want to start blogging so they can make money and follow in the footsteps of others bloggers and marketers like myself. First let me tell you that blogging is one of the slowest methods for making money online if you are just going to push content out there and hope for the best. I have 18 years of experience behind me and seven years of that is through writing on this blog. Becoming a successful blog does not happen overnight.

With that said, many blogs start out as a fun side project or hobby, then as their quality content and readership continues to grow, then they realize there is a market for them to monetize their site, create a guide book or maybe even become an authority within their niche.

Finding the Right Voice for Your Blog

With the basic questions and concepts for your blog out of the way, the next focus is how you are going to create and write the content for your blog. This may sound like a silly question, but you actually have a few options.

These are also important questions and depending on how you will answer them, the content and focus of your blog will vary. If you want to make a site to MAKE MONEY and it will be focusing on SELLING products through Amazon, it’s likely that you would have a more information or review based concept on the site. This would also mean you probably won’t have a face or name to the site since most of your traffic is only looking for research on a product before they buy it, and hopefully the majority of your traffic comes from organic search.

However, you could still take this approach to selling products through Amazon but add a more personal and engaging twist to it. For instance, “Mike’s Movie Blog” is all about movies that Mike watches and then he writes a solid review on each movie. Mike is also the name and face of the blog and he loves to respond to comments and engage with his audience. At the end of each review Mike also includes a link to Amazon.com where his blog readers can purchase the product and he will receive a small commission on each sale.

No matter what angle you want to go after, just make sure you stick with it. The long term value of the site is also different for each method. You may be able to sell your review site that is plain and generic, but it would be hard to sell a blog called “Mike’s Movie Blog” because it already has a name and brand attached to it.

Expand the Reach of Your Voice and Authority with a Blog

Even if you are still unsure about what direction to take with your blog, the best way to learn is to simply get started. You can add/remove blog posts from your site at anytime, which means you can never go wrong with a WordPress driven site.

If you haven’t already, get setup with your blog and a free domain name, then shoot me an email with any questions you have about getting setup. I can even set you up with a free premium theme to get you on the right path.

In the next section of  my “Seven Days of Blogging: My Personal Guide to Blogging” I will be covering the basics of what your first blog posts and pages should look like when you are launching your blog. These are some of the most important pages that all blogs have – you will need to have them too!

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