Blogging to Get Remembered

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Brag Better: Master the Art of Fearless Self-Promotion
“You can always get attention by being the loudest in the room,” admits Meredith Fineman in her book Brag Better, but being loud while lacking strategy will do more harm than good. There are ways to get remembered, Fineman teaches, by describing your personal brand in ways that earn respect and recognition. True showmanship, she says, means showcasing what you’ve done in a way that feels fun and true to you.

Better bragging better begins with making a list of facts about yourself and your successes, Fineman teaches. Learn to be loud, proud, and strategic by:

  • Using super power words
  • Avoiding invisibility
  • Avoiding verbal qualifiers
  • Considering your audience

Brant Pindivic, author of the book The 3-Minute Rule, speaks about ways to consider your audience: “To succeed, you must be able to capture and hold your audience’s attention with only the quality and flow of your information,” The audience must be able to:

  1. conceptualize your idea
  2. contextualize it (understand how it will benefit them)
  3. actualize it (engage with interest)

One tip that Pinvidic offers to sales people is particularly worth noting by blog content writers: “It’s not just who you pitch to, it’s who they have to pitch to, that matters.” How will readers rationalize their decision to buy when speaking to others?

Better bragging is about shining a light on the work you’ve done, having confidence in yourself and your voice, and speaking up, Fineman stresses. At Say It For You, there are three models of business blog posts that we’ve found are particularly helpful in getting readers to remember the content and its provider:

1. Helpful how-to hints
Find complementary businesses or practices, asking those business owners or practitioners for tips they can offer for you to pass along to your readers. The best tips and hints, I added, are related to some a topic currently trending in the news and practical.

2. Personal stories
Research done by questioning Stanford University graduates showed that shows that graduates were more likely to remember commencement speakers who told stories. In one experiment, students were asked to give one-minute speeches that contained three statistics and one story. Only 5 percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63 percent remembered the stories.

3. Fascinating tidbits of information
When business owners or practitioners present little-known facts about their own business or profession, those tend to be remembered. If you notice a “factoid” circulating about your industry, a common misunderstanding by the public about the way things really work in your field, a little-known tidbit can reveal the truth behind the myth.

Learn to do better bragging in your blog!

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Blog to Their Whys

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In order to retain good employees, Minesh and Kim Baxi explain in the book Stop Hiring Losers, practice using motivators. By clarifying both the “why” of your own interactions as a business owner, you can work to understand the individual “whys” of others, leading to positive results for all.

The authors define 6 defining attitudes or world views:

1. LEARNING-motivated employees can be given the opportunity for advanced training, along with the opportunity to train new employees.

2. MONEY-motivated employees can be rewarded based on performance outcomes with gift certificates or trips.

3. BEAUTY/HARMONEY-motivated employees can be given the opportunity to decorate for corporate events or redesign workspaces.

4. ALTRUISM-motivated employees can be given the opportunity to represent your company in community and fundraising events.

5. POWER-motivated employees can be given titles and the opportunity to attend leadership seminars.

6. PRINCIPLE-motivated employees can be given the opportunity to represent the company as spokesperson for a social cause.

There is a strong parallel between success in motivating employees and success in blog marketing, we’ve learned at Say It For You. The secret is knowing your particular audience and thinking about how they (not the average person, but specifically “they*) would probably react or feel about your approach to the subject at hand.

For example, while you may point out that your product or service can do something your competitors can’t, that particular “advantage” may or may not be what your audience is likely to value. For example, even if your target audience falls in the money-motivated category, are you the least expensive (that might appeal to a cost-conscious group) or the most expensive (your audience might prize luxury and exclusivity)?

When building a plan to connect with an audience, Francesca Pinder of Brussels event planning firm Spacehuntr cautions, consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but where your target readers “hang out”, what they read and watch, and what they’re saying on social media.. Interviews, focus groups, and a lot of very alert listening can help you understand what causes they support.

In creating blog content, speak to your target audience’s whys!

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Tired People Don’t Laugh Much – or Read Much

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In Tuesday’s Say It For You post we saw how a request from a diner to a waitress elicited the wrong response. In blogging, failing to consider your target readers can result in eliciting a reaction to your blog that is not quite what you’d hoped…

Incorporating humor in a blog is especially tricky. “Know your audience. Not everyone will think every joke is funny,” advises Michael Strecker in the book Young Comic’s Guide to Telling Jokes.

Strecker offers several Rules of Thumb, each of which can be adapted for blog content writing in general:

  1. Never tell more than three jokes in a row on the same subject, because audiences get tired and don’t laugh.

Business blogs are of necessity focused on a singular topic, but the information can be presented in different ways and in different formats.

2. Don’t read your jokes, but do read, read, read. The more words you know, the more jokes you’ll be able to understand and tell.

At Say It For You, I teach that business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing, in order 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 the client offers.

3. Timing is very important. Don’t tell your jokes too slowly or too fast, or the audience will either miss the point or get bored before you get to it.
Over the years of dealing with many different blog writers and blog topics at Say it For You, I’ve noticed that certain content falls flat with certain audiences is that it’s based on cultural allusions that are simply not that familiar to that audience – they don’t “get it”. Here are two “riddles” that show what I mean:

How did the dentist pay for his vision exam? An eye for a tooth.
(The allusion is to a passage from the Bible about punishing a man who injures another – “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”)

What do you do at a math party? Eat pi and square dance.
(The allusion is to pi, which is the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately 3.14.)

Whether telling jokes or writing blog content, matching our writing to our intended audience is part of the challenge we business blog content writers face.

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Who Should Definitely Read This Blog?

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Every month my Mensa monthly newsletter Mind has a book review section, and I love the way that review is presented. First, there’s a page-long description of what the book is about. But then, there are three smaller sections:

  1. Has this book changed the way you think or your attitude towards life?
  2. Who should definitely read this book? Why?
  3. Provide a short characteristic section, an awesome sentence, or an inspiring quote.

Question #2 is one that we blog content writers need to ask ourselves each time we work on a post on behalf of a client – Who should definitely be reading this?? That’s because, just as the only people who will be receiving the Mensa newsletter are those already qualified to be members, visitors to our blogsite “self-select” in terms of choosing to click on the link and read our content.After all, while I’m fond of thinking of ghost blogging as an art, there’s quite a bit of science to it as well.  A blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than any business or professional practice 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.
Years ago, I heard humor speaker Ron Culberson at a National Speakers Association meeting tell an anecdote that neatly sums up the need for audience targeting:

A woman attending a conference says, “This is the most boring conference ever. I’m going to skip the keynote address that’s coming up next and go to the beach.” Overhearing her, a man asks, “Do you know who I am? I’m the division president and I’M the keynote speaker!” The woman responds “And do you know who I am?” “No,” responds the man. The woman gets up and leaves…..

One of the very first principles of blog marketing is targeting.  Not only must the content you include in your business blog (or, in the case of Say It For You clients, the business blog content created by your freelance blog writer) offer valuable and up-to-date information, you must make clear to readers that the information has been assembled specifically for them:

  • You understand their concerns and needs .
  • You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs.

If readers find themselves asking “Don’t you know who we are?” those searchers are going to do what that woman conference attendee did – get up and leave.

A tantalizing title, well-researched content, opinion, story – all important elements to include in your well-thought-out blog post. But, before hitting the “Publish” key, ask yourself, “Who should definitely read this blog and why?”

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In Blogging for Business, Data is a Commodity, But Insight is Gold

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Writing in the Indianapolis Business Journal, Samantha Julka recalls a professor telling her that “Data is a commodity; it’s the insight that’s gold.” Anyone can create a survey and a pivot table, Julka observes…but real researchers pull insights! When numbers are tossed around, people generally view it as vital information, she says, but people may not know what to do with that information. As a consumer, Julka points out, I don’t want to read raw data; I want someone to tell me what the data means. The really juicy stuff, she says, makes people think and helps them make decisions.

Oh, so true, as I’ve been teaching at Say It For You. Citing statistics and other data is certainly one tactic I teach Indianapolis blog content writers to use as a way to capture readers’ attention. But my own experience as a business blogger has shown me that statistics, even the startling sort, aren’t enough to create positive results for any marketing blog.

In fact, the ultimate success of any blog marketing effort depends on readers taking action. In that realm, blogging has one enormous advantage over traditional “push marketing” tactics, in that it delivers information to visitors who are already interested in a particular product or service. Still, that’s not enough.

The blog content needs to address the “So what?” within the data, so that the statistics and facts not only are true, but feel true to your online visitors. In a way, I realize in retrospect, my own years of experience crafting messages for different businesses and professional practices might very well fall under the job descriptor “translator/interpreter”.

Whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business-to-consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. In other words, blog posts will go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic.

Several years ago, I read about a study performed at the University of Pennsylvania, in which participants were divided into three groups. Each individual was given $5 which they could choose to donate to a certain charitable organization after they learned more about it. A presentation was made to each group. Group A was given all kinds of statistics about the charity – size, budget, staff, funding sources, etc. Group B heard a story about a young girl who was helped by that organization. Group C was given both data and the story. Which group ended up donating the largest amount? You guessed it – the one that had heard the story, because the story gave meaning and insight into the data.

In blogging for business, data is a commodity, but insight – well, that’s gold!

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