Be-a-Mentor Blogging for Business

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“To gain business with your blog, you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. He wants to help them get ahead and live a more fulfilled life,” Neil Patel advises.

The first way that blogging gets you customers is it shows you’re open for business, Sarah Carnes writes in HubSpot.com. The second way? It educates your prospects. Take your frequently asked questions (FAQs) and turn them into blog posts. Once a potential customer sees you as a resource, they are much more likely to consider you when they are considering buying the product or service you provide. After researching and building your target audience, you know what they care about most – and what keeps them up at night. Using your content to answer those fears means that you can begin to “own” the conversation.

In the book Good People, author Anthony Tjan names five types of mentors. At Say it For You, we realize that in different blog posts, a business owner or professional practitioner can take on one of these mentoring “roles’:

Master of Craft:
Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a content writer, link to outside sources to add breadth, depth, and credibility to the ideas you’re expressing and the advice you’re offering.

Champion their cause
Comfort and connect with compassion and encouragement. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be as important in coming years as technical skills.

Co-pilot
“Collaborate” with readers, showing you understand the obstacles and challenges they face. Encourage them to “vent” by answering the tough questions in your content. But searchers haven’t always formulated their questions, and so what I suggest is that we do that for them.

Anchor
An anchor needn’t work in the mentee’s industry, but is someone who offers insights that readers can use to better cope with issues they are facing.

Reverse mentor
A reverse mentor can be of a younger generation with insights to share that can help older readers make sense of technology or see situations from a different vantage point.

What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts, curating content from many different points of view. In blogging for business, be a mentor!

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Lists Are a Good Fit for Blogs – Once in a While

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Of all the types of list-style blog posts you could write, the “curated list’ is probably the easiest, Virtasktic.com explains, because “it is more about researching and trying to find content from others than about writing your content from scratch”. Still, curated lists require thought and care, and need to be structured in a way that makes it easy for your readers to consume.

That lists in general are a good fit for blogs is actually something I stress in corporate blogging training sessions.  By most accounts, search engines like lists and bullet points.  Even more important, I’ve found over the years at Say It For You, lists help keep readers – and writers – on track.

Interestingly, I came across two different lists, both listing resource programs available to Indiana residents.

  1. The first of these is on the state’s website, Indiana.gov, and offers a comprehensive list of assistance programs including food and clothing, mental health & addiction, health care, housing & utility assistance, children and family, tax assistance and education, employment.
  2. The second list, also abut resources, appeared in the Indianapolis Business Journal‘s promotional supplement “IN Career Ready. This list is focused on assistance programs in only the area of education. However the title does not make that clear (it’s titled “Free Money from the State of Indiana”.

Each of these two lists would be highly useful for readers searching for information about Indiana assistance programs. There is no attempt to editorialize, advise, or even organize the information in a new way. Each list is simply an organized collection of information.

In marketing a business or practice, organizing relevant and useful information in list form, geared towards the needs of your target audience can be very useful to readers. As in the two examples I found, the lists might be of resources for further information, tactics to try, or alternatives for solving a particular problem. Unlike the case with the IBJ supplement, the title must make very clear precisely what readers will find in the list. “Listicles help present a large amount of information in small, easy-to-scan, numbered sections,” explains Neil Patel.

Are list blogs meant to be an “instead of”? Of course not! For instance, listicles cannot…

  • allow your audience to know, like, and trust you
  • offer soft sales messages in value-added content
  • build community
  • highlight the specific needs fears, and wants of your target audience
  • offer opinion and thought leadership

But, when it comes to sheer utility and convenience – list blogs just can’t be beat!

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Listicles Make Life Simple for Blog Content Writers and Blog Readers

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The AAA Crossroads Magazine knows a good listicle when they see one. In “How to Make Travel Count”, TV host Samantha Brown lists five tips plus one “bonus tip” for getting the most out of even the shortest travel experience.

  • Tip #1: Take a walk.
  • Tip #2: Explore the side streets.
  • Tip #3: Create a ritual.
  • Tip #4 Talk to people.
  • Tip #5: Identify the emotional value.
  • Bonus tip: Put the map away, put down the phone, and just go down street because you think they look good.

Each one of these titles heads up a paragraph explaining how to use that tip. Not only does that visually organize the page in an attractive way, it makes the information easy to digest.

Still, in the online world, Caroline Forsey writes in hubspot.com, the list post (otherwise known as a listicle) commonly gets a bad name. In fact, she admits, “you can easily drown in a sea of particularly low-quality low-value listicles”. Nevertheless, Forsey explains, readers love listicles – for a number of reasons:

  • They are easy to scan.
  • They outline specifically what the reader will learn in the post.
  • Complex content is broker into bite-sized pieces.
  • Readers can skip to sections most applicable t them.

Listicles feed into our brain’s drive to categorize information and give us a sense of satisfaction when we correctly predict patterns, Neil Patel points out, citing a study out of Ohio State University showing how humans try to detect patterns in their environment.

To avoid adding to the “bad name” side of listicles, Toman of checkflow.io advises, don’t add more points just to fill up your list. Add interesting details to each item (Samantha Brown’s article is the perfect example). In order to make your angle unique, read what the competition is saying on the subject, then write from a personal perspective. “Going for a walk is the very first thing that I do at any destination,” Samantha writes.

I noticed that, even though it’s a listicle, Samantha Brown writes in first and second person, using the pronouns “I” and “we” and “you” throughout her piece. “I know what you’re thinking – Enjoy the mundane?” “I feel that talking to people is something that has been slowly going missing from our daily lives.” In blog marketing, I stress first person writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the person or the team standing ready to serve customers.

At Say It For You, our content writers are always seeking to vary the ways we present information on a single topic in many different ways. Not only are we on the lookout for different “templates” in terms of platform graphics, but different formats for presenting information about any business or professional practice.

Listicles, when done well, make life simpler for both blog content writers and their readers.

 

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Blog Posts and Comic Strips – Sisters Under the Skin

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blog's 3-part structure

In offering corporate blogging training, one rule of thumb I often emphasize is focusing on just one idea in each blog post. Not only does this lend more punch to the post, it helps the blog content writer concentrate all his/her efforts around that one focal point.

When it comes to condensing, comic strip creators do it best, I’m convinced. Three comic strips in one Friday’s issue of the Indianapolis Star are perfect models. Each strip had only three “frames”. In the first, the stage is set with a situation, dilemma, question, or problem. The second box develops the idea, and the third ends with a “summary” closing line.

Blondie:
Did you lecture Alexander about being out past curfew?
Yes.
Then he lectured me for staying up so late!

Wizard of Id
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without your hat?
Oh, really? Here!
A mullet? The 80s were the best time for wizards.

Snuffy Smith
How come Sheriff Tait don’t have a deputy?
Well, he likes to think he’s so darn capable he just don’t need one.
That job obviously gives him wa-a-ay too much time to think!

Mutts
As the great cat wizard, I can see into the future.
How does it look?
Empty, for now.

When it comes to blogging, we at Say It For You firmly believe in the Power of One. A business blog post, the concept is, should impart one new idea or call for a single action. Focused on one thing, your post has greater impact, since people are bombarded with many messages each day. Respecting readers’ time produces better results for your business.

Problem-solution essays are a common requirement for high school and college students, grabmyessay.com explains. The essay identifies a problem and discusses a solution, convincing the readers to address the problem as soon as possible. The problem-solution essay, like any other essay, too, should end with a conclusion, restating the problem and containing a call to action that encourages the readers to take part in the proposed solution or to look for alternative solutions.

Although blogs use a much greater number of words than comic strips (and possible far fewer words than writing instructors often require of their students), it’s possible to incorporate that comic-strip “three-frame construct” in each post:

  1. The “pow” opening section presents a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy, challenging statement.
  2. The middle section develops the thought, brings in supporting materials and valuable information.
  3. At the end of the post, you do a “tie-back” to that opener, a finishing flourish.

    At Say It For You, we like to think of blog posts and comic strips as sisters under the skin!

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What This Blog Isn’t

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This week’s Say It for You posts were inspired by James Marshall Reilly’s book One Great Speech, in which he describes his challenges in locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors.

In the introduction to his book, James Marshall Reilly makes sure readers know exactly what to expect.  In fact, the author provides three checklists:

  1. Who is this book for?
  2. What this book will teach you
  3. What this book isn’t

While it may not be practical for blog content writers to actually provide readers such a checklist for each post, it’s a great self-check mechanism for content creators.

Who is this blog post for?
Not only must a marketing blog be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and towards those who will want to do business with you, each post should have a specific type of reader in mind. That way, the content will clearly demonstrate that the business owner or practitioner and the staff understand the readers’ concerns and needs, but know how to meet those needs and solve those very problems.

What this post will teach you
The title of a blog post indicates what readers can expect to learn. There are two basic categories of blog titles, we’ve found at Say It For You. The first is very direct, using keyword phrases that match up with what a reader may have typed into the search bar. The second category gives only the barest hint of the content to follow and is meant to arouse curiosity A compromise I teach is to use a combination of a “Huh?” title to get attention and then an “Oh!” subtitle to make clear what the post is actually going to be about.

What this post isn’t
Of Reilly’s three lists, this one may be the most important for blog content writers to consider and at least indirectly, make clear in the content:

  • This is not an advertisement or a list of claims about a product or service.
  • This is not a news report (although it may be based on a news report, offering a fresh perspective on that news).
  • This is not a ”put-down” of our competitors’ products and services.
  • This is not a thinly veiled attempt to capture contact information from you.
  •  This is not a mere re-hash of widely accessible information.

Very much like a sculptor who “reveals” the shape by cutting away “excess” marble, blog content writers can craft effective posts by cutting away what the content is not!

 

 

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