Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
How I'm building an online presence with personality
I'm on a mission. My mission is to spread the gospel of showing your personality. While everyone else tells you to be professional and insanely useful, I urge you to be a person and personal. I feel also, that to lecture about using your personality to build your online presence, I must do it myself. Lead by example, and whatnot.
For today's post, I was going to dig into some statistics of this blog and my site in general. A bit of history, telling how it used to be like a ghost town and now I've got a steadily growing readership. Nothing unreasonable, just a couple of hundred visitors per day. As soon as I tried to form the sentences and paragraphs, I wasn't interested anymore. It felt too impersonal and boring. I mean, we people of web love vanity metrics to the point of obsession. Plus, what's more fun than to do a little industrial espionage by finding out how your fellow bloggers are doing? Other than that, I felt the post would either appear too whiny or end up being too cold. Not personal enough.
As I wrote recently to my email list, personality is your best way to distinguish yourself from the online crowd. Everyone is sharing those same links as you, showing their best work, writing incredibly useful and helpful blog posts. Any subject you come up with, someone else has already covered it or will do so any day now. There's always someone else as good as you (or even better) at what you do. At least there's always someone who knows how to appear as good as you (or better).
The other day, out of curiosity, I subscribed for a free email course about online presences. The emails have been full of stuff I have covered here on my blog or in my emails. The wording sounds similar to what I've been writing. A person with less experience and understanding about web and people would have thought they are being plagiarised. I just was reminded of the limitations of human uniqueness. Hey, look at Twitter, at any time something big happens. Immediately tons of people are, as they were controlled by the same one brain, making the same jokes, asking the same questions, sharing the same opinions. In these emails, the wording was similar to mine because this person was writing about the same subject with the vocabulary common to our industry.
Me, me, me! You don't want to appear self-centred and talking about yourself. You want to appear to be writing for your audience (which is futile) and you want to be extremely useful. Because you are so afraid of appearing selfish, you stretch yourself to be helpful and informational. It may surprise you how sharing your personality can make people really engage with your content, respond to your emails or share the stuff you create. They, or rather we, want to know you. Who you are. Who is the person behind those blog posts? Who are you, behind that camera?
Look into the popular blogs and bloggers, what they write about and how they write about it. Even when talking about less than personal subjects, the best ones insert their personality in their blog posts. Those popular business coaches thrive from telling you how they run their own coaching businesses, what lessons they have learned, and what they personally do to grow their email lists. There's tons of hot advice pinned on Pinterest about someone's personal solutions to a subject or another. The strategies I used to increase my page views. How I made my first $ by blogging. My easy system to create content.
All this on my mind I've embarked to that mission of mine. A few years back I merged my work site and blog into one site, under my old helmikuu.net domain. That move took my blogging to more impersonal direction, because I thought that I should appear more professional. Until last year, when I acquired merviemilia.com and rebranded my whole online presence. From then on, I have slowly getting back to more personal space, around my various pieces of online presence. I've added a photo of myself everywhere I've could, so that you can see I'm a person. Working, Tweeting, sharing and blogging under my name, rather than some pseudonym or business name, has been a good choice. I'm not as professionally distant anymore. My Instagram was pretty quiet for years, until last spring I got into that crazy daily selfie project. Now I get more likes, more comments and more followers than ever.
The basic building blocks of my personality driven online presence are pretty simple. I use my name (or rather my first and middle name, usually) and my face everywhere. I describe myself in the sense of personality, even when talking about my profession. That Instagram series has been the best example of going personal. Besides posting the selfies, I always add a "diary entry" as a caption. Something personal, something related to the topic of the photo, maybe something that happened to me earlier or my thoughts about a subject. The popularity has surprised me. I'm again thinking about making some videos, even though I'm shaky about the idea. Even my Facebook page has gotten more personal. I've branded it as a page of a person, not of a business. My page is under a "People" category, while it could be one of the more impersonal categories.
Here at my very personal blog I currently publish three posts a week. On Mondays the subject has lately been SEO, which isn't the most personal of subjects. I try to add my experiences in, to make it more me. Wednesdays have been link round-ups, about subjects that interest me personally and professionally. I'm hoping they interest you too, but I don't get too preoccupied about being useful. Fridays are turning out to be more personal. More and more, stick around and you'll see. By the way, I've even used my own selfies in some blog post images. Because, why not. The previously mentioned email list has had its ups and downs. I've tried to share more information, ending up with emails that hadn't created that many clicks or responses. I have been more personal, which always increases the clicks (to my site) and getting responses. Thus I'm now using my personal experiences, thoughts, and things I've learned as a basis for the emails. There's something intimate about emails, because they come to you and aren't posted somewhere for everyone to read. It can be annoying and intimidating, but always very personal. Your inbox is a sacred place, which is why I get more personal with my email list too.
There's one issue with this. I'm not a sparkling person. I'm not full of smile and bubbles. I struggle with depression and anxiety, I can be morbid and gloomy. Occasionally someone comments how they prefer to see me smiling on Instagram, and that makes my hair stand up. I don't want to fake a smile or pretend to be glittery and positive. My personalty may not be as inspirational as that of a joyful type. But it's my personality, in all the best and all the worst. That's something I have to embrace. Otherwise I will fail in my mission.
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