Ethics govern various domains of life, and they stem from equally diverse sources. People learn their ethics from their religious backgrounds and from their parents; others develop these moral values from their school environments or their friends. As a result, ethics spill into the work environment. Ethics are important in all different fields, including blogging.
Establishing a Voice
Ethics should be infused into your blog from the very first post because doing so helps you to establish your voice. Letting people know who you are and what you stand for will help to craft a target audience. People will see a high ethical standard on your blog, and they will want to read more. In fact, you may want to include a note in a separate area of the blog that lets individuals know you are dedicated to the field of ethics, and you can lay out the different ethics that you follow.
Sounding Credible
No matter what the topic of your blog is, you want to sound as though you are an authority on the matter. When you start to infuse gossip and rumors, or other untrue information into your blog, you take away from that sense. Instead of seeing your blog as a source of information, people are going to view it as a rag. They will look at it the same way that they do gossip magazines, and they will not turn to your blog when they want to read relevant and intriguing information about the topic.
Avoiding Offensive Statements
When you start to use hateful language or to promote unethical practices in your blog, you open the door to truly offending people. While you cannot always know exactly what is going to affect different people, as a blogger, you need to have a fairly strong sense of what is considered offensive in the world of readers. When you offend people, a pretty good chance exists that they are not going to be coming back to your blog. They are going to seek out a source of information that is more aligned with their own beliefs and values.
Offering Inappropriate Advice
People turn to blogs for all different types of reasons. Some of these individuals simply want to be entertained, and others want to learn how to tackle a particular issue in life, how to produce a new dish for dinner or how to plan an elaborate vacation with the family. If you offer unethical advice, or you do not have the best interests of your readers in-mind, then people are going to fail in their attempts to succeed. Once they cannot trust your blog has a reputable source of advice, they are going to search out information of a higher quality.
Competing with Other Businesses
You want to maintain a high ethical standard for personal reasons. Going against values, morals and ethics is not a wise idea because you are, essentially, harming the soul of your business. However, from a business standpoint, you should also think about how an unethical blog can draw customers away from you. The ability to compete with other businesses is what keeps you afloat, especially in a world where new marketing campaigns are rolled out at a rapid rate. A blog that has unethical values in it is unlikely to be able to keep up with the competition.
Clearly, using proper ethics in blogging is extremely important to the success of your business. When you do not know how to infuse a high sense of morals into your blogging, readers are going to start to head to other blogs that align with their values.
Tell us how ethics helped you with your blogging career in the comments area below.
