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Bloggers need to let people know who they are by providing information about themselves (not the organization in which they work), their background and expertise in the topics they're writing about, and even a picture so that readers can put a face to the words.

Lacking an authentic personal voice

Blogs are a great way to form a connection between author and reader. It also helps to humanize a business in a way that conventional Web sites can't. But I repeatedly encounter two misguided types of professional blogging voice: Overly formal and artificially enthusiastic.

There are some blogs so formal that they end up resembling a legal briefing written by a depressed mortician. William Zinsser -- in the chapter on business writing -- put it best in his book On Writing Well, "Whoever they are, they tend to be so afraid of writing that their sentences lack all humanity -- and so do their institutions. It's hard to imagine that these are real places where real men and women come to work every morning." Zinsser goes on to explain, "But just because people work for an institution, they don't have to write like one. Institutions can be warmed up. Administrators can be turned into human beings. Information can be imparted clearly and without pomposity. You only have to remember that readers identify with people, not abstractions..."

At the other end of the extreme, you have those bloggers who feign enthusiasm to the point of sounding like college pep squad cheerleaders. These bloggers understand the uniqueness of a blog's tone over other Web content and go out of their way not to sound like an "institution". Unfortunately, these attempts to avoid sounding dry fall flat when they pepper their blog with gimmicky catch phrases and cheery Saturday morning cartoon talk.

With practice, bloggers will find their own natural voice, free of artificiality. Bloggers shouldn't have to try so hard to sound human because they already are.

Not focusing on your core topics

Professional blogs must have a primary focus or spin. If you want to talk medicine, talk medicine; if you want to talk IT, talk IT. It's perfectly fine for a personal blog to cover a wide range of topics -- usually centered around bloggers' own interests and activities -- but a professional blog needs to concentrate on a set of core topics.

People read particular blogs because they're interested in information or perspectives surrounding the blogger's area of expertise. But if every third or fourth posting has nothing to do with anything, readers will simply tire of the digressions and stop reading... Readers frequenting a content management blog might not be interested in alien abductions. If you want to change things up once in a while, do it sparingly. And if there other subjects you want to discuss on a regular basis, consider starting another blog catered to that specific audience, don't lump it all onto the same blog.

To be continued...

In part two -- to be published in the latter half of March -- I'll continue my look at common blogging blunders including infrequent posting, not syndicating your content, not organizing posts by context, and more.

Paul Chin (www.paulchinonline.com) is an IT consultant and a freelance writer. Previously, Paul worked as an intranet and content management specialist in the aerospace and competitive intelligence industries.

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