Do You have Personality ?

The Web is like high school. You want to be popular? You've got to have personality.

What if you're not the type? No need to worry. On the Internet, you can market yourself and your business without anyone knowing you're sweating bullets or shaking in your boots.

The written word is a great fooler. Right now it's working to make me seem like someone who gladly jumps up to address a room full of strangers and loves breaking the ice with people he doesn't know. Guess again.

Three Pros
There are a number of Internet personalities who come across as Mr. Or Ms. Congeniality through the written word. Let's look at how three of them do it.

All three are well-known, respected Internet marketers - Declan Dunn (writething.com), Nick Usborne (forkinthehead.com), and Seth Godin (author of "Permission Marketing").

When you read them, they all sound friendly, unguarded, relaxed. Here are some of the things they do to achieve this:
* Use contractions frequently (don't, didn't, I've)
* Use conversational phrases (expressions more often heard in speech than seen in print)
* Use commonly understood slang terms
* Start sentences now and then with a conjunction (And, But, So)
* Refer often to "you," "I" and "we"

They steer clear of jargon (even sales jargon), because it may be unfamiliar to some of us. They also avoid sounding trendy or "wired," because not all of us are hip to the same things.

More important, they can make writing sound like talking. And they accomplish this by:
* using wide variation in sentence lengths (from 1 word up to 30-40 words)
* using occasional sentence fragments
* getting sentences off to a fast start by typically starting with the main subject and verb
* maintaining a strong energy level, by using action verbs (rather than "is," "are," "was," "were," "be," "been")
* using mostly short words and short sentences, which score well on readability tests (Dunn's average sentence length is 16 words; Usborne's is 12; Godin's is only 7)

The 3-D Effect
That's all there is to it? Not exactly. These guys have also found a voice that makes each of them seem individual and three-dimensional.

Dunn, for instance, likes to modulate his tone. "What's tone?" you ask. In a word, attitude. Dunn can "lighten up," "get serious," or shift gears in any number of ways. He uses tone to reveal a range of feelings, from self-disclosure ("I'm scared to write this article") to laugh-out-loud jokes told at his own expense.

Usborne has a quiet, wry sense of humor. He's smart without being a smart aleck (few Web writers get this distinction). His opinions are important without sounding self-important (same deal). He wins one's confidence easily, and his secret seems to be that he respects the intelligence of his readers.

Godin draws freely from several decades of popular American culture to illustrate his points. When he gives examples, they're ones most of his readers are likely to know: Seinfeld, the Super Bowl, the movie "Titanic."

He refers to People Magazine, Coke, fast food, and a typical American boyhood: growing up in the suburbs of a big city, watching TV after school, liking "The Munsters," and listening to Bob Dylan. In the accumulation of detail, he's like a Spielberg movie.

Conclusion
What's the lesson to be learned from all this? Well, these writers succeed because they've mastered many ways of putting us at ease.

They gain credibility without using the manipulative, button-pushing language of by-the-book marketers, who often come across as predictable, flat, cardboard characters. Instead, what they write and the way they write reveal a range of human experience and a rich emotional life.

That's what we look for in real people. It works the same way on the Web.

Yes, you too can be popular. Start with a few rules of thumb to make what you say sound conversational (see above). And risk being the human that you are.

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