The Magic Ingredient: Humor in a Blog
You’ve sat down with a vanilla mocha-frappa-1,000calorie-achino in your favorite coffee shop. You have your adorable new netbook with the customized leapord-skin skin. And best of all, you have an entire hour to burn. Caffeinated, Customized you has just enough time to write the blog post you’ve been thinking about all week….the story of your first apartment hunt.
Goodness knows, it’s a great story. In fact, it’s one of the stories you share on first dates because it’s just that interesting. Your fingers fairly fly as you relate the details of the circled classified ads, the walk up the steps to the fourteenth place in as many days. The long wait after the first doorbell ring. The even longer wait after the second ring. Then the still-hopeful feeling you felt as the door finally opened. Finally, the punchline of the whole thing when who should be standing in that threshold but Billy Ray Cyrus. Yep…Achy Breaky himself. Dad of Miley. It would seem that Billy’s dad had a small apartment in Greenup that he rented out as a small real estate investment and Billy Ray sometimes escaped there between tenants to “get away from it all.” He happened to be there just the day you had scheduled your visit, so he and the rental agent were apparently enjoying some cold iced tea and awaiting the arrival of the next potential tenant who just happened to be…you.
It was a great story. A crowd pleaser. So when you finished the final words of your post on your new blog and sat back to watch the comments roll in you were a little surprised at the lack of fervor. You even shared the post on your favorite social networks, and got a few hits from Aunt Regina and your best friend from college, but then….nada.
What was WRONG with the blogosphere you wondered? WHAT could be more interesting than a good Billy Ray Cyrus anecdote??
The answer, if any of your potential readers were willing to take the time to tell you, is a Billy Ray Cyrus anecdote that has one magic ingredient in it. HUMOR. One of the key aspects of almost any successful blog is laughter. Whether you are writing about the mullet-king himself or detailing how to lay a brick foundation you will still never attract or retain readers without figuring out how to make them smile from behind their keyboards.
Besides being just more interesting to read, blogs that employ humor allow readers to identify with the author. Suddenly, you are laughing ALONG with the blog writer, and you understand him or her. Suddenly, the three minutes it took to read through the blog post were three minutes in your busy day that didn’t feel wasted. In fact, you might just come back to see if this person’s next post is just as rib-tickling!
So, it’s time to try that story one more time. This time, you won’t fail to leave out the small piece of apple peel you saw stuck to the back of Billy Ray’s pants as he turned to lead you down the hall or the nervous mouse-squeak of a laugh the rental agent eeked out each time Billy cracked a joke. From now on, you will remember that the only way to truly build a blog worth reading is to share your sense of humor in every single achy-breaky post.
If you are in the early months of your new blog, then you are likely still enjoying the writing process and getting your ideas “out there.” But unless you are growing your blog following, then your blog is still acting more like a private diary than a weblog. 
One of the most common complaints I hear from wannabe bloggers is…”I want to start a blog, but I just don’t know what to write about.” 
A really fun and exciting way to kick off a new blog is by hosting a giveaway. This can be as simple as asking people to comment on a specific post and then picking randomly from those chosen, or as complex as creating a skill-based contest that requires entrants to complete a task of some sort where you choose a winner based on your judgment. 
