For Business Bloggers, the First things is Finding New Things to Say

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Gerald Ford must have had blog marketing in mind when he stated, “When a man is asked to make a speech, the first thing he has to decide is what to say”.

Copyblogger’s Liz Fulghum knew that, too. Back in 2008, Fulghum suggested that blog platforms come with a warning notice:

Blogging is not easy. You may experience unexpected droughts of inspiration, difficulty maintaining a schedule, or succumb to the  pressure of always needing fresh content.

Business bloggers often confide they have trouble continually coming up with fresh ideas for their blog posts and finding new ways to talk about the products and services they offer.  In this, the #1898 of the Say It For You blog, we have several blog “starter kit” models to offer:

Kit #1 – “Interview questions”
How did you arrive at the name for your business? For services or “packages” you offer? What do the names say about the outcomes you hope to bring for your clients and customers? What’s the biggest mistake you feel you’ve made in starting your business and what have you learned from that mistake?

Kit #2 – “Collating”
Collect information from different sources on a specific topic related to your business and organize the information in a new way. Use content from your own former bog posts, newsletters, and emails, adding material from other people’s blogs and articles, from magazines and book, summarizing the main ideas your readers are likely to find useful.

Kit #3 – “Curating”
Find opinion pieces that relate to your industry, quoting from those and then expressing your own unique perspective on that topic.

Kit #4 – “Listicles”
Listicles round up existing content pieces and present them in the form of numbered lists – of tactics to try, alternatives for solving a particular problem, or “best of…” compilations.

Kit #5 – “Changes of heart”
Go back and read your own past blog posts – the further back the better. Has experience – or have outside factors – caused you to change your mind on any of those statements? How? What factors caused your change of heart?

Kit #6 – “In the now”
Enter trending “conversations” about topics in the news. Scour the daily news and pay attention to talk shows, finding “hooks” to promote your products or services by weighing in on current concerns.

Blogging wasn’t yet around in the Gerald Ford era, but the former U.S. President was certainly right about this one: When a man (or woman!) is asked to make a speech (or compose a blog post!), the first thing to decide is what to say.

Keep your blog starter kit stocked and ready to wow!

 

 

 

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In Blog Marketing, It’s Not Okay to Quit

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“It’s okay to quit sometimes,” observes Seth Godin in his book the Dip, and, he assures readers, quitters do win. But quitting doesn’t mean giving up and abandoning your long-term strategy, only quitting the tactics that aren’t working. In fact, Godin admits, most people do quit. Problem is, he observes, they don’t quit successfully or at the right time.

Blogging is a perfect example, I realized, reviewing this powerful little book, of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. The strategy itself is well-proven and documented, and many business owners and professional practitioners embark on blog marketing in recognition of its power to generate interest in their products and services. It’s the tactics, the week-after-week work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing…blog posts. Those abandoned blogs belong to those who don’t recognize what Seth Godin describes as the “extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most”.

It’s not that blog marketing is an unproven strategy…

“Content is still king, and it is the fresh, customized, customer-centric content that gets the attention. Those that create more of it will certainly see positive returns for their efforts. Content marketing generates at least three times more leads than conventional marketing techniques,” says Digital.com. People love engaging with businesses in particular, and they tend to look positively on a company that releases custom content…Over the long run, you can expect 87% more inbound links, compared to companies who don’t blog at all.”

“Know for a fact that Google and other search engines tend to give more weight and SEO boosts to websites that update their content regularly over those that aren’t so frequent. “ BlogPanda explains. “The more you blog regularly about your product, business or industry, the more it increases your search keywords which further helps your website rank better for those keywords on Google and other search engines.”

Amazing, but true: In the face of all these compelling reports demonstrating the value of blog marketing, Caslon Analytics tells us that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month!, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average blog, Caslon remarks ruefully, “has the lifespan of a fruitfly”. No lack of starts, though: blogtyrant.com reports that there are over 1.7 billion websites on the internet today, and more than 600 million of those have blogs.

“A blog usually starts with a bang,” observes Antonio Canciano of technicalblogging.com. Then life gets in the way, postnig becomes less frequent and ore sporadic until the blogger pretty much gives up on their site entirely. That’s the usual path to blog despair, Canciano says. However, blogging is a river, not a lake, he cautions, and the constant stream of new content is what gives blogging its edge over other forms of content publishing.

Sure, it may be okay to quite sometimes, as Seth Godin observes, but not if you’re after those extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to keep posting blogs!.

 

 

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Don’t Write Blog Posts on the Back of an Envelope While Riding the Train

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“Lincoln would never have waited until the last minute to write such an important oration,” assert the authors of The Big Book of Big Secrets, debunking the popular myth that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while riding the train on the way to the speech itself. To prove their conclusion, they cite not only the fact that several drafts of that address have been archived at the Library of Congress, but the common sense observation that 1860s-period train cars bounced and swayed enough to make writing impossible.

Since my company offers not only blog writing services, but corporate blog training sessions, I’m always reading others’ blog posts and learning new ideas I can emphasize in those training meetings. Bottom line is, at Say It For You, we don’t advise writing blog posts on the way to “the presentation”.
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In fact, before ever sitting down to their computer to create blog posts, content writers have lots to do, beginning with planning, which eats up 20% of blogging time. That phase begins with choosing a single focus under the general theme of “leitmotif” which has ideally been chosen when the blog was first created. The next 25% of the content writer’s time involves research, which includes following news stories, reading blogs related to the subject, interviewing experts, and gather facts, statistics, and definitions.

30% of the blog content writer’s time is typically spend writing and editing the post itself, making sure to incorporate keyword phrases in the title and spread throughout the post. The remaining 25% of the time is best spent “dressing’ the blog and actually posting it online, enhancing the post with photos, illustrations, or stock art, as well as adding bolding and italics to emphasize key points.

As an overarching guide to the process, blog content writers need to remember that the initial messaging visitors see needs to answer their primary questions about how you can help them… Online searchers are not likely to spare more than a few seconds to decide if they’ve come to the right place for the products, information, or services they need. Next, you must be able to differentiate your offering from your competitors’.

To be sure, train rides today are much smoother than they were back in the Honest Abe Lincoln era. But, honestly, at Say It For You, we know that doing a good job at content creation for marketing blogs takes time.

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Best Blog Content Writers Read Around and Toggle

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“Dreams, I’m convinced, are just one more dimension of our minds,” writes Sylvia Browne in her best-seller, Book of Dreams...

At Say It For You, I teach the principle of “reading around” in order to attain “go-to industry authority”.  In fact, I stress, business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing. Even after almost a decade and a half creating blog content for business owners and practitioners, I continue to need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my client sells and what it does for its clients. At least half the time that goes into creating a post is reading/research/thinking time, I’ve found. The writing part can flow only after prep time is complete.

Just last month, I quoted Carina Rampell of the Content Marketing Institute, who explains that our reading needn’t be limited to the subject of our blog content.  Poetry, she explains, can teach us clarity and precision, while the classics can teach us compelling storytelling structure. Browsing through the Sylvia Browne book on dream interpretation (hardly my usual choice of reading topic!) made me realize the truth of Rampell’s statement that “reading helps us get away from our subject or product expertise and unlock our creativity”.  

Every dream experience, Browne posits, is one of five kinds:
  • the prophetic dream
  • the release dream
  • the wish dream
  • the information or problem-solving dream
  • astral visits
“Knowing what type of dream I’m trying to interpret, Browne explains, “is always my first step in unlocking its mysteries.”

Business blog posts also come in different varieties.  From the content writers’ point of view, I’s generally a good idea to toggle back and forth among those varieties over time, keeping returning visitors engaged, but also in order to appeal to different types of reader. There are “how-to” tutorial posts, resources and link lists, reviews, opinion pieces, interviews, case studies, breaking news, and personal story posts. But, precisely as Sylvia Browne observes, knowing what type of post you are presenting helps unlock its “success”.

The best blog content writers have learned to read around and then – toggle among the types!
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Business Blogging to Help Maintain Control Yourself

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take control
In this time of Coronavirus anxiety, I suggested in my latest Say It For You blog post, our focus as blog content writers should be firmly on showing readers how our business owner and professional practitioner clients can help their readers maintain control. As the TIME piece by Hallie Levine emphasizes, anxiety in short bursts and in the right amounts can actually help people fulfill tasks and achieve results. The secret for hitting the anxiety “sweet spot” (not too much nor too little), Levine says, is maintaining control over as many aspects of the situation as possible.
Now, let’s examine how we can use that same advice for our own benefit.
Get real.
In The Art of Social Media book by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick, there’s a little section called Be a Mensch, with “mensch” being defined as a “kind and honorable person who does the right thing in the right way”.  One thing for sure is that a mensch is real. You can’t give a reader a sense of control without showing that you’re dealing with the very same issues facing them. Emotional intelligence, closely related to mensch quality, is the capacity to express and then manage emotions. So first of all, allow your content to “get real’.

Be organized.
Even while letting readers see your own “humanity”, keep your blog content well-organized and well-written to convey a feeling of being in control. Maintaining a consistent schedule of posting sends a reassuring message to readers.

Share, don’t “give” advice.
As content marketers, we want to present the business or practice in a very personal, rather than a transactional way. Still, since the business owner or practitioner is, after all, the SME (subject matter expert), practical advice on how to best use the product or service is very much in order.  The tone, however, should be one of “sharing” a useful insight or tip, rather than “handing down” advice.

It’s interesting that Kristin van Ogtrop in that same TIME issue on anxiety, realized that “there is a fine line between setting boundaries and controlling, between guiding choices and telling your kids what to do.”  The message for marketing content writers, I believe, is to acknowledge that the reader is the one in control.  We’re the ones sharing some valuable mechanisms to arrive at a state of “anxiety contol”. 
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