When telephone support people are first trained, they’re told to always smile when they’re on the phone. Customers will feel the smile on the other end. The same in fact goes for writing, whether blogs or otherwise. Well, not necessarily smiling, but writing with the feeling that you’re sharing something of importance, of value to someone. Sort of a mental smile, if you will.

I always try to write directly to that one hypothetical person, who may eventually bring back like-minded friends. If I haven’t got that loving feeling, I’ll leave an article for later – sometimes for months. If I don’t get that feeling within four or five months, I usually delete the article and have faith that my subconscious will come up with new topics for me to write about.

But that mental smile is crucial to developing a steady base of readers. Brian Clark has it. So do Liz Strauss, Yaro Starak, Om Malik, and several others – albeit, some are a bit more reserved about it. (Just examples; no ass-kissing going on here In the same way that people on the other end of a phone can feel you smiling, readers can feel whether or not you cared about writing an article. They may not realize it consciously, but if your writing is hollow, they won’t come back, no matter how important your topic is to them.

While I’ve known the smile-on-the-phone thing for years, I never consciously thought about the analog advice for writing until more recently. I’d noticed in June that one of my weblogs was getting small but steady daily traffic that was growing gradually (and still going). Much reflection finally led me to the conclusion that despite the infrequent posting, that weblog seemed to have the most warmth about the writing – that feeling of, hey, here’s something you might like to know – compared to most of the rest of my weblogs.

Other writers who smile when they write:

• Write Happy
• Speaker Sue
• Coincide Publishing