High Hopes For Your Blog

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Noted sales and business trainer Dan Kennedy likes taking a dare: Hand him any newspaper, he says, and he’ll find something he can use to promote his clients’ products and services.  USA Today writes about the giant meteorites that struck the earth 250 million years ago?

If you’re a house painter:
“100 Million Year Warranty Against Meteorite Damage – free when we paint your house!”

If you’re a real estate agent:
“You don’t have to wait until another great meteorite strikes to find unbelievable real estate opportunities at dirt-cheap prices.”

If you’re a stockbroker:
“Epic disasters can strike your investment portfolio now – not fifty million years from now!”

Frank Sinatra took a similar dare years ago, explains Kennedy, singing to the world about that “little old ant who thought he’d move a rubber tree plant”, proving Sinatra could record any song thrown at him and put that song on the charts.

The point of all this, according to Kennedy, is “there’s no shortage of jumping off point fodder for ads, sales letters, and promotions.“ The daily news is ripe with opportunities and ideas.

Kennedy must have read my mind along with the daily papers.  My answer to the question blogging clients ask “Won’t we run out of new things to write about in our company blog?, based on thousands of blog posts’ worth of experience, is “Read the news!”

In fact, as a professional ghost blogger for business, I can’t think of a better way to ensure blog content is fresh and relevant than by tying it to current events, capturing searchers’ interest and search engine “Brownie points” as well.

Fresh, relevant blog content can turn your high hopes into high ratings!

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Blogging Is Brain Writing

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Health advisers stress the fact "we are what we eat", but did you know "we are what we write"? Handwriting experts point to the relationship between personality and penmanship.  Professional speaker and handwriting expert Theresa Ortega shared an astounding fact with me – amputees who must write with a pen held in their mouth or even between their toes form their letters in exactly the same way they had done when holding a pen in their hand! That’s because, Ortega explains, "All writing is brain writing"!

In business marketing circles, we hear a lot about "branding". As a professional ghost blogger for businesses, I’m often involved in discussions on that subject.  Interesting – both Theresa Ortega and I had read a discussion of branding in Speaker Magazine that presented a whole different point of view. Your business brand, according to this article, isn’t something you create; it’s something you already are.  You discover your brand by discovering your core values and skills. Just as your handwriting reveals your personality traits, your unique way of doing business reveals who you are and what you’re passionate about.

To some degree, a business’ brochures, advertisements, and billboards will reflect the company’s special strengths and skills, and even reveal owners’ attitudes and beliefs. But blogs, without a doubt, are the most revealing.  First of all, blog writing is more informal and conversational, and readers feel as if they’re personally "meeting" the business owners.

Second, blogging is an ongoing process, continued over weeks, months, and even years. Just deciding what to say in each blog post is a form of self-discovery, of inventing and reinventing the business’ brand.
Whether you’re doing all the writing yourself, or collaborating with a professional blogger like me, the very process of describing in words what you sell, what you know, and what you do – that’s "brain writing" in its purest form!
 

 

 

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A Tail Of Two Meanings For Blogging

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In his book Words at Play, William Espy uses this little four-liner to illustrate some elements of effective writing:

               "The qualities rare in a bee that we meet,
                 In an epigram never should fail.
                 The body should always be little and sweet,
                 And a sting should be left in the tail!"

Some of those same elements make for effective blogging as well.  "Little and sweet" is a good model.  Blogs, like epigrams, don’t necessarily provide lots of detailed information, but do capture concepts and provide examples of your expertise. Remember that your blog is a web log, not a web brochure or web catalogue. A catchy phrase at blog’s end "stings" searchers into clicking through to your website to learn more. Creating just the right "exit line" will be much easier if each blog post is focused on only one idea.

The word "tail" took on a new meaning back in October 2004, when Chris Anderson coined the marketing phrase "the Long Tail" in Wired Magazine. The idea was based on the cost of warehousing and of distributing niche products. As an example, a music retailer has only so much space to store DVD’s and CDs, so a store might choose to carry only the blockbuster hits it knows will sell quickly.  (On a chart, the sales of the most popular items would be very high, then trail off in a "long tail" down to those items in which only a few customers were interested.) 

A digital music store, by contrast, could sell all the tunes in the catalogue, even the very obscure ones that only a few diehard customers wanted. The whole idea is that, in the digital world, you don’t need big sales numbers to make a big impact. For a small business, serving a niche market, benefit of having a blog can be huge.

This is a tale (or a tail) of two meanings, but there’s a third, very important way in which small business owner or professional practitioner’s business blogging efforts can have a disproportionately large effect on 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."
 
Done right, a short blog can have a very long tail!

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Make Waves With Your Blog To Make A Splash For Your Business

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New York Times reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom refers to "these desperate days in American retailing" when she describes the new wave-making machines being installed in some shopping malls as a way to attract customer traffic. Extreme-sports company Adrenalina distributes the Flow-riders, ten-foot tall wave machines that send 35,000 gallons of water gushing over a slope at more than 30 miles per hour. According to  Adrenalina CEO Jeffrey Geller, some mall owners are paying upwards of two million dollars to install the machine, just to get the extra traffic.  "They know that we’ll pull people from a further distance than their regular tenants," he explains.

Malls aren’t the only ones abandoning more traditional forms of advertising and marketing in favor of reaching out to the online world through "pull marketing". In fact, pull marketing is precisely what blogging for business is all about. As print and direct mail see their numbers decline, according to ResourceNation.com, more and more businesses are choosing "the cost effective, highly targeted marketing options found online."

"Because of the substantial value blogging adds to an online presence, stand-alone, static websites are becoming a thing of the past," says website and blog copywriter Matt Rouge.  Not only is blogging an integral and indispensable part of any company’s Search  Engine Optimization strategy, putting out new and pertinent content  about your business and industry on a continual basis demonstrates that you are "in the game", Rouge points out.

Websites and blogs, however well written, may lack the marketing impact of surfers in 35,000 gallons of "wet" in the middle of a mall. Surprisingly, though, blog marketing statistics are more than holding their own in blogsphere circles, accounting for 80-90% of all online search. In contrast to the $2 million installation fee for a wave machine in a mall, blogging is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies any business can employ.

Customers may be lured to a mall just to see the new water attraction, Once there, they need to be lured into the retail establishments to buy. What blogging does best in the online "mall" is giving companies customers who arrived looking to be sold!

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Ghosts Help Get From “Decent” To “Brilliant” At The Podium And In Blogs

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I have an alter ego in Canada, I learned the other day, and another in London.  While my business, Say It For You, focuses on ghost blogging for business, Journalist Wendy Dennis, based in Toronto, ghost writes speeches and toasts for weddings, funerals, and other what she calls "seismic life events that require heartfelt eloquence". "It’s still their feelings and sentiments", Dennis says of her clients. "They just don’t have the skill to craft it in a way that’s going to have the greatest impact."

When it comes to business owners and professional practitioners, I find, lack of writing skill may not be their primary motivation for hiring ghosts. Knowing that, in these days of internet commerce, marketing is more about search engine optimization than about billboards and print advertising, many simply realize they lack the time to post blog entries with enough consistency to "win search".

Lawrence Bernstein, who runs a ghost speechwriting service in London, England, agrees with me on that point, relating, in his interview with MacCleans.CA, that his clients are not at all incapable of creating their own material were they inclined to do so. Generally, Bernstein adds, his clients are bright enough to realize that they could do a decent job writing their own speeches. Those who retain him to write on their behalf are "self aware and bright enough to realize that they couldn’t do it brilliantly".   

Human resource specialists agree that employees crave recognition for a job well done and often value appreciation even more than their paychecks.  In one of my early blog posts, I wrote about ghost writing’s built-in paradox.  As a professional ghost blogger, I explained, my job is to fade into the shadows, allowing my clients’ businesses to take all the glory. "A good ghost blogger should not, herself, be seen or heard."

A related practical problem we ghost bloggers and ghost speech writers face is the difficulty in getting referrals from clients. Lawrence Bernstein explained that dilemma in detail: "With any other service-based industry, the better the service, the greater the number of referrals."  But when he ghostwrites a great toast for a wedding that everyone thinks is the funniest and cleverest speech they’ve ever heard, remarks Bernstein ruefully, "The bloke never says, ‘Call Lawrence Bernstein in north London!"

P.S.  I’m happy to report that one of my best clients managed to figure a way out of this very dilemma, by simply beginning his testimonial as follows: "The last thing I want to tell you is that I’m Rhoda Israelov’s client, because my readers believe I’ve written the blogs. So well has she been able to capture the concepts I want to convey to my readers and clients, she has begun to sound like me!"

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