This time last weekend I was sitting in a delivery suite in a Melbourne hospital waiting for the arrival of my second son Henri. It would be another 12 hours til he was actually born but after he’d come along and we’d had a little recovery time I managed to get online and post that I’d become a father again.
This morning I had a couple of spare hours to get online again and check my blogs (I’m taking next week off too by the way) and also sent out a quick newsletter to my DPS subscribers. Again – in that newsletter I mentioned that we’d had another baby.
I tend not to get too personal on my blogs – I like to keep to the topic at hand for the vast majority of posts – however both on the ProBlogger post and today with my newsletter I was amazed by the response from readers. The ProBlogger post has over 300 comments (and I’ve had 100 or so emails) and just a couple of hours after sending out my newsletter I’ve had over 100 emails from DPS readers. The same thing happened last time when we had a baby and I posted about it.
What I’ve noticed about the comments and emails is that many are from people I’ve never heard of before but who say that they have been regular readers for years.
Also in many cases the emails go beyond just saying ‘congratulations’ and tell me something about themselves, their families and their interaction with the blog.
It struck me as I waded through these emails this morning just how powerful ‘getting personal’ can be on a blog. I’m not advocating doing it every day and revealing everything about your personal live – but there’s something quite special that happens when you do. I guess it humanizes you as a blogger a little, shows a different side of you, makes you more relatable to your readers and gives them another potential connecting point with you.
Read more about Adding a Personal Touch To Your Blog (series).
