In Blogging for Business, Start With the End in Mind

If anybody knows about crafting stories, it’s humor speaker Jeff Fleming. Start with the end in mind, Fleming advised us at the National Speakers Association of Indiana meeting just a week and a half ago. Why? Deciding, up-front, what your point is going to be allows you to organize your story for maximum impact and surprise.

Maximum impact, of course, is what every blog content writer aims to achieve for her business, practice, or organization. As I listened to that talk on ”Humor Secrets for Improving Presentations”, I couldn’t help sifting for secrets that might apply to the blogging world. Since our primary tool is the printed word, we can’t use all the voice variations and body language techniques Fleming has mastered. The impact needs to come from engaging with the reader’s desired results –from the get-go.

Organization counts for a lot.  There are three goals my Say It For You contract writers are out to accomplish on behalf of each client:

• Provide information that is valuable to readers and which satisfies the needs that brought them online to find answers
   
• Demonstrate the particular expertise and history of the company or the professional practitioner and how they are different from their competitors
   
• Provide a clear navigation path that brings readers closer to becoming clients and customers of that business or practice

Of those three, it’s absolutely essential for the first to happen quickly, so that readers are assured they've come to the right place.

“All of us speak on hope,” Jeff Fleming observed, knowing that, in our speakers’ group, most were content speakers, not humorists.  “No matter what the topic, listeners are hoping to have a better life in some way.”  In blog content writing, I believe, it’s the “pow!” opening lines that engage the reader by appealing to that hope.  If we fail at the “pow”, readers may not stick around for us to tell them the “how”.

Funny or not, in each business blog post, start your writing with the end in mind!