 a blogging agency called Need Someone to Blog and that's how I'm able to talk to you about finding your client's voice today. So but before we get started on the topic I want to tell you about something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I went to dinner with a friend of mine who's a blogger you may have heard of her she's very well known in the word press space and also in the south her name is Kitty Lesby and because she's from this area I was asking her about some some geographical things I wanted to get to know what it was like in Raleigh because I'm from California and it's very different world right so in order to localize my talk I just started up a conversation said so what's the barbecue like in North Carolina and and he said well unless you like the vinegary kind there is you don't want to do the barbecue just trust the pork and she said because sometimes it's just catch up with meat on it and you never know what you're gonna get which I thought was a very interesting approach because all I'd heard was how great the barbecue was from Stephen Harvey who is somebody who works with my company and so I laughed I said okay tell me a little bit more about the south she said well it all depends on where you draw the mason-dixon line and then she informed me that Florida even though it's in the south is not part of the south so it was interesting to get that perspective and I was fascinated as she continued to tell stories about growing up here and sharing the differences between a been here and a come here and since I am a come here today it just it made me excited to be able to see what I was really gonna experience and I had to see it for myself so I want to thank y'all for coming out and being here to give me a chance to come to Raleigh and a reason to be here so so far everything's been very welcoming and I have to say that it's kind of been a life-changing experience for me to be here and it's added depth to my own voice because it's one more experience that I've had because I am a blogger and I know my friend Bridget here is sitting in this first row saying Jen don't say you're a blogger you're a writer and I am a writer I'm also a mom of eight kids I'm an agency owner I am many things I the founder of women who WP and so I've been very active in WordPress but really I am a blogger and I blog on a lot of people sites I blog on my own site and it's where my roots are and whether I'm a writer too or not I love to blog on websites how many of you are bloggers in this room okay and how many of you blog for your own website how many of you blog for other people's websites okay good there's a few of you so this is a business opportunity for those of you who don't it's something for you to realize is a service that you can provide I've been writing since I was four years old and I didn't really find my voice until I was 19 prior to that I was more of a technical writer my job was at a newspaper and I covered the police beat for them and I also covered the police beat for my college newspaper the daily 49er I knew how to organize my thoughts quickly how to ask questions and how to write in the inverted pair of pyramid and I thought I was pretty good at what I did but the year I turned 19 I was surprised because something happened at my newspaper that sort of changed my voice and changed how I looked at my writing one day in our editorial meeting someone said that they wanted to cover my hairdressers shop and they have a piece written on it and I immediately raised my hand and volunteered because my hairdresser was my friend I've been to their shop I tried all their services I thought this is going to be a shoe-in article it'll be easy for me to write and it will help bring my friends and business so I did my due diligence I made up my list of questions and I planned a day at the salon I even tried this flotation tank thing so that I could experience all of their services and I thought I had every detail in order so when I wrote my story and submitted it to my editor I was convinced I had dotted every eye and crossed every T well an hour later I got a call into the office and I was told that they had reviewed my article and that I needed to understand that there was a difference between a feature and a news story your story is lacking heart is what I was told turn it into something that someone wants to read and I was shocked I never had anybody say anything bad about my writing but really no no one had ever said anything bad and it happened that day and so I went back to my desk and I cried and a friend of mine who worked in the office was another writer she came over and she sat with me and I asked her for help we started rereading the story together and at first I didn't see it but she did she said tell me how you felt being there don't be afraid to let the laughter and the color and the true salon environment show through no one expects or wants it to be a sterile article you need to tell the story and with her encouragement I did my article was published on time even and it created quite a sensation in our local community because it brought my hairdresser into the forefront the people who went to the salon shared the story everywhere it really paved the way for me and for her to become better known in the community and it actually paved the way for me to become an editor of the newspaper and the quarterly magazine in time and I take it all back to that story because that's where I learned to write with heart and I kind of found my niche in or niche in later life because I started writing more of those kinds of reviews and more personality pieces because I found I had kind of a knack for it because they were easier for me to write and that's how I found my voice when I walked into my hotel room yesterday the first thing I noticed was a blanket folded neatly on the change lounge and it read make your point so I'm going to do exactly that and get to the reason why we're here today so we're going to be talking about blogging voice lessons or as the talk read creating content in your clients voice for those of you who write for others last October a client called me and said Jen I just read through some of the articles and blog posts that you wrote and I wanted to know where you found it and I explained that we didn't find those posts we didn't find them anywhere they were written just for him in his blog in his voice and he was impressed he'd hired bloggers in the past and they hadn't been able to create material that he felt reflected his voice he said they were all canned posts well canned posts are not the way to tell your client's story they do not work for showcasing a product and they definitely are not the answer when you want to capture your client's voice and vision you may be asking how a voice and vision can be related to blogging well a vision is a grand dream or a company's story broken into essential components a voice is a mechanism by which that story is told it can be written it can be performed it can be dance music even on stage a voice in this context can even be considered an art last fall I was in Austin Texas and I happened upon an outdoor art exhibit it was named Hope you can see it right here and some of the locals even referred to it as the graffiti wall I recognized it as a place where people would make their mark similar to finding their voice right in the context of the acronym Hope stands for helping other people everywhere people travel from all over the world to paint their names and contribute temporary art to this terraced wall they go to share their personal message and express their voice how many voices and messages do you think are expressed on this wall well I was there there are thousands and they keep being painted over and over so it continues to grow those messages of art are often replaced and sometimes the art that's there is modified so that the original art becomes unrecognizable someone who didn't understand the concept might view it as a wasted project however I didn't I grabbed a can of spray paint because they have several there and contributed a tiny bit of myself to the project because I didn't want to give up the opportunity to have a voice on this wall the Hope wall content that has been outsourced to content mills or unvetted writers often has similar drawbacks the subject isn't under oh wait that's not where I'm supposed to be hmm well that's okay okay but so I had my opportunity to contribute my voice and you can do that when you do when you write your own content but not everybody has that opportunity sometimes if something's outsourced it can it doesn't express the true vision of the company or the person who it's being written for and so that's when outsourced content can be a problem the subject isn't understood the meaning is lost because a writer can't connect to the topic it really can't adequately be described and so I'm going to put this in a context that can be understood but let's see incoming here I've seen some gorgeous scenery do you all agree yes right but I haven't seen the a passionately how do you say it appellation thank you trail I haven't seen it I can't describe it for you but I'm sure there who's seen it who's been there okay many of you could stand up here and tell me all about it and but I can tell you about the beauty of my drive from the Raleigh Durham Airport into town because all I saw were trees I even took a video send it to my friends in California look at this because it was beautiful and so I can adequately portray that so when I was in Austin Texas last October and there I tried barbecue right going back to my discussion with Kitty and I actually had three opportunities to try distinctly different barbecue the first time I was recommended go to a place called Vicks it was a home style family-owned storefront and the brisket was moist and nothing like the barbecue I'd had in California the following day I ventured to a place called Cooper's and Lano I tasted everything and was amazed at the flavor and I thought I discovered the best barbecue ever but on my final night in town I was able to sample brisket and ribs from a food truck called Kerlin and was blown away it understood that Austin had good barbecue this is I'm sure you do here maybe Kitty doesn't like it right but I knew that that was the that was what the area was known for and I was told it was better than California barbecue but until I had tried it for myself I had no idea what that meant and now as a blogger in California I know that writing about barbecue from a restaurant in Austin it's not something I would be capable of capturing because it's not something that I have in my repertoire so context is lost when someone doesn't understand the area or topic and by the way I'm happy to try some North Carolina barbecue if anybody has suggestions on places I should go okay so now we're gonna talk for a couple minutes about something that's unique to North care or NC State actually how many of you have been to the butterfly garden nobody do you guys know it's here there's a butterfly garden how cool is that okay well how many of you have ever looked at a butterfly and like studied the patterns on its wings okay we've got some people who are nature people super cool there's different patterns the colors each butterfly is unique and at this butterfly garden there are more than 50 species that are represented so it's a one of a kind experience every time you go there you're not going to see the same butterflies so bringing this back to WordPress just says every butterfly is unique that's what we need to see on the blogs on your websites we need to see unique original content that is representative of who you are or who your company is that you're writing for now blog posts typically have some commonality just like butterflies all have wings right so for instance there are many blog posts in the United States many of them are written in English but do they all sound the same no should they all sound the same no the tone or color of each is a reflection of the rider and it's called their voice so after reading several posts on the same blog you become familiar with the style whether it's casual or written with local slang or highly technical the and maybe it has odd bits and of humor added to the post these are the things that we start to recognize when we're capturing someone's voice it may be something completely different you may just notice that this writer always uses bullet points but usually there is something recognizable and sometimes you may come across a blog that seems really lackluster and like the content doesn't really relate that's usually when you can find a client because that means they're having somebody put that logging or do their blogging or create their website content that really doesn't understand how to capture a voice as I said before content is the context is lost when someone doesn't understand the topic or when they don't understand the feel of the company that they're representing and a share with you something that happened in in my writing career this is a scenario that I saw play out while working for a client that had hired he had outsourced his blogging to an unknown vendor in another country and he was trying to save money and thought that this would work but his scrutiny was very low because he knew he didn't really value the post and the posts weren't really I'll tell you in a second yeah sorry and they weren't really valued by the client so I was told to review the posts and make changes well I took a look at the first post and realized it was taking place in the Colorado mountains and the community was very excited about these cats there were cats that were coming to clean themselves on the mountain and that they they would play in the snow and I thought this is really strange because I've been skiing I've been to the snow I don't think I've ever seen a cat play in the snow other than maybe on YouTube have any of you ever experienced a cat playing in the snow all right so it's not a universal experience for sure so as I read through this piece that I was editing I realized it wasn't about cats or kittens at all it was about cats capital C capital a capital T the little tractors that's groom the snow and everyone was excited because ski season it was opening day and they were getting ready by grooming the snow and this is what this article was supposed to be about was announcing when Open Day was opening day was but the person who had written it obviously had no experience with mountain life had no idea what what they were talking about and this could have gone live on the person site had he not had me editing the post and so had the blogger taken even if they didn't live there if they had just taken a few minutes to Google cat all caps because they recognized that it wasn't the same as a kitten they probably would have found something relating to construction and then if they had put in cat plus skiing they might have made that connection I had life experience that helped me to make the connection pretty easily but not everybody does but when you don't you should put some research into the topic that you're writing about to make sure that you are on track so your context really does matter and your clients deserve better than that kind of a mix of wouldn't you agree and you do too if you're writing for your own content and you're trying to write something that maybe you don't fully understand make sure you understand it before you write about it because better content and better topics lead to a better voice so how do you develop and create that content for your client you first do it by listening to your client so if you're writing for somebody else you've got to really listen and you need to think about it any music fans out there okay could you tell the difference between a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughn yes okay I thought so okay are you able to recognize the difference between a Ford and a Toyota if you hear the motor okay and can you tell the difference of voices in your family different friends different family members without seeing them so our voices are very important I think sometimes we forget that and we just think we can go through the motions but it's it's not true we've got to capture that voice so listening helps you to recognize that uniqueness at my company we started we start the voicing process for our clients by interviewing the client we listen for unique phrases and we make small talk with them we ask about recent books they've read and magazines that they look at and websites they go to and why they like them we ask about their favorite places to visit locally because we want to have a community connection in their blog and this might give you insight into the type of content that resonates resonates with each client so you can ask them about their competition you can find out what their competitions writing about or get the websites and do your own research so that you understand some other topics that you might want to go into and you also should ask them ways that they want to stand out as a brand because what you're writing about if you're writing it in a unique and organized fashion and you're putting in your titles and your meta descriptions in your alt tags and all the things that you know you need to do to create good content if you're doing that it's going to be found in search engines and if it's found in search engines you want that company to be found for the right terms so it's super important to find out what their objective is and having you blog and you might want to ask them even for five adjectives that describe their brand so that you understand how they look at their company or ask them to describe a current client or a past client or the perfect client you can set the tone through creating the voice so there are several tones that we use at my company one is the professional voice and we use this when we write on more corporate type blogs because sometimes it's necessary to adopt a formal authoritative style this doesn't mean that we cut out personality it's not eliminated however we play it down a little bit I would say the key to keeping this style engaging while you're playing it down is to provide details sometimes a case study is the best way to do this because you're explaining what your company does you're explaining how it affects other users or you know vendors or whatever the case study may be about and that is is a great way to showcase your work so other people know what it is that you do another voice is the neighborly voice so this style is when we use on a lot of our community blogs it's more casual in tone and it can be used to really make it emotional connection a lot of lifestyle bloggers use this neighborly voice because it's a great way to showcase relatable events and your stories humorous voice is another one you've probably seen on websites this is one where if your client likes to joke a lot pay close attention because you might get a good understanding of what type of jokes they might would use in their content you might be able to just from your conversation pull one of those jokes and use it in their content and when someone one of their clients reads their blog they're gonna recognize that they're gonna see it so it's important to pay attention to those little cues and if you do have a client who would like this humorous voice one of the things that would be really good is to talk to them about hey if you hear of any good jokes if you have any funny stories tell them to me send this quick email you know all that you need is two sentences and you can pretty much flesh that out into a couple of paragraphs in a blog if you know your client well enough or at least it works for us another voice is the newsroom voice that's kind of that professional inverted pyramid style that I was talking about in the very beginning that I did at the newspaper I don't prefer that style anymore but you see it all the time on the internet and the reason why they used to do that is because with newspapers they used to cut from the bottom to fit the page and so the most important information had to be told first and then it went down to include more details as you went further on the page it can easily come across as stuffy or arrogant and so you have to be careful with this style because if it's done wrong it can be off-putting we don't want that we want engagement on those blogs but if you write for a news-based company this may be the style that they want and so if you are doing that then adding some community stories into that content can help to develop an authoritative voice even though it's newsy because it gives it shows that they know who their target audience is and it pulls people in the curious tentative voice okay so this might be a weak way to start a blog some people might say because blogging should be about sharing what you know so you should be coming from a place of authority however sometimes you want to write a piece that asks a question that says this is the way I think it is or is it because then you'll get comments you'll get people who engage in your topic because they might have a differing opinion it may reframe how you want to continue to write for that client even because you could use a support queue for instance and get some questions and ask the question rather than answering it so you can kind of flip everything around and you'll find that when you do that and you're curious about what the client wants or you're curious about how they solve this issue that you'll get a lot of shares on those type of posts so I don't use this a lot but with our clients every once in a while we do do a curious voice post just to kind of bring it all together so and the reason why we don't do it a lot is because it's it involves risk the client has to take a risk and be a little vulnerable when they're reaching out to their audience versus just saying this is how it is so these voices sum up the bulk of what we use for our client work however I'm sure you can think of more as professional bloggers we use these as guides and like I said before move between these voices and usually having a combination produces results that our clients love and it connects them with their audience it connects them with their community and it gives them credibility so I'd advise you all to do the same and and when when you're doing this when you're thinking about how you're going to approach this client blogging interaction and how what topics you're going to use sometimes it makes sense to review emails and so I'm gonna tell you like because sometimes you'll notice that your clients start a word with a sentence I have one client who starts like every third paragraph with the word and and you know capital and which is not something that's technically correct or common usage but it's the way she writes and so if we're writing her blog we're going to be starting every third paragraph or fourth paragraph with the capital and because we want to be in her voice we want the clients that she's emailing on a regular basis to see that it's her blog the questions you can ask is did your client often write in the third or first person they probably won't know but you can tell that by reading what they have written or by reading what they're writing in their emails two years ago I went on an extended trip to Europe and I worried that my email would go unanswered while I was gone I spent several months training my assistant on typical responses for our company and created a few templates and spent a few of the next few months reviewing what she was sending the clients to make sure that it was in my voice our company's voice really and we made adjustments and then two weeks before I was due to leave I noticed something I saw that just about every email used the words I appreciate you somewhere in it so weird like who says that right and that phrase just kept coming up so I hadn't spoken to my assistant about it and I just kept thinking about it and then I looked at emails that I was sending to my clients and I realized I totally overused this phrase I was saying I appreciate you or so appreciate you or some variation on it and almost every email I sent which is why my assistant had incorporated it I never use it anymore because like that freaked me out a little but I realized that even my voice could be learned so interesting point to note if you're starting your own business and you want to hire other writers to work with you so in order to involve your client you're gonna read your clients past writing everything from blog posts to emails and you're gonna look for those word patterns buzzwords that seem unique notice their length of sentences some people write really short sentences some people write all compound three line sentences you don't have to sacrifice your grammatical or graphical style necessarily in doing this but maybe you slowly bring your client into a line that is more uniform that people are used to reading when you notice something that seems a little odd but you want to make that a gradual change because the audience will gradually shift to understand that so if you have a client that makes references to growing up in the 80s what are you gonna put in their blog posts references to growing up in the 80s right if they mentioned locations all the time you're gonna want to mention locations because they might be very map based you want to use these things in your content and you also want to notice words that are not used so when if someone were to blog for me I never swear if somebody put something that was even close to a swear word in my blog post we would know it wasn't written by me right we would we would know that but there are other words like some people will never use the word actually or well there are just words that when you look at enough of someone's writing you realize that those words are missing because they could have replaced with them and they don't so I want you to make a note of that keep a little journal on each client or a little you know something in your computer as you track your client notes listen for those repeated phrases favorite quotes maybe you can ask them about and add these things into your post to add authenticity to them punctuation has trends as well often in social media I use to exclamation points when I'm excited about something so you can tell if a tweet has been written by me because I usually put two exclamation points I also am very much in favor of hashtags and so often my Twitter account will have four to six hashtags just because I'm having fun with it even though social media experts would tell me not to put that many in so though so professionally I might recommend a different style than what I do but that's my style that's what I do and so with one of our clients he had trying to remember I think it was like every tweet for the last four years was five words or less no hashtags and I just looked at that and I was like what are you trying to convey you know how are you trying to get people places but we had to write in his style because I didn't want anyone calling out the tweets we were putting on his Twitter account as being something that wasn't generated by him and so we adapted it's very different from my style though so my goal is that when a post or a page on a website when anything that is added to that site goes on there it feels like who the author is supposed to be it shouldn't feel like the author's guest blogger or ghost blogger so if you notice that the posts are starting to sound like you you're doing something wrong so keep those tabs keep the notes and realize what the no-no words are with the key phrases are that are used often or should be used often and and think about the location and favorite quotes and genre references and then watch social media so that you can see how people comment back and if your client comments back to them watch that discussion because that may impact the posts that you're writing and have your client become aware ask them to let you know it's really good to have that buy-in it may not be that they contact you every you know you may hear from them once every four months and they may say oh this is happening in my community we really want to write about this I'm providing the swag here's four pictures to use and that's something that really is great because you can bring that into the posts that you had slated to write for that event I have a client who desperately wanted to be you know number one first page of Google this was about four years ago when it was a lot easier to do that and there's a lot less competition but not for her phrase her phrase had a lot of competition because she's in a very exclusive area and so we had a long talk about it because she was three and she's like Jen we've been blogging for a year why am I not in slot one and I said we need an event we need something that's gonna push you up there and I said so I need you to watch and when a celebrity comes to your community and she's like well I can't I can't invade their privacy and I said no I'm not asking you to invade their privacy but if something happens where you're in a place where we can get a lot of traction to your blog I said it could just be going down to the beach when OP pros going on you know and and just happening to be in a picture with Christian Slater or something and being able to tag that and send people to the blog because we'd write a quick blog I said just snap a picture just do whatever you can so she went away thinking okay what can I do and about three weeks later on a Saturday night I get this phone call and this client I've been working with her for a long time and so she never calls me up on the weekend so I picked up because I was shocked and she said you'll never believe it George Clooney is here and I said what do you mean she's like I am in the theater he produced a movie and he is showing it and I'm here with him I said get a picture so she did and it wasn't a picture with him it was with her and him it was a picture of him standing in front of the stage and then we wrote a blog post or we we wrote a blog post about what was what was showing and the fact that they were there together but then the title combined her keyword term and his name and we tweeted it out and got it on Facebook and before we knew it we had tons of traffic to the site and she's been that first place ever since because that one event pushed her to the top and since we do continual content she stayed there real estate so very competitive industry so it's important that you respect what the client might bring to the table and if they have talent if they have events if they have an eye for something bring that into the blog and incorporate their ideas as well as your own so like that gets her solo you need to showcase your voice and use it to help your readers engage use authority because you know the topic you've done the research if you're the writer for the blog or if it's your own blog don't fear intensity because people love to read editorial pieces and be consistent we recommend twice weekly blogging for all of our clients and we follow that up with social media posting because if it's just on the blog and you don't have an established audience those posts are going to go unseen unless you're sharing them paint a picture with your words cyclists whizzing past evokes a very different meaning than a bike road by read each post after you've written it and give it an honest assessment and rewrite it if it doesn't capture the voice as you'd hoped and find and tell the truth we use some tools to help us to do this we have for our clients we use Google Drive and a series of spreadsheets to track the posts that are being written for them and the topics but if we find something that's more relevant or timely that takes place you know if that's going to happen before the next scheduled post we'll write on that and push the scheduled post because we want to be we want our clients to be in the know and there's also other options that you can use to track these things I know some people use Trello to track how they're gonna keep ideas for blog posts and those are good options but what you need to do is file any posts away that you think are particularly good so if you have other people writing on your team you can use those to teach them how to write for this particular client or you can use those posts to help you to find your voice when you maybe have too much going on and you can't quite get your head in the game sometimes reviewing particularly good older posts is a great way to do that and visualization so there are times where it can be hard to turn on that voice like I was saying and so when that happens we use a method or a technique that's similar to method acting where we advise our writers to pretend that they're the accountant or the lawyer or the community leader and then they write as them and it helps in capturing the right voice when you're having trouble because our job is to create an extension of the client learn to think and write as your client would if they had the time so to sum it all up here are my top 15 tips for ghostwriting one develop a target reader to envision your client's goal three create that client avatar a voice that you're gonna use specifically when writing for that client four keep a file of all of your clients information in each article you write for them and hold on to information like quotes and no-no words and phrases and do five do your research look at the past blog posts and current posts that are in the clients writing styles and talking style so that you can understand how to write for them six observe and interview your client and listen to how they talk and portray themselves this will help develop confidence and help you to develop that voice even more seven read things out loud I don't think I mentioned that actually but if you try talking in your client's voice you'll know if it matches them let's see eight tailor your voice to your medium so if it's a press release a blog post an informational article each of those may require something a little different nine write something you would read ten be unique and make yourself stand out make that post stand out so be credible and helpful in each one if you can and eleven take risks because if you don't feel a little adrenaline when you're pushing publish that may not be your best piece twelve communicate with your client thirteen have confidence and authority in your writing because people need to be pulled in fourteen decide about the formal informal and maybe even tour the company to get a feel for what their actual environment is like and fifteen invent a specific brand or voice you can bring as the ghost rider that is your own but that conveys their feelings and their the feel of their blog if the client wanted the words to sound exactly the same as before they probably wouldn't have hired you so whether you go stride or blog for yourself I'd like you to remember this quote by Alan Alda which oddly enough I found on my hotel key card when I checked into Raleigh you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition so trust yourself put your heart into the content you write and post your blog and then push publish get it out there so thank you for listening to me today I'm Jen Miller founder of need someone to blog and you can find me on linkedin or twitter at Jen blogs for you and if you have any questions I'm here or we can meet in the happiness bar if we're out of time