By Vidas Pinkevicius (get free updates of new posts here)
Do you act differently in front of other people? I know I do sometimes. I pretend to be wiser, more experienced. This is caused by the fear of getting laughed at and ridiculed in public. But people with integrity act as they say. They don’t pretend to be better or worse in front of others. For bloggers it means telling the truth, whatever ugly or beautiful it is. In other words, bloggers should write from their experiences. Not to appear like experts or gurus but be themselves. “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything,” wrote Mark Twain. This is the best strategy in blogging. If you lack experience in your niche, go get it. Read a lot, think a lot, and write a lot. Study and practice. Every day. With time you will gain this much needed experience. But most importantly, you will be telling the truth about the things you are interested in. When I taught people how to learn to sight-read on the organ, I went and studied for 9 months J.S. Bach’s “The Art of Fugue”. It wasn’t easy but it was well worth the effort because I then knew what does it take to sit at least for 15 minutes a day and play a piece once through. Tired or sick, I did it. I saw the ups and downs of the process. I met some obstacles on my way to this goal. I wrote about them too. Then I was able to teach others what I learned. I once played a concert of organ improvisations where the listeners were the group of tourists from Germany. As I often do in such events, I chose to close this concert with the German National Anthem. I thought it would be really nice for people to hear their beloved melody played on the organ. After the concert the guide of the group came up to me and asked, if I knew there were a few people from Switzerland who were quite offended by the German National Anthem. I felt really embarrassed. I should have done more research on the listeners. But it was a good lesson for me. Even though I made a mistake like this, I wrote a blog post about this whole situation. It turned out my readers were quite grateful I shared with them this sensitive subject so they could learn from my mistakes too. So if you want to be a respected blogger, it’s important to be honest, tell the truth and share your experiences. Yes, you might appear not as perfect, as you want to be. Others might see the mistakes you made. But you know what? The person who fails the most, wins. Are you a blogger? How do you apply integrity to your blog?
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