Solve Problems In Your Blog

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Solve a problem, own the customer, sales trainers like to say.  Come to think about it, all the inventions that make our modern lives possible grew out of finding solutions to problems. Mental Floss Magazine reminds us of four examples.

Scroll back the 1830’s.  Elias Howe Jr.’s nightmare about cannibals attacking him resulted in his inventing the first automatic sewing machine. Howe not only became rich himself, but his invention played a big role in the Industrial Revolution. (The sewing machine needle was patterned after the cannibals’ spears, which had little holes at the tip.)

Sixty years after that, a traveling salesman named Gilette became annoyed at the inconvenience of sharpening his safety razor after every use.  Creating the first disposable razor made Glilette a millionaire.  Another problem solved.

Fast forward to 1948. As George DeMestral was preparing to take his wife to dinner, the zipper on her dress jammed.  Walking his dog in the woods a couple of weeks later, DeMestral noticed his pants covered with burrs.  Those tiny hooks that stuck to the threads of clothing gave the inventor the idea for Velcro. The millions DeMestral made on his patent meant, for many, never needing to wrestle with zippers again.

On a picnic in 1958, toolmaker Ermal Fraze realized he’d forgotten his "church key" and had no way of opening the canned beverage he’d brought along.  By next morning, Fraze had developed the tear-off ring pull for cans, and seven years later, 75% of American brewers were using nothing else for their beer.

Had business blogging been available to help these four gentlemen spread the word about the solution each had discovered, they might have realized their profits in a much shorter period of time and with much less effort.  That’s because people are online searching for answers to their problems or solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  If your business has been consistently posting content, those people are going to find you, because your posts provide the solutions they need.

Shawn O’Donaghue of the Central Indiana Women’s Business Center put it nicely:
"Successful business owners understand that the product or service they are selling is the answer to someone’s problem." 

Providing a powerful online "voice" to solutions to searchers’ problems is the essence of my work as a professional ghost blogger for business!
 

 

 

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More Ways To Blog For Business

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Sometimes I find my Say It For You blog posts taking on a "’Dear Rhoda’-advice-column cast.  (With 25 years of ‘Dear Rhoda’ financial advice columns under my belt, the format has a natural feel for advice on business blogging.)

Today, I thought I’d model the post after the "More Ways To Save" section in last week’s Indianapolis Star, which offered advice on smart grocery shopping and meal preparation.

Here are just a few of the food-related tips business owners can heed when it comes to blog marketing:

Stock up on items you’ll use.

(One customer bought 12 bottles of salad dressing at once, so she’d have it on hand for preparing various dishes.)

The blogging equivalent is to keep an "Ideas" folder.  Jot down any juicy word tidbits or clever sayings, clip articles from magazines, the newspaper, ads, brochures, billboards – anything you believe you’ll be able to later incorporate into a blog post.

Be flexible.

(One shopper first looks for which items are on sale, then plans her meals around those items.)

Bloggers need to be flexible, too, building posts around conversations with other bloggers and business people, and centered around news items and issues of the day. Suppose  you just read about Michell and Barak Obama’s theater date night in New York City. Relate remarks about what you sell or the services you provide to New York, big city life, married life, fashion, theater, babysitting, etc..

Develop some favorite websites.

(Cooks are advised to bookmark their favorite websites, so they can easily go back to find just the right recipe for either a family dinner at home or a big party.)

Business bloggers can do the same thing, bookmarking favorite sources of information on subjects that relate to their business, and favorite blogsites to link to. 

Repackage if necessary.

(If buying a ten-pound package of ground beef or other product saves money, go ahead and buy the larger size, advises the Star reporter, then rewrap into smaller packages you can save in the freezer for later meals.)

"Repackaging" is a way to get more out of your business blog, because the material you developed for your posts can be used for brochures, newsletters, e-books, and as text for video clips about your business. 

As I always say, "Your brand ‘r you in your blog!" Serve up valuable information and they will come!


 

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Blogs Can Carry Heavy Weights On Their Heads

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By the time they are young women, East African girls can carry up to 25% of their body weight on their heads, according to Don Vorhees, author of The Book of Totally Useless Information. The amazing thing is, those young women do this using no more energy than it would take to wear a straw hat.

I like to use this metaphor to illustrate some points about business blogging.  A small business owner’s or professional practitioner’s blogging efforts can have an effect on marketing results that is disproportionately larger than might seem possible from mere short, informal pieces of writing.

For business owners seeking to leverage their blog marketing efforts, it’s worth noting the secret behind the East African ladies’ carrying power: It’s their remarkable posture control, Vorhees points out.  "They form a rigid straight line between their vertebrae and pelvis."  With very little movement of the head, neck, or shoulders, their power is concentrated.  Westerners, Vorhees adds, tend to bob and dip when they walk, wasting a lot of energy.

Blogging is "leveraged" almost by definition.  Internet commentators David Verklin and Bernice Kanner (Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here) say blogging is part of "marketing to the moment of aperture", offering the right product or service at the right time before the right prospect. Because searchers arrive at the blog seeking information on exactly what you do, what you sell, or what you know, there’s a "rigid straight line" between the potential customer and your business!

At the same time, just as the East Africans maximize carrying power through focusing energy in a straight line, you can enhance the power of blog marketing through focusing each blog post on one central theme, then using key words to help direct traffic your way.

Blogging for business has a creative element to it, no doubt, as interesting, well-written content will engage readers and keep them coming back. Along with the art comes the science of blogging.  The science involves focusing on a theme and using key phrases to create that "pull marketing" power. 

The combination of art and science is the hallmark of East African basket-carrying and the hallmark of successful business blogging as well!


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Multi-Tasking For Blogs

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Multi-tasking is the big word around job interviews these days. Most small business owners find themselves wearing many hats and playing many roles in running their business. It’s important for entrepreneurs to use a “multi-tasking” approach when it comes to their marketing efforts as well.

As I work with business owners on their blog marketing strategy, I’m finding at the start of the conversation that most are already fully aware that blogging has become an indispensable part of any business tool kit. The only problem is that their efforts are being devoted to playing all those different  roles just to keep the business running, and so they lack the time and inclination (and sometimes, as my clients readily admit, the talent) to compose blog posts.

I want to share a true marketing story, recounted in Don Voorhees’ The Book of Totally Useless Information, about Blue Bonnet Margarine.  During World War II, butter was in short supply, and the Standard Brands company decided to add margarine to its product list, sponsoring a contest to name the new spread.  A company employee in Texas suggested naming the margarine after his state’s flower, the bluebonnet. That was the winning entry, but, as Vorhees goes on to explain, the company “didn’t use a bluebonnet flower for the logo but opted to use a blond woman wearing a blue bonnet”. They had re-purposed the name!

Remember that blogs can multi-task and re-purpose, too. There’s more than one important way in which small business owners’ or professional practitioners’ business blogging efforts can have a disproportionately large effect on their marketing results.  As professional website copywriter and blogger Matt Rouge puts it, "Blog posts contain valuable information about your business and your industry.  This information may be further used in email and print newsletters, white papers, brochures, and other media."

The blog can reflect different aspects of the business and different personalities. 
Whether you propose to do the blog writing by yourself, have your entire team participate, or collaborate with a professional ghost partner like me, the content in the blog posts will be a way of continually thinking through and reinventing your business brand.

Then, the material in those posts can be used to market your business offline as well as in the blogosphere.

 

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Federal Food Guidelines For Blogs

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In the U.S., processed foods are required to list ingredients on their labels, and the ingredients have to be listed in order of their weight in the final product. So, if tomatoes are listed first, that’s the main ingredient; if sugar heads the list of ingredients, that means there’s more sugar than any other substance in that product. It’s quite a simple concept, and one that’s paralleled in the way search engines evaluate and index blog posts.

When a search engine is visiting a website or blog, it reads the information on it, measuring the relevance of the material it finds to what the online searcher appears to be looking for. When the key words (which match what the searcher typed in) appear in the title of the blog post and towards the beginning of the text, it’s assumed that those are the “biggest deal”, indicative of what that blog post is mainly about.

There’s a second parallel I found between blogs and food labels. If a label says “Reduced Calories),that means that food product must contain one third less calories than a comparable, non-reduced-calorie food. By definition, blogs should be “reduced calorie” compared with corporate websites.  Blogs should contain at least a third less content than a promotional brochure or a website page, and should focus on one idea having to do with the business – highlight one product, one service, debunk one myth, one comparison, one testimonial from a customer, one true story, one link to a news story.

As a professional ghost writer of blogs, to me a “sugar free blog” is one that goes light on the hard-sell, and one that offers valuable free advice.

As blogging consultant Mack Collier points out, most companies spend too much time blogging about themselves.  The way to make blogs exciting, Collier advises, is by finding your "bigger idea".  In other words, rather than touting your company’s pet grooming product, blog about the proper way to groom pets. In business blogging, best to keep things lean and syrup-free!

There are no federal guidelines, I learned, for the use of the word “natural” on food labels. Many foods whose labels say “natural” contain artificial preservatives, artificial coloring, or artificial flavors. To me, "natural" in business blogging means to keep the tone informal, yet informative, giving your readers a “taste” of your personality, as well as the special personality and culture you’ve created in your culture.

In fact, the special challenge I love about my profession of ghost blogging is to capture the special flavor of each business in their blog posts!  In fact, one of my clients described it as follows: "I cook my own stew, and my ghost blogger adds the condiments, spices, and flavoring!" 
 

 

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