Take Care of Your Shoes

As many as four buyers will intentionally take note of the condition of your shoes during a sales call, Sam Deep and Lyle Sussman of the Sandler Sales Institute caution. If prospects see worn or broken shoelaces, or worn heels and soles, they’ll lose confidence that you’ll pay proper attention to the details of their order. For blog content writers, there’s a lesson here…..

Realistically, online searchers who land on your blog are already interested in and have a need for the type of products or services you offer. The opening lines of your blog content then can offer “signs” to those readers that they’ve come to the right place:

• You and your employees have the training and expertise to be able to deliver the desired advice, service, and products.
• You’ve kept up with what others are saying on your topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing in your industry.
• As a business owner or practitioner, you’ve stood by your work.
• Your blog has used images, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos to add interest and evoke emotion.
• The layout is targeted towards your target audience (Are they deal seekers looking for bargains on products and services they already use? Are they enthusiasts looking for information to support their hobbies and beliefs?).

But what about your blog’s “shoes”??

As a corporate blogging trainer, my favorite recommendation to both business owners and the freelance blog content writers they hire to bring their message to customers is this: Prevent blog content writing “wardrobe malfunctions”, including grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors. As Writer’s Digest Yearbook points out, unconventional or incorrect grammar may be seen as an indication of carelessness or ignorance. The result? Readers may take the content itself less seriously. At its worst, failure to use proper punctuation and sentence structure in blog posts can make content difficult to comprehend.

“It’s one thing to lose a sale because you can’t solve the buyer’s problem,” Deep and Sussman stress. “It’s quite another to fail because you didn’t fit the image of a professional salesperson.”

The message for content marketing professionals? Take care of your “shoes”, meaning the details of your blog posts!