Blogging to Get Remembered

“You can always get attention by being the loudest in the room,” admits Meredith Fineman in her book Brag Better, but being loud while lacking strategy will do more harm than good. There are ways to get remembered, Fineman teaches, by describing your personal brand in ways that earn respect and recognition. True showmanship, she says, means showcasing what you’ve done in a way that feels fun and true to you.

Better bragging better begins with making a list of facts about yourself and your successes, Fineman teaches. Learn to be loud, proud, and strategic by:

• Using super power words
• Avoiding invisibility
• Avoiding verbal qualifiers
• Considering your audience

Brant Pindivic, author of the book The 3-Minute Rule, speaks about ways to consider your audience: “To succeed, you must be able to capture and hold your audience’s attention with only the quality and flow of your information,” The audience must be able to:

1. conceptualize your idea
2. contextualize it (understand how it will benefit them)
3. actualize it (engage with interest)

One tip that Pinvidic offers to sales people is particularly worth noting by blog content writers: “It’s not just who you pitch to, it’s who they have to pitch to, that matters.” How will readers rationalize their decision to buy when speaking to others?

Better bragging is about shining a light on the work you’ve done, having confidence in yourself and your voice, and speaking up, Fineman stresses. At Say It For You, there are three models of business blog posts that we’ve found are particularly helpful in getting readers to remember the content and its provider:

1. Helpful how-to hints
Find complementary businesses or practices, asking those business owners or practitioners for tips they can offer for you to pass along to your readers. The best tips and hints, I added, are related to some a topic currently trending in the news and practical.

2. Personal stories
Research done by questioning Stanford University graduates showed that shows that graduates were more likely to remember commencement speakers who told stories. In one experiment, students were asked to give one-minute speeches that contained three statistics and one story. Only 5 percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63 percent remembered the stories.

3. Fascinating tidbits of information
When business owners or practitioners present little-known facts about their own business or profession, those tend to be remembered. If you notice a “factoid” circulating about your industry, a common misunderstanding by the public about the way things really work in your field, a little-known tidbit can reveal the truth behind the myth.

Learn to do better bragging in your blog!