In regards to how personal you can be on your blog, I think the answer is dependent on what your blog is about & what you want to achieve with it. For example, let’s think of a few types of blogs:
The “Just Because I’m Awesome” Blog:
If you want to create a blog “just because” you think the whole world would die without knowing what you think- then I’d imagine being very personal is a high motivation. I also want to categorize blogs that people create for their family & friends to follow a life event- a wedding blog, a travel blog, a baby growing up blog- into this category. The audience on these personal family & friend blogs is subscribing to the information to keep up-to-date with the writer, but everything is personal…100%.
The "Fitness/ Fashion/ Make-Up" or "Entrepreneurs/ Business Owners/ Marketing Tips" Blog:
Woah, that was a long title, huh? Regardless of the specific topic, these are forums for people of the same niche to get together and “talk shop”. I recently looked up many Halloween Make-Up Blogs to get ideas for my awesomely scary Halloween Makeup (it was creepy nutcracker doll in case you were wondering, and it was awesome). All of these style blogs require a good amount of a personal touch. The audience wants to relate to the blogger because they want advice, motivation or information in that specific realm.
There is a thin line to personal touch, because if a blogger starts venting too much, getting very negative or whining- I personally shut down and will never look at their blog again. Although it’s not a blog-blog, Yelp reminds me of this point. I like to read reviews that give good information such as, “I suggest parking in this area, because the other lot fills up completely at 6pm”, or “I visited this gym, unfortunately 4 of the 10 treadmills were broken”. These tell me actual information not angry emotions, such as, “I went to this salon and the girl was super cranky and rude. Don’t ever go there, you are wasting your time”, or “Their food is disgusting. Nothing is cooked right, and the restaurant is gross.” Those comments give me nothing to go by as a reader, I don’t know the situation that occurred between the writer and the salon attendant, and I also don’t know what the other writer's food pallet is like.
The “Textbook” Blog:
This blog is straight information, almost like a textbook- in that the information is factual to the industry or product its representing. If a blogger is discussing a How-To of installing a Spray Booth, or Car Engine, the information needs to be specific and straight forward. Bits of personal information can jump in, like “In my experience doing this trick first helps a lot”. Other than that, the posts are clean, informative and efficient, because the reader needs that exact information to get the job done.
MY BLOG for my company (Pro Spot), well... A) It doesn’t exist, B) If it did exist, would likely only succeed if it was a combo of a “Talk Shop” Forum + Factual Expertise. The downside to a blog for my company is that we are a manufacturer. Creating content is difficult for me, because finding information that is classified as available for the public is hard to come by. Releasing too much information can give the competition a breakdown of how to mimic us. Also, we aren’t a B2C company, we work through a 3rd party distributor for sales- which just adds a bit more stickiness. I am trying to find a route for a blog, but my industry is a bunch of repair shop guys, who would rather get out there & tinker with a car then read on their phone about it. They are a “doer” culture, and I can’t imagine many even know what a blog is, unless it linked to photos of Pamela Anderson or stats on cool cars- but that would be steering from who we are and what we do.
