Connecting With Your Readers
11. Jun, 2010 
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There is an art to blogging in such a way where your readers can establish a real connection between their own emotions and your written word. When aiming to share your content with your readers, it’s simply not enough to just get them to read, but to go beyond the eyes and get to their minds and their hearts. Blog readers are looking for a real connection between themselves and the author of the blog they are investing their time into.
For those that know me, or who may follow me on Twitter, I run a fairly active blog on managing relationships touched by bipolar disorder and share some of the most difficult challenges with the blog’s readers. With my blogging efforts, however, sharing the information that my wife and I didn’t have when we were thrown into the mix with the disorder helps get much needed information out to others that are either starting a similar journey themselves or may feel that they are alone in such a lifestyle.
Connecting With Commonality
There are more readers than there are bloggers in the world and those readers have a goal to find information not only from static websites that have some basic articles on them, but also from personal stories and experiences from others. In order to make a working connection to your readers, you must be willing to not only share your words, but to actually tell them a story in which they can totally relate to and find a common ground with you to stand on.
Tell a Story
Many people are visual thinkers and the best way to get them to think is to attempt to paint a picture for them and place it in the forefront of the minds as you unravel the story. Some ‘gurus’ like to dive right into their teachings with the belief that every pupil already had some intermediate knowledge of a topic. This isn’t always the case, don’t write your blog out to be for experts and veterans only because you miss out on a huge target for those looking to start out or are still in the beginner phases.
For the experienced, it may be cumbersome to go back to basics, but again, you’re not blogging for you…you should be blogging for your readers. Take the necessary steps to go back to where you started out, paint that same picture fro your readers and walk them through every detail. Once you reconnect your own emotions to the story you want to tell, those emotions will translate themselves into the words you share that will generate that detailed image your readers are looking for.
Keep the Journey Going
Hobby bloggers tend to pick a subject that may only be relevant with a very limited time-line. If you sit down at your computer to write about the day’s issues that you have encountered, the actual issue may be resolved long before you ever start typing out the story, the connection is lost after. What I mean by this is, your overall blogging efforts should be a long running story where each post can establish a connection with another post on your blog.
Blogging is all about connections, whether that means connecting your own story to itself deep within your blog or making external connections with readers and other bloggers. Keeping that journey going on is what brings your readers back to your blog as they will soon learn to know that your story is never over and the next chapter is coming out soon.
Some blogs are emotionless and simply contain the printed results on research that had been completed years ago and it’s highly doubtful that your readers are looking for such canned information. Your blog should reflect who you really are and provide that personal touch to your drive your purpose from your reader’s monitor right into their own emotions.
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