In Blogging, Personal Can Get Away WIth Platitudinous

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Whenever I’m working with business owners to plan their blog, I challenge them to think about two important questions.

My first question is, "Would you find you?"

Imagine, I ask each business owner, someone’s navigating the Web from home or perhaps from the corner café, searching for the kind of products and services you offer.  Keep in mind, though, the customer has never heard your business name!

Since a business blog targets organic search, people will get introduced to you by a search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) matching up the words the searcher typed in with the words you used in the title and content of your blog post. 

Skillful marketing through business blogs is a science as well as an art.  The answer to this first question relates to the "science" part of blog marketing, and to the importance of using key phrases for "search engine optimization". Other tactics such as linking and "back-tracking" to other blogs, purchasing analytics for your blog, and which blog software to use all figure into this conversation about "finding".

My second question is longer, and requires some deeper thought on the part of the business owner: "If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what your sell, what you know, and what you do, what would those words be?"

In other words, as I emphasized in "Your Brand ‘R You In Your Blog", whether you propose to do the blog writing yourself or collaborate with a professional ghost blogger partner like me, the very process of deciding what to put in the blog is one of self-discovery.  The content in the blog posts will be a way to continually think through and reinvent your business brand. This second question relates to the "art" aspect of blogging, the creative and very personal twist that will mark your blog as yours.

Earlier this week I mentioned attending a marketing strategy session with business coach and author Jim Ackerman.  Ackerman told about a highly successful marketing campaign run by a car dealer in Salt Lake City, Utah.  The tag line appearing in all the ads and marketing materials for this dealer was "You know this guy!"  On the surface of it, the slogan was old-hat to the point of being hokey, but, as Ackerman, pointed out, it worked wonderfully! 

Why did "You know this guy!" work well? Because "this guy" was down to earth and a straight shooter. "This guy" was personal and genuine in the way he treated customers, to the point that people seeing the commercials really did feel as if they knew him. According to Ackerman,: even "platitudinous" marketing works if it’s genuine, up close and personal!

Getting started on a business blog is simply a matter, then, of answering my two questions, the first about finding and the second about what they’ll be finding when they get to you!

 

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Oh, The Only-ness Of Blogging!

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It’s sort of hard to ignore 250,000,000 of anything, wouldn’t you say? One quarter billion is actually the number of blogs on the Internet as of this writing.  And that’s not all, mind you – 175,000 new blogs are coming online every day! This "blog thing" has fast attained impossible-to-overlook proportions, I’d say. Who’s doing all this blogging and why?

Blog maven Seth Godin describes three categories of blog:

Cat blogs are personal and idiosyncratic, he says, written out of a need for self expression, or sometimes to gain converts to the writer’s way of thinking.

Boss blogs are work project-centered, used to coordinate the different steps of a project being worked on by several different people.

Viral blogs, as the name implies, are used to spread ideas, and particularly to spread the word about businesses. Virals are the blogs I deal with in my professional ghost writing business, Say It For You, with the whole idea being to "win search" and attract buyers to your business who otherwise might never have shown up.

The other day I heard nationally-known speaker, business coach and author Jim Ackerman teach marketing to a group of entrepreneurs.  He urged each to find a "point of only-ness", meaning one statement to differentiate that business from all similar businesses, in a way that appeals to the kind of customers that business is targeting.

Any business owner needs to be able to start a sentence with "I am the only", as in "I am the only_____________________ in___________________ who ___________________." 

This crucial statement is not the same as an advertising slogan, Ackerman hastens to stress, but a marketing mission statement.  Your "only-ness" business statement always puts the emphasis on them and the benefits they will reap by dealing with you, and never on all the wonderful things you know, that you have, or that you know how to do.

Blogging for business, you remember, is "pull marketing".  Potential clients arrive at your blog because they’re searching for information, for a solution to a problem, or for a product or service that matches up with the content in your blog post. (In other words, you didn’t send out a mass mailing or put an ad on a billboard, which is "push marketing".) Now that they’ve located you, it’s up to your blog to engage them.  That’s where your "only-ness" must come across loud and clear:

Your blog has just the information searchers want:

It’s "on-the-money" (that’s what says "relevancy" to search engines)

It’s up-to-date (that’s what says "recency" to search engines)

It speaks your message in a very personal way to each one of them (that’s what makes prospects say "Yes, I want some!")  

Back a few decades ago, there was a hit song called "Only You". Well, that’s exactly the tone you want to set in your blog. Searchers must understand that only you can give them exactly what they came for!

Oh, the "only-ness" of you and of your virally on-the-money blog! 

 

 

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Brother, Can You Spare A Loanword For My Blog?

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Loanwords are words adopted by speakers of one language from a different language.  There are many, many foreign words and phrases used in English, and often these have become so familiar that people use them every day without considering their foreign origin.

Some Scandinavian words that have become part of English are husband, kindle, lump, thrust, and scrub.  France gave us the words judge, noble, priest, lady, pork, and salmon, while the words tattoo and taboo each come from the Pacific islands.  From Australia we “borrowed” the words kangaroo and boomerang, while banana, banjo, and jitterbug come from Africa.

As a ghost blogger, I’m a wordsmith, and it occurs to me that the language of computers and of blogging includes many, many loanwords of its own.  These words come not from foreign languages, but from everyday English words given a slightly different meaning for Internet and computer use. When I compose my blog (“web log”), I navigate using my “desktop”. My information might be protected with a “firewall” against “viruses”.  When I look at a website, it might have “wallpaper”.  I “scroll” down to read the content and decide to “bookmark” it. I might email documents in a “zip file”. There’s no end to computerspeak using loanwords! 

Professor Suzanne Kemmer of Rice University explains that a loanword can also be called a borrowing. “Loan” and “borrowing”, she hastens to add, are metaphors, because there is no transfer from one language to another, and no “returning” words to the source language!

With literally trillions of words being added daily to the World Wide Web, the Internet has become the largest repository of information in human history. Blogging activity has become a rapidly growing part of this information swell, and (inadvertently or on purpose) there’s undoubtedly a lot of “borrowing” going on. My college students are taught to avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their proper authors. 
The blogging equivalent of citations is links.  Even if you’re putting a unique twist on a topic, it’s good practice to link to websites from which you got the original news or idea (the link in the first paragraph of this blog post is an example of that).

Not only is the practice of attributing “loans” to their sources, as Alfred P. Doolittle of My Fair Lady might say, “the right and proper thing to do, there are actually rewards to be gained. Electronic links enhance search engine rankings for your blog by creating back-and-forth online "traffic".

 

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Fresh Is Better For Blogs And Beer

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Two advertisements for beer that ran on British TV appear to contradict one another, as related in a NewScientist book on trivia.

Budweiser’s ad claimed the key to good lager is fast shipment from brewery to bottle to drinker, while the ad for Grolsch beer stressed the importance of a long conditioning period to improve flavor. The answer – both are correct.  Lager needs to be matured slowly to get a good flavor, but then it "must get into the drinker as fast as possible before it deteriorates". "Fast", in beer, apparently makes a big difference in "fresh".  NewScientist says a reasonably good taster can distinguish between a week-old and month-old bottle from the same batch."

Freshness is super-important in my field of business blogging as well. Search engine rankings reward recency, a.k.a. new content, which is the key reason traditional websites can’t complete with corporate blogging. "Fresh" in business blogs means content that is up-do-date on the latest trends in your industry, problems that are now getting solved because of updated technology and knowledge.  "Fresh" in blogs, according to WebInkNow,  means content that informs and educates and entertains, adding that (and this can be hard for businessowners to hear) "nobody cares about your products and services except you". 

Did you know (I didn’t, until recently), the U.S. Air Force has created a role called "Chief of Emerging Technology", to develop web applications to engage Airmen and the general public in online conversation? The Air Force has even created a flow chart for assessing blog posts and comments, stressing the following values:

  • Transparency (disclosing your connection with the Air Force)
  • Sourcing (citing your sources)
  • Timeliness (Don’t rush, take time to create  good responses)
  • Tone (Your tone should reflect on the rich heritage of the Air Force
  • Influence (Focus on the most used sites related to the Air Force) 

Each item on this Air Force checklist describes a good practice for business bloggers. In my work as part of a company’s marketing team, it’s important to set just the right tone and methodology for the blog. But, never forget, the Air Force-level discipline is needed as well. Without maintaining a system of consistently posting new, fresh content to the blog, the tactic will not pull its weight as part of the business’ marketing strategy. 

Search engines, like those reasonably good beer tasters, will be able to distinguish freshness!

 

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Belief Comes Before Blog In The Dictionary

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Daniel Finley, advising financial planners on managing their practice, poses the question: "What’s your purpose?"

According to Finley, one thing that holds many advisers back from increasing their business strength is their business belief systems, which he defines as "what you believe about yourself, your abilities, the market, your firm, or anything else that affects your business." The important thing about belief systems, he stresses, is that they affect business activities.

Finley’s words ring very true to me. As a professional ghost blogger, I become part of a business’ marketing team. Too often, I find, business owners are so anxious to embark on blogging, they don’t devote adequate thought to how the blogging will fit into their overall marketing system. 
Blogs are tools, and like other tools, may be used for different purposes.  A company can use blogging to build goodwill, attract new business, improve customer relations, enhance the brand, recruit employees, or weather a crisis. According to blog experts Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos, one kind of blog you should never launch is the "Let’s-launch-a-blog" blog, just because everybody else is doing it!

Fellow blogger Luke Houghton agrees with that idea. In his blog post "Say Exactly What You Want When You Ask For Something", Houghton mentions the "stinging disappointment of loss" you feel when you’ve paid for something that turns out to be different from what you expected. Houghton emphasizes that "the question comes first, then the answer."

When working with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for their business blogs, I begin by challenging the owner of the business or professional practice with the following question: "If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what you sell, what you know, and what you do, what would those words be?"

In short, when it comes to blogging for business, Luke Houghton’s "spot on" about the question needing to precede the answer.  For eager-beaver business blogger newbies, a reminder:  in the dictionary, the word "belief" comes before "blog", and (significantly, I think), "planning" comes before "posting"!

 

 

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