Week 10A

write a blog post explaining how adding human interest to a post can appeal to peoples emotions because it describes personal experiences. When does it make sense to add a personal touch to a post, and when does it not?

Adding human interest helps to build trust and connection with your readers.  The emotional connection helps to build your audience which in turn helps to find new readers and reach a wider market as your base audience shares that they are enjoying your blog.

It makes sense to add a personal touch when you are blogging about your own business or creating a lifestyle/diary-style blog and when the personal touch is authentic.   Utilizing a guest blogger with expertise in the topic you are blogging about or turning to HARO would be preferable to creating a false personal “touch”.

Although I live in San Diego, I follow a dog rescue out of Texas that I learned about because a friend happened to share a link to this rescue’s blog post several years ago.  When I first started following this rescue they had well under 1,000 followers.  Their personal, emotional stories about the dogs they save, rehabilitate and rehome, along with many great pictures has created an enormous following, now well above 2,000 for their blog posts.  They post daily and on the rare occasion they do not, they tell their audience they have gone dark in memory or in honor of a specific rescue that was lost to death.  Their emotional stories have helped this small, grassroots rescue grow to receive financial and volunteer support from many corners of the US.

It would be less wise to add a personal, emotional touch if it was a controversial one and you are a business, such as in the case of Chik-fil-A.  Not that the Chik-fil-A situation was a blog but a representative of the company expressing a polarizing opinion on a controversial topic, while it may increase the comment traffic, it may also result in a loss of business.