What’s Tops in HVAC Blogs is What’s Tops in Blog Content Writing – B

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Marketing company Broadly.com looked for certain qualities in compiling their list of top HVAC Blogs in 2018. Earlier this week, I commented on six of those points, because they can work for  blog content writing in any industry or profession. Here are six more:

Advice on finding the right components
Employment consultants name four things workers need:  people who help them, tools, information, and an exchange of ideas. Blog readers need those same components.

Region-specific posts
Niche marketing means targeting the information you offer in the blog to a small portion of a market that is not being readily served by the mainstream product or service marketers.  Your blog helps you serve specific “regions” or “niches” through providing up-to-date, frequent, and relevant content that applies specifically to their needs.

Numerous posts (there’s a lot of content to pick from)
With frequency and recency playing such important roles in search engine rankings, what the consistent posting of content on behalf of a business or practice provides readers with “content to choose from”.

Lists of resources
On a blog, links represent resources  you’ve collected, or curated, for your readers. Adding links to other, credible, resources means you take your responsibility – to keep your readers fully informed – seriously.

Advice on respiratory health
Air conditioning/heating professionals don’t pretend to be healthcare mavens.  At the same time, they realize that indoor air quality affects residents’ or workers’ health. Content writing can be about not just your brand, but about related topics. 

Site updates regularly
The parallel lesson I stress to Indianapolis blog content writers is “yo-yo blogging”.  Spacing SEO marketing blog posts at regular intervals and maintaining consistency has a double advantage. The blogging becomes part of the business owner’s or blogger’s routine. Meanwhile regular readers and subscribers (and search engines as well!) come to expect a regular flow of information.

At Say it For You, we realize, all twelve qualities which Broadly.com pinpointed in “Top HVAC practitioners in any field!.

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Look-Ahead Words of Wisdom for Blog Content Writers – Part B

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This week, with an eye to the year to come, I’m sharing more words of wisdom from ”my bookshelves”, along with the links to the authors and book descriptions…

Sketch out an outline of events leading to a typical client needing you.
Choose a client from a typical demographic you serve, suggests Paul Smith in The Ten Stories Great Leaders Tell. Your sales story, Smith explains, relates what you did for one of your customers that is so impressive, other people will want to buy what you’re selling as well.

Build a blog post or two around a customer success story. Say you’re a realtor, and today you’re blogging about how important “curb appeal” can be when you’re marketing a client’s home to potential buyers. Rather than just offering advice, you can tell the story of how you guided Sam and Susie towards a successful sale by encouraging them to plant colorful flowers and painting their front door an attractive red. As a final touch for your blog, you can link back to the full version of Sam and Susie’s testimonial which is already part of your website. Customer success stories boost your credibility with new prospects, helping them decide to do business with you.

Our core values are… We pride ourselves on… We commit to… We encourage and reward…
The right phrases have the power to engage and develop employees, Laura Poole explains in Perfect Phrases for Coaching Employee Performance. Language has the power to establish personal connections, develop and reinforce strengths, provide constructive feedback, and encourage commitment to the company’s goals.

The best website content and the best blogs give readers insight into a company’s core beliefs in addition to information about products and services that company offers, I teach at Say it For You. Just as it’s important to tell readers what you have, what you know, and what you know how to do, it’s even more important to explain what you believe. Why have you chose to pursue this field or industry? Why do you choose to do business or conduct your practice in certain ways?

Customers want personalized solutions for their unique needs and preferences.
Driven by tighter budgets and dwindling natural resources, companies are now seeking new ways to appeal to their customers, Navi Radjou, author of Frugal Innovation posits. Products and services can be “co-created”, he says, with empowered consumers and external partners.

Try this highly useful exercise – make a list of ways your business individualizes and personalizes services to customers and clients. Drill down, I’d say to everyone offering blog writing services, to actual cases of clients’ personalized customer service, recalling times when unusual problems got solved, and when standard procedures were put aside to get the job done for that one customer..

By now you should have become a convert to the “reading around” habit. Over the past two weeks we’ve sampled a dozen precious gems that can motivate content writers and infuse blog posts with sparkle and meaning. But these represent just a sampling – blogging gems are all around, just waiting for each of us to add our own unique twist!

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Look-Ahead Words of Wisdom for Blog Content Writers – Part A

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imagery in blogs

 

Last week, by way of kicking off a new blogging year, I’ looked through my bookshelves at all the business writing-related books I’ve collected over the year 2019. What would I do without these “reading around” gems with their different sorts and shapes of advice and reflection? . This week, with an eye to the year to come, I’ll be sharing even more words of wisdom from ”my shelves”, along with the links to the wonderful authors…

Paint a verbal picture for your followers.
“The successful articulation of a leader’s vision may rest on his or her ability to paint followers a verbal picture of what can be accomplished with their help,” says presentation coach Carmine Gallo.

Imagery helps make marketing blogs more engaging.  True, in business communications there may be times when technical, precise language is in order. Still, you want readers to visualize themselves successfully using your products and services. In a way, you want visitors to “see” as well as hear what you’re saying.

Claiming credit is adding insult to injury.
“Claiming credit is adding insult to the injury that comes with overlooked recognition. We’re not only depriving people of the credit they deserve, but we are hogging it for ourselves. It’s two crimes in one.”
Marshall Goldstein, who coaches global leaders, is referring to corporate employees in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, but the principle is the same for blog writers when it comes to properly attributing content to its original authors.

Is quoting others in your blog a good thing? As I’m fond of saying in corporate blogging training sessions – it depends! On the positive side, when you link to someone else’s remarks on a subject you’re covering, that can reinforce your point and add value for readers by aggregating different sources of information (just as I am doing in this very Say It For You blog post). On the other hand, as is true of all tools and tactics, “re-gifting” content needs to be handled with some restraint and using proper protocol by attributing each piece of content to its author.

Every negotiation has two kinds of interests: the substance and the relationship.
“The ability to see the situation as the other side sees it is one of the most important skills a negotiator can possess,” Roger Fisher and William Ury explain in the book Getting to Yes.

By offering more than one point of view, we blog writers can actually showcase our knowledge of the latest thinking in our field, while at the same time clarifying our own special expertise and slant.

No question – I’m a convert to “reading around”. Gems like these are all around, just waiting for you to add your unique twist before sharing with your blog readers.

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Benchmark Blogging

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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” legendary management consultant Peter Drucker was fond of saying. “How do we know if we’ve identified a result rather than an activity?” he asks. To achieve any goal, whether personal or business, explains local consultant Michael Hill, use the acronym SMART:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Results-oriented
  • Time-phased

When blog content writers use SMART, that can greatly enhance the value of the information and advice they’re offering.

Specific:
Start by asking yourself what you want the person to do as a result of reading this post.
Each business blog post 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.

Measurable:
Readers need to know how they will know that choosing a particular product or service has been a good idea. Offer tips on small, incremental positive changes they should begin to notice.

Attainable:
Describe realistic, achievable and easily identifiable signs that can signal that the client is on a trajectory leading towards the desired outcomes.

Results-oriented:
While time may have elapsed from the initial transaction, the content of the blog can serve as a reminder of the initial reason for beginning the regimen, purchasing the item, or continuing to take training.

Time-phased:
Setting expectations based on time is a good idea for blog content writers. Imagine readers asking themselves “How will I use the product?  How much will I use? How often? Where? What will it look like?  How will I feel?”

Remember, if clients and customers can’t measure it, they will not even try to “manage it”.

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Thanksgiving is a Good Time to Talk Turkey About Blog Posts

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Despite the flair of those TV Chefs who seem to nonchalantly add “a dash” of this or that seasoning, as you’re preparing the Thanksgiving feast, it’s a good idea to measure the ingredients and the cooking time. Is it important to measure your time in blogging for business? Well…“It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong,” observed English economist John Maynard Keynes almost a hundred years ago.  I think that saying holds true when it comes to measuring the effects of SEO marketing blogs.

I realize that our Say It For You business owner and practitioner clients want to be able to measure the success of their blogging initiative. Still, I tell Indianapolis blog writers that Return on Investment is more than “analytics” and charts. Why is that so?

  1. Even using today’s analytics, it’s not always possible to associate a specific ROI measurement to blogging for business without regard to all the other initiatives the client is using to find and relate to customers.  All the parts have to mesh – social media, traditional advertising, events, word of mouth marketing, and sales.
  2. Blogging for business carries benefits in addition to helping increase sales, I’ve found. Continuously producing and making available quality content helps demonstrate that you care about quality in all dimensions of your business.

On the other hand, I teach content writers to measure, and the Thanksgiving turkey is a good metaphor to keep in mind. Just as in preparing the turkey, it is useful to measure where you business blogging time goes, I teach at Say It For You. Say you’ve allotted two-three hours of your time for each blog post. One fourth of that time might be devoted to finding, reading, and processing existing content published relating your topic. Then, the bulk of the blog creation time is taken up in thinking about the topic, and actually composing the post. Finding just the right photo or clip art to capture the theme of a blog post and inserting it into the post might take 10 minutes. Then, there’s formatting the text to make it more readable, editing, strategically employing keyword phrases – all that will take the reminder of the time involved in the gestation of a single blog post.

Measuring is important in blog marketing in another way. Blog posts should contain at least a third less content than a promotional brochure or a website page, and should focus on one idea having to do with the business – highlighting one product or service, debunking one myth, making one comparison, offering one testimonial from a customer or one true story. This is a case where increasing the amount or number of ingredients is going to take away from – not add to – the eating pleasure!

Thanksgiving is a good time to “talk turkey” about blog posts!

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