Blog Like You Have an Illustrator

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As a professional illustrator, Ebony Glenn offers advice to book authors in a Writer’s Digest piece. Your story, Glenn says, will help the illustrator pair art with text.

Have a compelling theme
To get an illustrator’s wells of creativity overflowing, Glenn says, have a compelling theme. The theme is your story’s North Star. If you have too many poorly defined themes, it will be a challenge for readers to connect with you. Readers need to be able to find the why to your text.

In a sense, focus is the point in blog content writing. At Say It For You, we firmly believe in the Power of One, which means one message per post, with a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business, geared towards one narrowly defined target audience.

Provide resources
Provide your illustrator with resources and notes if your story requires additional research (it’s about a historical figure or takes place in a foreign setting), Glenn tells picture book authors. In blog content, links are part of the resources you’re providing for readers, Amy Lupold Bair says in Blogging for Dummies. At Say It For You, we see collating information from different sources and then organizing that information in a different way provides great value to readers.

Use art to arouse curiosity and evoke emotion
It is the job of the illustrator to engage readers with their imagery, Ebony Glenn admits, enriching the content with intrigue and stimulating curiosity. While words are the most important part of blogging for business, visuals, whether in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, add interest and evoke emotion.

Personally, in blog marketing, I like clip art. While these commercial images are not original to my client’s business or practice and they don’t actually depict a practice’s or a business’ products services, colleagues, or customers, often clip art is more effective than anything else in capturing concepts, helping me as the blog content writer express the main idea I’m articulating in a post.

Read, read, read
Asked for a top piece of advice for aspiring illustrators of all ages, picture book mentor Kim Rogers answers, “Read, read, read some more. It’s the best way to see how books are written, which ones work and which ones don’t.”

Ditto for blog content writers, I’ve been teaching at Say It For You. In order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing. You need to keep up with what others are saying on your topic (What’s in the news? What problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to your industry or profession?) You need a constant flow of ideas.

So, no, you may not have an illustrator, but keep these valuable tips in mind in order to keep producing focused and inspiring marketing content.

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Don’t Know Your Tools? Know Your Gems!

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The way Jeff Bullas sees it, “Blogging is a platform for self development,” People start blogs, Bulas says, for all sorts of reasons – to educate, to have a voice, to make money. Content writing drives you to learn , to document, and to connect. It is your passion that will act as your guiding light, helping you find and connect with “your tribe”, even with no technical expertise. In terms of connecting, Bullas emphasizes, you must understand your audience’s fears, dreams, problems, and challenges, learning whom they respect in your niche.

But what about that “technical expertise” piece, including setting up the blog, choosing a domain name, selecting a host, and securing the site? Recalling the beginnings of Say It For You, now in its sixteenth year of content writing, I’m reminded of a favorite saying of an attorney friend of mine: “Don’t know your tools? Know your gems.” In other words, the advice I’d offer new content writers is this: Call on advisers who can help with the technology piece while you focus on the messaging.

Meanwhile, needless to say, the technology piece isn’t standing still, but changing and developing at an astounding pace. Still, as Emily Nix of Nectafy observes, “excellent content requires a human touch”.”Tools are nice,” Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media remarks in a Start Your Own Business magazine piece, alluding to all the buzz about artificial intelligence. “but we’ve had tools for years to build houses, yet we haven’t completely automated house building.”.”Despite the fact that ChatGPT can develop conversational AI tools, it cannot take the place of human content creators”, the Med Responsive digital marketing agency believes.

As content writers, our primary function must be learning all we can, not about the “tools” and mechanics of the internet, but about our target audience (or, in the case of Say It For You content writers, the target audience for each of our clients)..When it comes to the technical aspects of delivering that content, we’ve turned to technology maven “gems” for ongoing advice and guidance, while our writers focus on the message.

“Don’t know your tools? Know your gems,” is the byword.

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Is Content Marketing For Performance or Brand?

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“Over the past 20 years, performance marketing has become the dominant approach , referring to paying third party channels to generate sales, leads, and click through direct mail, search engines, and social media sites,” a recent Harvard Business Review article states.. But, the authors question, “Is performance marketing crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer awareness of, attitudes towards, and affinity for their companies’ brands?” In fact, the authors relate, at the Cannes Lions Int’l Festival of Creativity, th authors relate, the issue most voted for as important to discuss was managing the tension between brand and performance marketing.

As content marketers at Say It For You, we work with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for the blogs we ghostwrite. In a very real sense, the very process of deciding what to include in a post is one of self-discovery, with the creation of content being part of the process of inventing and reinventing the business brand.

The performance marketing piece of the puzzle, meanwhile, involves the use of keyword phrases. SEO is the practice of optimizing content to clearly define what your webpage is and what information it is providing, explains Elena Terenteva in the SEMrush blog. Some areas that need to be optimized, Terenteva explains, include page titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, and internal links. But should blogs be built around these performance marketing tools? .Using keywords in a natural way in y our post is good for SEO, web influencer Neil Patel says, “but don’t overdo it”. “The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone.  Nowadays, quality content is king,” says Seattle freelance writer Carol Tice.

At Say It For You, we’ve found, our business owner or professional practitioner clients are interested in is spreading the word about what they know, what they know how to do, and what they sell. In that sense, the content writing effort is meant to “perform”. But, in content writing training sessions, I’m continuing to emphasize the verbal, not the viral. That means we’re writing marketing blogs not to attract the attention of gazillions of readers, but to attract prospects of the right kind. Blog posts are essentially about reaffirming the company’s or the practice’s brand.

On the other hand, customers don’t want to feel like they are being told a “brand story”; they want to tell themselves the story,” Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business authors Cooper and Gruntzner advise. The goal in blogging for business is creating loyal customers who have an emotional engagement with your brand.

Is content marketing performance or brand? It’s both.

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To Plot or Not to Plot in Creating Blog Content

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one sentence speech in blogs

 

“I rarely start writing without knowing what I’m going to (try to) write,” confides Simon Van Booey in Writer’s Digest. “I know the story when the pen hits the page, but how to write, the tone, approach, pace – that’s what the deskwork is about.”

Advice to students offered in the Research & Education Association’s QuickAccess laminated writing guide is perfect for content writers of all types: Before you begin writing an essay or writing a research paper, draft a working thesis statement.” That thesis statement should contain the subject of the essay and your opinion on that subject, REA explains.

With the general purpose of any content marketing piece being to promote a product, service, or cause, content writers never “start writing without knowing what they’re going to try to write”. The “thesis” of any individual blog post takes the form of a one-sentence declaration of a fact or opinion that the content writer will set about fleshing out, illustrating or “proving”. And, while business blogs ought to be far more conversational in style than college essays, “plotting” the posts forces writers to focus, which translates into increased impact for the finished piece.

Thankfully, the “thesis” itself can become part of the post. At Say It For You, I’m fond of saying to blog content writers that their task is to keep the reader engaged with valuable, personal, and relevant information, beginning with the “downbeat”, which is what I call the first sentence of each post. The thesis, itself, though can appear anywhere in the blog post, reinforcing the main idea of the message.

“Plotting” an editorial calendar for a marketing blog makes a lot of sense, since, as marketing strategist Alex Honeysett says, “The introduction of social media has forced us to say things too quickly and efficiently…but some topics and musings need more than a few sentences to be fully explored.” On a blog, Honeysett explains, “you’ll have more room to expand on those thoughts.”

From a general content writing standpoint, while we never start writing “without knowing what we’re going to try to write”, since the basic “plotline” has been provided by our client, our task becomes exploring different “templates” to use in presenting the information in ways that will resonate with readers.

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Using Phraseology to Pique Interest

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Some of our most popular phrases have a long history, Medievalists.net points out. Since, at Say It For You, we find “tidbits” of information very useful in generating ideas for business content marketing, here are a few of our favorites from their list of ten::

The apple of one’s eye:
The pupil of the eye was thought to be an apple-shaped solid. Since the delicate pupil of the eye is essential for vision, it needs to be cherished and protected.

In creating content that connects with your audience, consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but what your target readers are reading and watching – what do they feel “protective” about?

Baker’s dozen
In the middle ages, since bakers had a reputation for selling underweight loaves, legislation was put in place to prevent cheating. To make sure that they did not sell underweight bread, bakers started to give an extra piece of bread away with every loaf, and a thirteenth loaf with every dozen.

I remind content writers that blogging about unusual ways your products or services have been applied in different situations is good way to capture interest in posts. Tel them about the benefits you offer, sure, but what are some of the extra, unexpected benefits to your customers and clients?

Playing devil’s advocate
An official used to be appointed by the Roman Catholic church to argue against the proposed canonization of a saint by bringing up all unfavorable information, so false rumors could be dispelled.

While you want to shine light on your special expertise and on your particular slant on the work you do, it’s important to address any misperceptions or real issues that have arisen in the company’s past, and how those have now been set to right. .

By hook or by crook
There was a medieval law about collecting firewood. Peasants were allowed to take oly what they could cut by using their reaper’s bill-hooks or shepherd’s crooks.

One thing I suggest stressing in blog posts is best business practices.  Once you’ve been “found”, the goal changes to helping the online readers get comfortable with the way you do business – not by “hook or crook”, but maintaining high standards of quality and honesty..

In content marketing, it’s always a good idea to use phraseology from the past to pique interest right now!

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