But how does one BE interesting?
It’s probably a topic that deserve someone smarter than me to explore but it strikes me that one element of being an interesting blogger (or an interesting person for that matter) is that they are often people who are ‘interested’.
To be interesting you need to be interested
Image by riot jane
This is a concept that I’ve seen many write about over the years (example) but today it hit home for me.
You see I had 10 minutes this afternoon to check my RSS feeds. Regular readers will know that I follow 650+ feeds – so 10 minutes didn’t really cut it so I headed to 4 blogs that I generally find most interesting.
As I quickly read these 4 blogs I wondered to myself why I was drawn to them and realized that what made them interesting was that the bloggers behind them were:
- interested in their topic – you can tell by reading their work that they are obviously fascinated with the topics that they write about. They love researching it, learning about it, talking about it and exploring it even though they write about it every day.
- interested in their readers – they seemed to love the conversations that happened on their blogs but also based much of what they wrote about on real needs of readers and helping them.
Applying this ‘Interesting’ Principle:
There are a number of ways that I think it’s useful to think about this ‘interesting’ principle:
1. Starting a Blog – when starting up a new blog an important question to ask yourself is whether you are genuinely interested in your topic. This comes back to working out what you are about when choosing a topic.
2. Hiring Bloggers – last time I hired bloggers for DPS I had a number of criteria that I judged applicants by – one of which was how much I felt that they loved the topic of photography. Ability to write is important – but unless the person demonstrates a love for the topic they’ll probably not be able to take the blog to the next level.
3. Monitoring Your Interest Levels – perhaps a good question to ask yourself periodically when reviewing your blog is about how your interest levels are going on your blog. I think it’s a fairly natural thing to have your own interest levels for your topic to rise and fall over time – but to monitor this can be useful because it means you can take action when it drops (take a short break, find some guest posts, change your posting routine/rhythm, experiment with some new types of posts etc).
