It doesn’t matter if you’re a fiction writer, a landscape photographer, or an avid crafter selling your 3D-printed fidget spinners online. To show your readers how you created something — whether it’s a physical object or something more amorphous — is to bring them closer to your world. Next time you’re struggling to come up with a new post idea for your site, just invite your visitors behind the scenes. Here are three ways you can go about it.
Show yourself
We love to present our work in its final, perfect form (or at least its “I’m tired and this is good enough” form), as if it fell from some alien spaceship, all shiny and flawless. Focusing on the gloss, however, erases one of the most interesting — and crucial — elements of the end product: you. Whether you work in a visual or textual medium, there’s always room to show the person behind the work — sometimes literally.
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Artist Rommel Joson, based in Manila, recently participated in an exhibition at the University of the Philippines’ Vargas Museum. Seeing the artwork on its own would’ve been interesting in its own right, but here Rommel chose to start with an image of the drawing coming into being, which not only adds an element of physicality to the post, but also anchors a very specific point of view.
Teach what you’ve learned
Some website niches lend themselves very easily to giving instructions based on personal experience: every recipe blog out there is, at its core, teaching its audience how to do something they hadn’t tried before. (When you’re Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman, you also infuse the teaching with an irresistible storytelling voice.) But even topics that aren’t driven by hands-on, step-by-step instructions come with ways to give an insider’s look at your craft.
Case in point: to celebrate the publication of their book, Trans Like Me, author and trans activist C. N. Lester shared a post with five takeaways from the blog-to-book process, including many insights that could apply to anyone who’s just starting out in a competitive industry or field:
Despite not seeing myself writing a work of popular non-fiction, I was fully convinced (in 2010) that I would be a published author by, say, 2014. I had been writing fiction for years, and had had interest from agents since my teens. I had a novel ready to sell, and was sure that my academic gender tome would be ready before long.
If I’d have known that it would take another seven years, I would have been utterly overwhelmed by that odious mixture of blocked ambition and total sense of failure familiar to so many of us. It would have crushed me. And yet, of course — obviously — I couldn’t have written this book that I’m so proud of without all of those seven years — sense of failure and all.
Everything I’ve done in that time has helped me to become a better writer — everything.
Compare a “before” to an “after”
A creative process is just that — a sequence of steps that leads to your final work. There’s something deeply satisfying (for both creators and their audience) about seeing the stark difference between the starting point and the finish line.
The makeover images above are from oh.eight.oh.nine., the website of Australian designer Tarina Lyell. In her post, she shows the dramatic transformation she brought to a teenager’s bedroom — from drab and awkward to bright and streamlined.
While people who work in design, architecture, or DIY might have more obvious examples of before-and-after processes to share with their readers, any creator starts out with something hazy and unformed and ends up with a tangibly different object. If you’re a writer, show how a line of prose evolved over time. A photographer can highlight the finishing touches they added to their portrait. A freelance tutor can show the progress a student has made since they first started taking lessons (if you go that route, make sure to get permission from the person involved, of course).
There’s always an element of vulnerability to the act of opening up and taking strangers behind the scenes, exposing the spinning (and sometimes creaking) wheels that power your creative engines. But when you do so, you not only tell a compelling story — you also give a reader another reason to care.
How do you engage your visitors in your work? Share your insight in the comments.
This is a great tip! I often wonder what type of behind the scenes things to share. But do find that my readers respond to behind the scene sharing. This confirms that I should definitely be doing more of that. Thanks!
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very great article for new writers just like me 🙂 loved it!! thankyou for sharing.
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Always open to tips like this! Thanks a lot! As newbies at all levels and always in need of inspiration, this is exactly what we need to move forward! Thx again!
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Wow this is great! Gave me some great ideas!
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I definitely enjoyed reading your article, it has some great points I can use to further my knowledge as a new blogger. What advice would give someone who wants to show readers multiple sides of me on a personal level, although my blog focus is on something else?
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Ultimately, while people might first discover your blog through a specific topic you focus on, it’s your voice and the community you build around your blog (and between your blog and others’) that people will come back for. So showing different sides, as you put it, is entirely fine!
There are a couple of things you can do to impose a bit more order in case you’re concerned about things feeling random for your readers. You could create specific categories for the topics you cover, and link to each (or the most important ones) in your site’s main menu — that’s called category pages:
https://wordpress.com/support/category-pages/
You could also develop a regular editorial calendar, which would allow followers to know what to expect when — for example, devote a specific day each week for a more personal post on a changing topic, outside the main “programming” of your blog.
You can read more about these and several other ideas in this post: https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2015/01/15/many-topics-one-blog/
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Thanks for the extra tips and expanding on the topic. On top of all this I think you have tons of great content on Blogging U that is unfortunately often overlooked by new bloggers. Here is a link for anyone who doesn’t know about it: https://wordpress.com/dailypost/blogging-university/
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Thank you, I’m new here and appreciate all I can learn.
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Great advice although I am not a new blogger some of your links will be helpful to me as I go from WP free to WP self hosted so thank you 🙂
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Great ideas. I’m going to try a few.
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great post – very helpful
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Thanks for this post. I once wanted to share the story of why I rejected a collection of shoe samples worth about $20,000 because they did not meet the standards of our brand. However, we were advised against publishing the story as that would make us look unprofessional. I just wanted to be open about what was going on with CC Shoes. Thanks again.
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This just reinforces the idea that people are more interested in the journey and not the destination. Thank you!
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Edit: Which I think is a good thing, by the way!
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great article. thank you for sharing. xx
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Thanks for that.
As an artist, I often struggle to get the sociable bit. I make things, but I don’t now how to engage an audience, that is faceless.
If I was in my day job, I would be just dandy, because you have all the visual verbal ques.
I suppose, I have never thought I have a voice with words. (as I am Dyslexic)
My visuals have always been my communication. So to me, I have no idea… how to get people involved, invested and more importantly interested in what i do???
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Keep up the good work
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Great ideas, thank you!
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That’s a really interesting and clever idea.
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Very crisp points you got here. I will definitely be thinking about how to add more behind-the-scenes features to blog for quite a while now. …. I really like the way you wrote this.
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Great idea 👍
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Thanks for this reminder to blog about *how* I do what I do. Over the years, my poetry writing process has evolved to, now, include three notebooks, switching between each book as I the draft poem takes shape. I’ve just blogged about it and am now engaging with new people on social media. I’d forgotten that this interests people (it interests me!). I needed this reminder, so, thanks! 🙂
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I really enjoyed this post. As a fairly new blogger (1 year and counting) I get the best responses from my illustrative posts. They are also the posts requiring the most work (in terms of photography if nothing else) so I often take the easy road out. My challenge will be to craft more articles ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’ going forward.
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It’s great. As I read the article, I have come to understand it and it motivate me to keep writing. Thank you. Btw, I’m also a newbie that is a lot to learn from.
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This is great. I should try it. I’m beginning to see how my readers can enjoy learning how to produce an e-book, for example. Thanks for this post.
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As a tour guide and travel blogger, I try to engage my audience in the planning of a trip, from the different bookings to the books I have to study before a new trip. The options are many 🙂
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this is a tricky one for me. because I’m a wedding planner it’s all about my knowledge. so, I have to walk the tightrope between sharing knowledge publicly to show that I *have* the knowledge to guide couples through planing their wedding, without giving everything away for free, since it’s my knowledge that I’m selling.
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All good ideas, I have done before and after. I don’t think my audience is big enough yet. But I am not giving up, still growing.
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What thoughtful advice! Thank you!
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great ideas 🙂
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