Savvy Affiliate

Adopting a persona when you’re writing is very important.  The object of your blogging is to get people to remember your site.  Your content, your site design, and your URL are all important aspects of making your site memorable.  But if you haven’t developed a persona for your writing, you are missing out on a valuable branding tool.

What’s an Example of a Persona?

You can think of a persona as a nickname which describes your personality, at least how it appears in the blog. The best example of a Blogger’s persona that I know of is John Chow.  He is known as “The Evil Blogger.”   Is he actually evil?   I’ve never met him, but I would be tempted to say probably not evil.  At least he doesn’t strike me as the devil incarnate from his writings.

So Why Pick a Persona?

A persona is great for getting people to remember your site and link to you.  I can’t count the number of times I have seen John linked to as “The Evil One” or a variation.  It gives the blogger doing the writing some flavor to add to their description, other than just JohnChow.com.   The flavor both makes it more interesting to read, and more likely that the link will be clicked on, and it makes it more likely that the reader will follow the link.  After all, why should I go to JohnChow.com?  Who the heck is he.   But an evil blogger?  That sounds interesting.

What else does a persona do? 

Although you will develop your persona from your personality and writing style, you will also find that your persona will drive your writing.   If you have a set personality for your site, you will find it easy to write posts which fit that personality.  If your persona is sneaky and devious, you’ll write a lot of posts about finding loopholes and playing the system.  If your persona is friendly and helpful, you’ll find that you spend a lot of time linking up with other bloggers and engaging in more conversations on your site.

How Should I pick my persona? 

You don’t need to pick your persona for your blog right away.  Spend some time writing your blog and see what kind of personality it develops.  Then play to that personality.  Online, it is much better to be an extreme something and be memorable, than to be in the middle of the personality spectrum and just like everyone else.

So what’s your persona? 

I am still in the process of developing a persona for Savvy Affiliate.  It is a relatively new site, approaching 2 months, and doesn’t have enough personality yet for me to play to any one aspect of it.  Although if you have any suggestions, or an opinion on what you think that this site feels like, I would love to hear them.

So how about yourself?  Have you given any thought to developing a persona for your site?  Is there a particular personality trait you play to in your writing?