Overheard on #Blogchat: Your Picture (@AngelaMaiers)

Do you participate in #blogchat? Every week, this weekly discussion on Twitter focuses on a specific topic and bloggers everywhere are invited to join in. Because I often have more to say than what will fit in 140 characters, every Sunday night (or Monday morning), I post about some of the most interesting #blogchat tweets. Join the conversation by commenting below.

(Still confused? Read more about #blogchat here.)

This week’s theme: driving the RIGHT traffic to your blog in 2011 vs just getting MORE traffic

One of the themes of the night was talking about how to get readers to stay on your site, to become fans and even customers or subscribers rather than leaving your site after their visit. It doesn’t matter if you bring in traffic from social media recommendations, social bookmarking, SEO, or another source – if they read your post but never come back, their visit to your site essentially means nothing.

Tweeters at #blogchat offered tons of advice on how to convert more first-time readers into regular readers, and one that I find especially important is this:

@AngelaMaiers: Your readers need to see your face- they need to know WHO u r before they care WHAT u have to say

Earlier this month, Nikki posted about the importance of having a good About Me page, and I truly believe that Angela that hit the nail on the head with one of the most important points – including a picture.

The chance that I’ll read your blog regularly – even if you write awesome content – is significantly lower if you don’t have a picture of you on your blog somewhere. If you honestly aren’t comfortable, even a caricature or cartoon of some kind works – but if your face is a logo, I have a really hard time thinking of you as a real person, connecting with anything you say.

I think that this all raises an even more important point: while education is important on a blog, if you don’t have personality while you are educating me, I’m not likely to become a regular reader. There are so many boring blogs out there. I think, sometimes, that we’ve lost the reason blogs came into existence in the first place – to allow the blogger an outlet, a place to show their personality. Even some of the experts out there, some people who I really respect and who are regular speaker at BlogWorld and other blogging events…I go to their blogs when I want to know something, but I don’t read regularly. They bore me, and there’s so many bloggers out there that I can probably find someone to teach me the same thing but with a little personality.

Personality is everything – and I think we’ve lost track of that at times. So give me your picture! Tell me about you! Give me super valuable information, but mention your kids and tell me where you’re going on vacation and share an embarrassing story. Every blog should be a personal blog – because otherwise, you just run a boring website that’s updated regularly.

Thanks, Angela, for your great #blogchat comments!