Blogging From a Top-Floor Hotel Room

People often assume he shoots his beautiful images with a drone or that he creates them on a computer, but that’s not it at all, says Virtuoso travel photog Gray Malin. What you see in the magazine is the result of him going up in a helicopter and leaning out the side to find timeless imagery. The idea of shooting from above came to Malin, he says, when he was somewhere in a hotel with a birdseye view of a giant swimming pool filled with people and realized he could create tableaus of beachgoers and beaches from a new and different perspective.

Perspective is everything when it comes to business blog content. Whether a business owner is composing his/her own blog posts or collaborating with a professional content writer, it’s simply not enough to provide even very potentially valuable information to online searchers.  Think of the facts – about the business, the services, and the products offered  – as raw ingredients which must be “translated”. 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?”  

Many business owners and practitioners make use of statistics in their blog posts, and that’s a good thing for a couple of reasons:

• Numbers help debunk myths and dispel false impressions relating to your field or product.
• Numbers help demonstrate the extent of the problem your business or practice helps solve.

But statistics, too, need to be put into perspective for readers. Before a reader even has time to ask “So what?” we need to be ready with an answer that makes sense in terms with which readers are familiar. I call it blogging new knowledge on things readers already know.

Photographer Gray Malin understood that content (in his case pictorial) offered to readers must “own” a unique perspective. There’s certainly no lack of content in either print or online media, and no lack of experts (at least purported experts) in the travel field or any other. Malin understood that he needed to go beyond presenting photos and offer a unique perspective.

In fact, what Gray Malin says of his top-floor style of travelogues is a great example for business blog content writing: “It all goes into creating something that’s unique to that location, but still universally appealing.”