Lifestyle blogging is all about branding- yourself and your blog. Here’s how to refine your voice and brand as a blogger.
With hundreds of thousands of bloggers out there, how will you make certain your lifestyle blog stands apart from the rest? One key ingredient to success: a specific and unique point of view.
In this article, we’ll address ways to make your voice and brand a selling point of your lifestyle blog as a business and how to refine both to increase your success.
How to Refine Your Voice and Brand As A Lifestyle Blogger?
Lifestyle bloggers curate, create, and editorialize content based on their unique points of view. If you’re reading this article, then you must be a lifestyle blogger yourself! Excellent. So what makes your blog a reflection of who you are?
For your lifestyle blog to be a success, you’ll need to have a solid idea of who you are as a writer, what your blog is about, and what point of view you’re sharing with readers.
If you take your blog’s overall look and feel, the kind of lifestyle you’re promoting, and the content you are publishing, you’ve got your blog’s voice and brand. Not sure what those key elements are yet, or they perhaps feel a bit murky at the moment?
That’s okay!
In this article, we’ll give you pointers to define and refine your brand voice and your overall brand as a lifestyle blogger. With these tips, you’ll have a better shot at creating a successful blog that is marketable and can gain you followers, affiliate and brand partnerships, and generate income.
Lifestyle blogging is a business, and like any business, it will need to have a brand identity. Businesses with brand identities will last longer, make a more significant impression, and have a stronger sense of presence.
When you’re a lifestyle blogger competing with hundreds, even thousands of other blogs in your niche, brand identity makes your blog stand out in the crowd, makes your content recognizable, and makes your marketing strategy replicable across platforms.
This is why apart from unique content and attention grabbing visuals, continuous research and review of the competition is critical. Aggregated data such as best lifestyle blogs will keep you updated and informed on the most popular lifestyle blogs on the net.
What sets these bloggers apart from the other thousands? Check out their material, delivery strategy and layout. Take notes and make comparisons to your own blog.
When thinking about brand identities, the first thing to come to mind is often a brand’s visual identity. This is an important element in lifestyle blogging, no doubt. Your blog’s visual elements should be consistent.
Your blog logo, your page layout, your social media profiles- all should have a consistent look and feel. But these aren’t the only elements of your brand that need to have a strong sense of identity.
Voice and Tone
While the visual aspect of a brand’s identity tends to be top of mind, voice and tone identity for brands are equally vital. So what is the voice and tone of a blog or brand?
According to CoShedule.com, a marketing expert website, your brand voice refers to the personality and emotion infused into all company communications.
As a lifestyle blogger, this means everything from your actual blog posts and content to your social media posts, promotions, digital products, engagements with readers, email marketing, newsletters, and more.
You’ll want to be sure that you have a consistent tone across all of these communications. Thankfully there are some very nicely curated tutorials available online to help you.
In How to Start a Blog for example, you will find easy-to-follow instructions on how to effectively customize your content and visual aids. The style you write and communicate, images you choose, and logos and branding you create should all convey the same personality and vision.
Consistency is vital because it plays a key role in how readers perceive your brand, makes your blog more memorable and makes a lasting impression on both readers and potential sponsors or brand partners. For your content to convey a message, voice and tone consistency are key.
For audiences to recognize your brand, you’ll need to master not only consistency but repetition as well. This can mean a variety of things for a lifestyle blogger, from keywords and phrases to a conversational style and message that you’re attempting to convey.
For example, if you change your writing style from post to post or incorporate a different overarching message from week to week, your engagements with readers might fall flat or become off-putting.
Readers tend to prefer some predictability. If they started following your blog for upbeat banter and style tips, but you are suddenly posting moody and sarcastic content, they may be confused or turned off.
Brand partners may also be frustrated by inconsistency and how it pertains to their features on your blog. So keep posts and visuals consistent.
Some of the most successful lifestyle bloggers have curated their styles so succinctly they can even be seen clearly at a glance in their Instagram feeds. A quick perusal of the hashtag #lifestyleblogger, and you’ll find both good and bad examples of brand consistency.
If you’re changing your messaging and style too frequently, it’s hard for audiences to gauge what you’re about.
While keeping the voice of your brand consistent is vital, your tone has a lot more flexibility.
Think of the tone of your brand communications as the emotional inflection of your brand’s voice. While your voice is a reflection of your blog’s personality, your tone is adjustable based on the particular piece or message.
For example, a blog post about a holiday party theme won’t have the same tone as one honoring veterans or addressing a recent natural disaster, for example.
So How Do You Refine Your Voice?
The idea of auditing all of your content to make certain that your brand and blog voice is consistent may seem like an intimidating task, but it’s simpler than you think. Taking stock of your content and assuring things are consistent requires a few steps.
- Consider your values. The voice of your blog and brand should be reflective of your values. Like any business, you should have a mission statement or some basic values associated with your lifestyle blog. These values are a good jumping-off point for refining your blog’s brand voice.
- Put together a list of adjectives that describe your brand- and some solid ideas about adjectives that describe what your brand isn’t. For example, do you want
- your voice to be playful? Sarcastic? Fun? Smart? Will you avoid content that comes across as stuffy, down, or serious? These are your guideposts.
- Go through all of your written content—blog posts, newsletters, emails, marketing pitches, social media feeds, etc. Take a look at any common themes and tones. Do these themes match your idea of your brand? Are there any areas that need to be improved?
- Research your audience, or your ideal audience. Comb through their social media profiles, and take a look at their likes and dislikes. This gives you a better idea of how to fine-tune your voice.
Create Guidelines
After you’ve spent some time considering what you want the voice of your lifestyle blog to sound and feel like, create some enforceable guidelines for yourself to follow in order to keep things consistent.
You may benefit from writing down a list of the qualities you wanted to convey in your voice, for example, “playful,” and then what that term means in relation to your brand.
Guidelines are especially helpful if you are not the only person writing and producing content for your lifestyle blog. This way, you can be sure there is consistency not only across platforms and posts but from writer to writer.
Moderate the Tone
The first question you’ll need to ask yourself when it comes to tone: formal? Or informal?
As a lifestyle blogger, it’s likely to be the latter since lifestyle blogging, as a rule, incorporates a lot of informal communication and topics.
This may be different for a life insurance company seeking to populate their business blog with content that speaks to their expertise but writing about fashion, beauty, travel, and day-to-day life tends to have more wiggle room when it comes to tone.
The key thing to consider with tone is what’s appropriate given the subject matter. For example, if you’re writing about a sad or serious subject, an irreverent tone is not likely appropriate. Always keep your target audience in mind.
Get It All Consistent
Once you’ve spent the time considering what your brand and blog are about, how you’d describe them, what you want to convey, and set out some guidelines for yourself, you’re all set, right?
Not quite.
The final and most important step in refining your voice and brand as a lifestyle blogger is auditing all of your published content and purging anything that isn’t consistent with your brand’s identity.
As your audience grows, your blog may evolve, and there may come a time where you’re purging more than you’d like to.
However, in order to relay a consistent message to your audiences and brand partners, consistency is critical. If a reader or potential business partner searches your company and finds content that doesn’t convey the right message about you and your blog, it’s not going to serve you.
Ditch the inconsistent content! Rebrand images if necessary, and make sure the look and feel of your lifestyle blog makes sense on all platforms.
Final Words
There you have it. Get your voice and tone together, get consistent, and get to standing out. Treat your lifestyle blog like the brand and business you want it to be, and you’re on your way to successful blogging!
