As someone who is somewhat new to the world of blogging, I found myself questioning many of the great blog posts. I assume that the blog community deems an article “great” when it gets more than 50 tweets or a lot of LinkedIn shares. The articles had great information, but there was one thing I couldn’t get past—the cheese. The majority of these articles had a long introduction that was cheesy and then a conclusion that summed up the cheesy metaphor. While some articles were clever and creative, I found the majority to be cheesy.
I continued to write my own blog posts and as time went on, I found that I was beginning to sound cheesy. I wanted something original, so I would force some extended metaphor onto the article. It started to seem as though this type of language was the mark of a good blog, so I began to adopt this tone. This led me to wonder: Have all the other bloggers done the same? Does anyone really like a cheesy sounding blog post, or is that just expected?
I decided to weigh the pros and the cons of the issue to see if the annoyance is actually beneficial:
“Gotta’ Love the Cheese” Pros
- Grabs Attention – If someone sees a picture of a cute dog, they are much more likely to stop and read the article than if they saw a picture of a bar graph. Getting the attention of readers is the hardest part, so although the article may have nothing to do with a cute dog, the cheesiness makes sense.
- Creative – It can be very difficult to come up with a clever metaphor for a topic that is typically boring. Even though you may sound cheesy, your article will be more creative than the rest. This will help your article stand out and get extra publicity.
- Entertainment – If you want to write an informative article about postage meters, for example, chances are the material will be somewhat boring. A little joke to lighten up the article might help keep readers on the page and have them coming back for more.
“I Can’t Stand It” Cons:
- Audience – If you’re writing about something serious, your target audience is most likely serious. For this reason, trying to spice up something straight forward may actually annoy those who actually want to read the article. They will see it as filler and a waste of time. You should be focusing on your target audience, not capturing the attention of any reader on the Internet.
- Credibility – If you spend most of your article discussing a cheesy metaphor and only a little bit of the article discussing real information, you will lose credibility. If you have nothing to say about a topic, you should probably be writing about something else.
- Confusing – It’s much more difficult to write a cohesive article if you’re worrying about being creative with different examples and comparisons. Sometimes words make sense to the writer, but the reader cannot follow. If this happens, then you will lose your readers entirely—and they probably won’t come back.
Whether or not you want your blog to be cheesy is entirely up to you. There have not been any studies about whether or not this creative tactic works or does not work for the majority of readers, so it’s tough to say which is “better.” I personally think that cheesy lines and metaphors are a waste of my time, but then again I just wrote “Gotta’ Love the Cheese” Pros. When you blog as often as I do, it’s hard to turn it off.
Do you like it when blogs use cheesy titles and metaphors?
Photo Credit: blog.fooducate.com
Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to document scanning. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for Resource Nation.
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