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Professional Bloggers Need Thick Skins
As a professional blogger sometimes it requires that you have a very thick skin. A large portion of blogging is of course the written word. This written word is your voice it is the style of your writing and it defines you as a blogger. I have been putting bloggers together with companies for a while now and one of the toughest parts of that is matching a company and their mission and message with a blogger that fits with the personality of the blog. Some bloggers are great technical writers and do a great job with describing technical terms and processes. Other bloggers are pithy and have great sense of style and humor. Companies sometimes are demanding both. As you can see it’s tough to put the proper voice of the blogger with the company blog. It’s not to dissimilar from matchmaking. Not every match is one made in heaven.
As a person that manages many bloggers it is very rewarding to tell a blogger that a company has chosen their voice and blogging style to head up their blog campaign. It is equally devastating for me to tell a blogger that the company has decided to go in a different direction with the voice of the blog. Bloggers tend to take ownership of a blog and adopt it making it their very own, and to tell them they have to turn that over to another is a difficult process. This is why it is necessary to be a thick skinned individual. Business is business to the company and they see it from a different perspective from their end, no matter how attached a blogger has become to the blog. This is not something that happens often but it does occasionally happen so bloggers need to be prepared. For now, I need to go to a blogger and make the “It’s not you it’s me” speech.
[photo via DeclanTM]
7 Users Commented In " Professional Bloggers Need Thick Skins "
It’s so hard to take a blog, make it your own and learn you’re no longer needed.
Blogging is different from most forms of writing in that it’s so personal. I put a piece of myself in all my blogs. When a client no longer has a need for my services, I can understand it…but it does hurt sometimes.
Most of us who blog for a living do know, in most cases, it’s nothing personal. It’s best to make the split as amicable as possible and not burn any bridges.
Ability to ‘change’ voice to suit requirements becomes necessary.
I’m sure every blogger will have developed a thick skin in the time they take to reach a certain level.
For all you blog writers out there who want to make a quick buck writing a great blog:
Jim,
You make me proud to call myself a blogger, which I’ve only just started to do. I’ve been blogging for over a yr. now and as a print journalist find it hard to make the transition back to writing for the dead tree edition. I love the breezy, condensed, conversational tone of blogging that I want to pepper my stories for the paper w/”ya know what I mean?” and “You feelin’ this?” Switching between the two mediums is getting harder all the time. Is this a problem for other bloggers/mainstream writers out there?
This is such a great tip! I wrote for a company once who decided I didn’t have what it took to write for their blog. Not because my writing was poor, but because the company’s owner knew in her mind what she wanted her blog to convey but couldn’t pinpoint it enough for me to be able to write it. And quite honestly, I don’t think I could have. She had a dry style of writing that she wanted mimicked on her blog and I simply couldn’t write that. It was a humbling lesson, but a valuable one.
