Nobody Cares About You

Whether you write content for a client, blog for your personal brand, or write on the company blog, you’re constantly writing. Most of the time, your writing is inspired by a personal experience or some specialized information that you possess. While it’s tempting to qualify what you’re saying by sharing your personal story, it’s a bad habit that may be cause your readers to bounce.

Read on to understand why you should stop talking about yourself so much.

Nobody cares about you; they care about the problem you can help them solve.

Food bloggers are notoriously bad at this. Their visitors are looking for recipes — explicit instructions on how to prepare the food pictured. So when they open with a paragraph about their weekend away and follow that with a detailed description of how much their husband and children just looooooved the dish, it gets annoying.

Occasionally, amongst all of the fluff about their personal lives that nobody (save for their mother and besties) cares about, they’ll tuck in some truly helpful tidbits about substitutions or suggested deviations from the recipe. Unfortunately, the entire opening to the blog post gets skipped because it reads like a journal entry. The reader misses the helpful tips altogether.

You are the authority on this topic, so act and write like it.

Someone’s decision to read your writing is a subliminal showing of their respect for your thoughts. When they subscribe to your content, that respect is elevated to trust. If you are knowledgeable and experienced enough to write on a topic, voicing your opinion is literally the creation of information.

So stop using yourself as a crutch and start writing with self-confidence and appreciation of your own skills. For example, if you’re a LinkedIn power user blogging about a new feature that doesn’t provide all the information you’d like to have, don’t write, “I thought it was neat, but I was really hoping it would have given me more information.” Instead, voice your opinions strongly in third person. “The idea is nice, but it ultimately doesn’t provide the vital information users need.” You’ll sound more credible and appear to be more sure of yourself when you omit your me-crutch.

When is first person appropriate?

There are exceptions to every rule, so certain occasions warrant the use of first person:

• When you’re the focus of the article or story. Are you being interviewed or answering questions about your personal success story? It would be pretty awkward if you didn’t use first person here.


• When your perspective adds value or credibility. If you — the writer — had the opportunity to speak with the featured person (or a representative of the featured product or organization), then writing about that engagement in first person actually adds credibility to the story. Likewise, if you got exclusive access to a new product and you’re blogging about your experience with it, first person is most appropriate.

Think of your top three or four favorite media outlets and magazines and then go to their websites or latest issues and skim the cover stories. How many of them are written in first person and do not fall into one of the two exceptions listed above?

You don’t have to stop referencing yourself in your writing altogether, but limiting the use of first person will keep your thoughts concise and allow them to resonate louder with your audience.

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