Mother Nature has graciously and generously given us the gift of six winter storms so far this January (note the sarcasm).  However, today’s storm was an especially significant headache for my “plow guy”.

Instead of rip-roaring down the eighth-mile-long driveway cutting through the snow like a hot knife through butter, he unknowingly entered into a heavyweight death match which featured his Ford F-Series truck and Fisher plow against the Hercules-grasp of Mother Nature’s (c)oldest weapon.  Unfortunately, his truck lost the battle and was lodged into a mountain of snow so tightly that it wished it had as much room as a sardine packed in a can.

To add to the frustration, the defeated driver was further beat-down with the realization that his phone had been taken by the snow.  After more than an hour of searching, the “plow-guy” retired from the rescue efforts and admitted defeat.

Now, to bring this back to a topic that will help your business, there are numerous writers, business owners, and/or marketing managers who have difficulty finding their writing voice.  Instead of encountering the unbearable fate of defeat like the plow driver, follow these four simple steps to find your opportune writing voice:

Find A Groove

Allowing yourself to have a writing space, writing time, and an overall writing setting is the start to finding your ideal writing voice.  The downfall is that your focus primarily shifts to the quality of what you write and completely avoids the idea of including a voice.

To help you establish your voice from the starting block, try altering your approach for the opening content.  Set a timer and write as much content about your specified topic in a 5 minute block of time.  Take note that this will not be your finished product, but what you will notice is that you have a the beginnings of a voice in your opening paragraph(s).  Giving yourself the opportunity to create a voice in the first few sentences attracts more readers and sets the foundation of the remaining content which can now be drafted in your “writing space”.

Write Like You Talk

First and foremost, let’s realize that this is a web log.  These phenomenal sources of marketing and public relations started as a simple way to broadcast personal happenings to the wide world of the web.

The next step is simple.

Write like you talk.

Let’s use the above statements as an example.  They are simple sentences with five or less words and I have virtually forced you to pause, breathe, and break after each sentence which encourages the realization of importance for those specific words.  If I were giving this as a presentation, I would stop, breathe, and pause prior after I mentioned that the next step is simple because I want you to take in the on-coming information.  I would then deliver the statement with exaggeratedly long pronunciations (like the italics bring out), and I would pause after that comment.

Overall, you have the ability to deliver your voice through writing like you talk.  Keep it that simple.

Forget Conventional Writing

Coincidentally following hand-in-hand with “writing like you talk” is completely ignoring what you have been taught in school (to a certain extent).  In other words, you have been taught to write in a specific structure, to have a guideline number of sentences per paragraph, and other standards.

Forget those standards and guidelines for a few minutes.

Write without convention, and structure your blog post in a way that reaches out to your audience in the most efficient way possible.  This allows you to maintain your voice throughout the entire article.  If that means that you have paragraphs that are shorter than 3 sentences, bullet points or numbered lists, highlights, underlines, italics, or bold characters then (by all means) use them.  The general goal of your blog posts is to reach  a further target audience which means that you have to form your content to maximize reader interaction and interest.

Write What You Know

Unless you are a professional copywriter (or blogger in this case), do not write about content that you do not understand or know.

To elaborate, if you don’t know the content that you are supposed to write about your end result is a publication that merely spits out historic facts or mundane (a.k.a. useless) information.  Now, if you do have to complete research to write your content, make sure you do research from a multiple number of sources, wait for a day or so, and then write the content without the sources in front of you.  The result of that process is an ability to write in establish your voice instead of echoing another’s.

Overall, when you blog, you need to make sure you set yourself up to find your voice for that particular content.  If you are able to establish your voice you have a better chance to attract/interest readers which (consequently) leads to higher website conversions.

*If you need assistance with your blog or any other copywriting, don’t hesitate to contact us today*

Need Help?

If blogging is something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.

Sources:
“The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing”-E-Book
SlideShare.net
Image Source: HubSpot, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing”, E-Marketer.com