Infuse Your Content Marketing with Freudenfruede

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“Finding pleasure in another person’s good fortune is what social scientists call freudenfreude,” Juli Fraga writes in Reader’s Digest, “describing the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds even if it doesn’t directly involve us. Freudenfreude can “foster resistance, improve life satisfaction, and help people cooperate during a conflict”.

When it comes to content marketing, it might appear that praising or even recognizing the accomplishments of a competitor is the last thing any business owner or professional practitioner would want to do in their blog content.  Yet, competitor-focused content can be some of the most profitable you’ll ever publish, Ramona Aukhraj of IMPACT writes, because prospective buyers need to know you’re aware they have other options, and that you can be trusted to  have their best interests in mind. (A side benefit, IMPACT adds, might be that, in writing content about competitors, you’re using keywords that might drive traffic to competitors’ sites!)

Alexander Chua of Kalungi.com agrees that, specifically with B2B blogging, there are good reasons to mention competitors, including showcasing your own confidence, controlling the conversation, and possibly generating mentions of you by those competitors.: Most important, Chua says, is that you’re providing value to your readers.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking, while all these posts mentioned valid and very practical reasons for referring to competitors, none suggested anything approaching the possibility of achieving pleasure at learning about or recognizing competitors’ achievements. The high road is the one to take in blog marketing strategy and tactics development,  we try to always remember at Say It For You. As Bing Crosby used to croon, “Accentuate the positive…latch on to the affirmative.”

Where content writers might find – and share with readers, that feeling of “freudenfeude”, I believe, is in celebrating the combined success in an industry or professional field. Your blog becomes a way to educate leads on industry trends and developments, informing readers about “what’s-going-on-and-how-do-we-fit-in”, celebrating how far we (as an industry or profession) have come in terms of both technology and human understanding.

Freudenfreude – it’s all about the “We”.

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Content to Win Search, Not the Lottery

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“There’s no shaking it. Your chances of winning the lottery are extremely slim.” The Associated Press patiently explained after the Mega Millions jackpot had climbed to more than a billion dollars, the largest in U.S. lottery history.” (Since the article was published, someone in Florida did, in fact, win the jackpot.)

There’s a long list of rare events that are more likely than winning the lottery, the AP author explains, including the 1 in 15,000 odds of being struck by lightning once in your lifetime . In fact, it’s about four times as likely that you die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery! (Depressing facts to all of us ever-hopeful lottery ticket buyers, to be sure.) Still, the article itself holds a valuable content writing lesson, which is that one very important function served by a blog is putting things into perspective.

When you think about it, the typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are, and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers. In other words, it’s the function of the blog content to give readers a deeper perspective with which to process the information offered.. For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?” The facts need to be translated into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action.

Blogging helps you build authority in your industry, WP Beginner explains. “It is harder to prove your expertise and authority on a subject if all you have is a five-page website selling your products/services. Adding a blog allows you to regularly publish content on topics related to your industry. This helps you establish authority and win users’ trust.

As content writers, we understand that online readers have access to more technically detailed sources than our blog posts.  Our job, though, is to help those readers (and that includes B&B prospects of our marketing blogs) make sense out of the ocean of available information.

In blogging for business, we’re trying to “win search” and win hearts, not overcome enormous odds and win the lottery. But to truly overcome the still substantial odds against getting noticed, content writers must focus on putting avalanches of information into focused perspective.

 

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M’splaining Yourself in Your Content

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“We might even be the smartest people in the room,” writes Matthew Grob of Mensa, “but does that always mean we should always be compelled to demonstrate that?” Mensans probably do more m’splaining (boasting of their brain power) than most, Grob admits, but “we might not always be correct, factually or politically.” Given the options in any conversational situation, he advises his fellow Mensans: “select the one that avoids m’splaining.”

One concern many new clients of Say It For You express to me is that they don’t want to come across as boastful in their blog content. At the same time, they know they need to convey the reasons prospects ought to choose them over their competition. Let the facts do the boasting, is my advice. The whole secret of content marketing is that, rather than running traditional ads for your brand of hats, or vitamins, or travel, you provide lots of information on the history of hats, on why vitamins are good for you, and about exciting places to go on safari.  Consumers interested in your subject, but who never even knew your name, will come to see you as an information resource.

When you think about it, blog posts are like “flip-flopped” job interviews, in which the blog reader “candidate” is interviewing the provider. Just as in a face-to-face interviews, those searchers read what you put out there in your blog posts and evaluate that content in light of their own needs.  Subtle “m’splaining” is needed to demonstrate ways in which the provider stands out from the competition.

But, “boasting” isn’t going to do the trick, and language such as “innovative solutions”, “great customer service”, “world-class”, or “game-changing”, as David Meerman Scott points out, can be perceived as exaggeration. Instead, conveying the special “flavor” and personality of your brand and your people is precisely what blogging for business needs to contribute to your overall marketing strategy.

With the right kind of “boasting”, business owners and practitioners can project the kind of confidence that inspires trust and, ultimately, drives sales.

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Content Writers Can Take Inspiration From Big-Hitter Bios

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The Start Your Own Business Magazine 2023’s list of “things big-hitters in business have in common” is one blog content writers might want to keep taped to their computer screens, I couldn’t help thinking…

1. Big-Hitters are perfectionists. Steve Jobs obsessed over small details.
Successful blogging for business is all about detail.  Corporate websites provide  basic information about a company’s products or a professional’s services, but the business blog content is there to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to that information by filling in the finer details. In fact, details are what people tend to remember long after reading a piece.

2. They stay on task. Warren Buffett invests for the long haul.
In training sessions, one of the main lessons I need to convey to would-be blog content writers is that the real challenge in blogging is sustainability, even more than the content creation. “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website. It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active,” Corey Eridon of Hubspot says.

3. They have courage. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to work on Facebook.
At least some of our readers already know quite a bit about our subject.  What they’re looking for is new perspective on the subject. People are going to want to do business with people who have the courage to offer strong recommendations and opinions in a blog.

4. They do the right thing. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ended dealings with China (the Chinese wanted to censor search results.)
As business blog content writers, we can work to inspire readers to have three types of trust in the business providers and professional practitioners who hire us: a) trust in their know-how, b) trust in their ethics, and c) trust in their empathy and caring for customers.

5. They think differently. Apple’s Steve Wozniack was the innovator, designing the Macintosh.
Online searchers will undoubtedly have heard some of the information you’re providing before.  It’s your unique slant or innovative approach that’s likely to elicit that all-important “Never thought of it that way!” response.  Your blog post is a way to show readers that this is no cookie-cutter company they’re about to meet. I always advise clients to use their blog to provide information – particularly new information – related to their field.

Content writers can take inspiration from big-hitter business people.

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5 Tips for Fledgling Entrepreneurs and Content Writers of Every Ilk

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Fascinated by the “Online Impact” section of Start Your Own Business Magazine, I found five recommendations that are perfect for blog content writers:

1. “People respond to a business with a human side, so don’t be afraid to express your own flair.”
One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we translate clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms.  People tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

2. “Be conversational. Forget formalities.”
At Say It For You, I often explain to clients and to newbie blog writers that that blogs, unlike brochures, client newsletters, online magazines, and websites, are short and concise, less crafted and more casual and conversational than other marketing pieces.  It’s perfectly all right to take a thoughtful, serious approach to your topic.  Just write as if you were having an actual conversation, writes Paul Gillin, author of Secrets of Social Media Marketing.

3. “Do not take credit for content that does not belong to you.”
The most common way we cite our sources (whether it be an article or a website) within our blogs is by paraphrasing and hyperlinking back to the page where the information originated (precisely what I’ve already done several times in this very blog post). Vervante lists three instances where attributing content to a source is needed: a) You’re actually quoting someone else. b) You’re using statistics you did not collate yourself. c) You’re using ideas that aren’t your own.

4. “Storytelling is your secret weapon.”
Blog posts will be at their most effective when presenting stories, where the stories themselves become calls to action for readers. You can use stories to explain what you do and whom you’ve been able to help. Blog marketing through stories not only helps online visitors feel only understood by you, but lets them feel they understand where you’re coming from as well.

5. “If your text sounds strange or stilted because there are two many key words, visitors will be turned off.”
“Two of the most widespread mistakes made by bloggers are failing to integrate new keywords into their posts and not getting rid of keywords that are no longer valuable,” Catherine Smith of PhD Centre explains. Searchers use words and phrases to hook up with you, but keyword-overstuffed blog posts are uncomfortable to read and can make your content look like spam to readers.

 

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