How Not to be Passive in Your Posts

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In “The Tyranny of the Verb To Be”, Tobias Buckell describes how, as a new writer, he “almost destroyed himself” trying to eliminate passive verbs from his material. What’s so terrible about the passive voice? Buckell asks. Isn’t it time to stop worrying about “staying active”? Some of our overuse of passive voice, he believes, comes from academic writing, which removes the narrator from English papers.

“While tense is all about time references, voice describes whether the grammatical subject of a clause performs or receives the action of the verb,” grammarly.com explains. It’s the difference between “Chester kicked the ball” (active) and “The ball was kicked by Chester” (passive). “If you’re writing anything with a definitive subject who’s performing an action, you’ll be better off using the active voice,” rhw grammarly author advises. “Using active voice for the majority of your sentences makes your meaning clear for readers, and keeps the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy,” the Purdue Online Writing Lab agrees. .Sometimes, though, the active voice is simply awkward, Alice Underwood of grammarly explains, as in “People rumor Elvis to be alive”, as opposed to “Elvis is rumored to be alive”.

As writers, we teach at Say It For You, we need to decide (in each sentence and phrase) what – or who – matters most in each particular sentence – do we want to emphasize the action itself or the doer of the action? When it comes to actual “voice” in terms not of grammar, but of messaging, in a business blog, it’s important to have “voice variety”. That can come from writing some of the content in I-you format, with other posts written in third person. If a company person or a customer is being interviewed, the content can be written in the “voice” of the interviewee or that of the interviewer. “Third person narratives so often mimic the ‘beige voice’ of an objective reporter,” William Cane says in Write Like the Masters. With first person, he advises, “it’s usually easier to be intimate, unique, and quirky.”

In the grammatical arena, the most important thing, Bucknell concludes, is to test each sentence to see whether its SVA (subject, verb, object) arrangement could be written in a more interesting way. Achieving interesting writing is not as simple a matter as changing all the verbs to active, he realizes. “But looking carefully at all those ‘to be’ sentences might not be a bad way of diagnosing places where we have the opportunity to push ourselves a little more artistically,” he says.

Of course, as blog writers, we want to come across as passionate, never passive, towards our topics and towards our readers.

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Blog Posts – Info in a Flash

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“There’s nothing like flash fiction to teach you how to write an engaging story ” Breathe Magazine tells readers looking for “activities for a happy and healthy mind”. Author Kit de Waal, judging a microfiction writing contest, says she looks for “a whole story that gives me depth and breadth, with a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order.” The best microfiction, she adds, gets people talking and starts ideas in their heads.

While marketing blog posts are nonfiction, some of the tips offered by de Waal and other microfiction contest judges certainly apply.

  • “Focusing on a single idea is a really good technique.”
    When it comes to blogging, we at Say It For You firmly believe in the Power of One (one outcome, one audience, one writer, one client, and – one message per post, with a a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business.
  • “Pieces without a beginning, middle, and end don’t work.”
    In business blog writing, for the opening, you may choose to present a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy, challenging statement. Later, on the “back end” of your post, your “pow” closing statement ties back to the opener, bringing your reader full circle.
  • “Editing and revising is the hard part, but it is important. Work with language and imagery.”
    The second hardest part of blog writing is cutting your own work down to size, cutting out the non-essentials.

  • “Readers must be made to think and talk about what you’ve told them.”
    For blogs, the “first take” message is crucial, showing online readers they’ve come to exactly the right spot to find the information they need.

  • “Choose three words at random and weave them into a story.”
    Blog readers tend to be scanners, and searchers will select the most important words, the ones relating most directly to what they came online to find in the first place. Choosing those keyword phrases should hardly be random, instead being the result of research about your target audience.

  • “Find your ideas in weird sources.”
    In order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing.You need to keep up with what others are saying on your topic, plus keep up with your marketing and selling skills, as well as finding unusual or little-known facts that you can use to to explain your own (or your clients’) products, services, and culture.

“Flash fiction attempts to condense a story into the fewest words possible, telling big, rich, complex stories quickly and concisely, Catherin Sustana writes in ThoughtCo. Marketing.  blog posts, while not fiction, are a means of providing readers with valuable information, and doing it “in a flash”.

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In Each Post, Remember the Raison D’Etre

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“The first thing I do when I create a magic effect is forget about the method,” says Joshua Jay in How Magicians Think. “How it works comes later.” In fact, the last part of developing the trick will be the hardest, Jay says: its raison d’etre (reason for being). Why am I doing this in the first place? “I’ll cut this rope in half and put it back together…I’ll float this silver ball in front of a cloth.” Why? Who cares? The best magic, Jay says, has an emotional hook: “I’ll show you how to win when you play blackjack.” (Now they’re interested!)

Sure, the overall purpose of performance magic is to entertain. But what fascinated me as a Say It For You blog content writer was Joshua Jay’s central thesis: Each trick (each blog post) must have its own reason for being or raison d’etre.

What’s more, “great magicians don’t leave the audience’s thought patterns to chance,” Jay says. You might not suspect that he has a pigeon tucked into his right sock, but then again, why would you? In this sense, the author explains, magic is a collaboration between the magician and the audience. When it comes to blogging, Dan Roam’s book for speakers, Show and Tell . is helpful. As presenters, the author says, we need to ask ourselves: for this topic, for this audience, and for myself, which truth should I tell?. Roam suggests presenters ask themselves the following question: “If my presentation could change them in just one way, what would that change be?”

As blog content writers approaching our reader audience, what are we trying to accomplish in this one blog post? Is it:

1. changing their information, adding new data to what they already know?
2. changing their knowledge or ability?
3. changing their actions?
4. changing their beliefs, inspiring them to understand something new about themselves or about the world?

As you begin each blog post, forget about the method. What’s the raison d’etre?

 

 

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Don’t Blog Only From a Front Row Seat

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Financial professionals often have a “front row seat”, getting to see up close the how clients transition into retirement, Robert Laura writes in Financial Advisor Magazine. “We get to see how they accumulated their savings, and what their plans are for life after work.” Problem is, Laura points out, like people sitting too close to a high stage in a theatre, many advisors have a partially obstructed view, missing scenes playing out in the background. Just as a good play transports you into another world and into other lives, Laura tells advisors, you must be willing to look at more than what is on “center stage” and notice the backdrops.

“Buyers are 48% more likely to consider products and services that address their specific business and personal issues,” uplandsoftware.com stresses. In practice, the authors point out, most companies don’t dive deeply enough into the concerns and needs of their target customers. Instead, most marketing is based on a “front row” view, using demographics such as age, role, and location. The result is marketing materials that simply don’t resonate with the target audience. Hootsuite summarizes the marketing challenge blog content writers face in an almost brutally “in-your-face” way: “You can’t speak directly to your best potential customers if you’re trying to speak to their kids and parents and spouses and colleagues at the same time.” In other words, you need to go narrow and deep rather than using a broad brush.

I’m fond of thinking of ghost blogging as an art, but, truth be told, there’s quite a bit of science to it as well. Since your blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than your business can be all things to everybody, the blog must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who will want to do business with you.  Everything about your blog, we stress at Say It For You, should be tailor-made for your target customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it. In short, you’re giving up your “front row seat” and mingling with the audience members in the “cheap seat”, offering cues that you understand the situations and challenges they face.

Don’t blog only from a front row seat!

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Letting Them Know You Hear Them

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“As you listen to people, let them know that you hear them, value them, and understand them,” Ron Willingham writes in Integrity Selling for the 21st Century. You can offer feedback by nodding approval at key points, giving verbal responses, and through your body language, the author adds.

All well and good for in-person selling, but what about blog marketing? After all, content writers can’t “nod approval” at key points or use body language to cement connection with online searchers. Yet, “the buying process is in the hands of the customer, and marketers must create targeted, personalized experiences for people,” as marketingevolution.com stresses.

Even in face-to-face selling situations, it may be too easy to assume you know the customer’s needs and then move on to offer them solutions or recommendations, Willingham cautions. The pros must not only be willing to talk to you about a solution, but have a sense of urgency about seeking a solution. Of course, the very fact that searchers found their way to your page indicates their interest in the subject of your blog, but now the content writing challenge is to create those “targeted and personalized experiences”.

At our Say It For You content marketing company, we absolutely agree. Stories of all kinds help personalize a business blog. Even if a professional writer is composing the content, true-story material increases engagement by readers with the business or practice. Case studies are particularly effective in creating interest, because they are relatable and “real”. The content must speak to “our shared experience”. I tell newbie blog writers: “Everything about your blog should be tailor-made for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it.” Since we, as ghostwriters, have been hired by clients to tell their story online to their target audiences, we need to do intensive research, taking guidance from the client’s experience and expertise dealing with actual customers.

Online visitors to your blog need to find an experience along with information.  Word tidbits, unique points of view, special how-to tips, links to unusual resources, and humorous touches – all these things make your blog post special. Stories – testimonials, real-life successes and failures, help translate corporate messages into people-to-people terms. Metaphorically, at least, the stories in your blog posts can represent nods of approval and understanding.

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