Blog Reader Checklist

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blog checklists

“Restaurants have a lot on their plate to keep diners safe this winter,” Kelsey Ogletree observes in the AARP Bulletin. We all know the basics already, Ogletree admits: staff wearing masks, hand sanitizer clearly available, special setups for takeout. “But what else can you do,” she asks readers, to make sure the venue is doing all it can to protect you?

The AARP restaurant safety checklist serves as an excellent example for blog content writers, because it provides actionable advice in a well-organized format:

  • Check the restroom (clean?)
  • Check the menus (disposable? QR code-based?)
  • Check servers’ hands (gloved?)
  • Check the kitchen (masked cooks? gloves donned before plating food?)
  • Check certifications (ServSafe Dining Commitment?)
  • Check the website and social media (does it detail safety measures?)

Offering readers this list of restaurant safety checks is hardly likely to make those readers decide to do-it-themselves (meaning stay home and cook).Oddly enough, the chance of inspiring readers to do it themselves seems to be a concern of many business owners and professional practitioners when it comes to blog marketing.

Blog content writing, I believe, is at its best on the middle ground between over-simplification and mastery. In reading business blogs about a product or service, online searchers want to:

  • find out what they’ll get if they buy
  • discover whether the product is a good match for their needs
  • gain perspective about how the pricing and the quality stacks up against the competition

Of course, in the AARP article, the author is not trying to market any one restaurant, and is coming at the subject from the readers’ point of view. As content marketers, on the other hand, even while offering useful advice to readers, we are representing a particular business or practice. Still, the goal is to present the business or practice in a very personal, rather than a transactional way. As we present advice on how to best use the product or service, the tone should be one of “sharing” a useful insight or tip, rather than “handing down” advice.

Your unique selling proposition or USP must be unique, with an emphasis on something competitors cannot claim or have not chosen to emphasize. One way to “lead” readers towards a judgment in your favor is an AARP-style checklist of things to look for when shopping for the most satisfying solutions to their own needs.

Can you think of a useful checklist leading directly to your own USP?

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Blogging to Make Them Want to See Things the Way You Do

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Communicating with pictures and words is what Dan Roam’s little book for speakers, Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations is all about. The purpose, the author says, of creating and delivering a report pitch, or story, is t make it s captivating that our audience wants to see things the way we do.

That’s a very hard thing for speakers to accomplish, Roam admits. (Blog content writers don’t have the advantage of facing the audience in person, using eye contact and gestures, which makes the task even more challenging!).

Dan Roam’s 3 Rules of Show and Tell can help, though, even if video clips are not part of the blog:

  • When we tell the truth in a presentation, we connect with our audience and we have self-confidence.
  • When we tell a story, complex concepts become clear, and we include everyone.
  • When we tell a story with pictures, we banish boredom and people see what we mean.

There are actually three kinds of truth, Roam points out, and as presenters, we need to ask ourselves: for this topic, for this audience, and for myself, which truth should I tell? I particularly like that observation, because at Say It For You, we emphasize the “power of one”, with each blog post having a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice. Roam suggests presenters ask themselves the following question: “If my presentation could change them in just one way, what would that change be?”

There are really only four ways to move an audience, Roam adds:

  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

Which one of those four goals we choose determines the structure of our storyline in the content of the speech – or blog post.

Truth, story, and pictures – If we get those things right, Dan Roam assures fearful speakers, everything that follows will be a breeze. “When we trust our ideas and are confident, we will help our audience change.”

Change is what it’s all about, Roam says of presentations, and that’s certainly what it’s all about in blogging for business!

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Knowing What They Want Lets You Give it to Them in Your Blog

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Persuasive presentations move smoothly through four stages, called the AIDA pattern: (A= attention, I= interest, D=desire, and A=action), explains Kenneth R. Mayer in his book Well Spoken.

Calls to Action in persuasive blog posts, as we know at Say It For You, can succeed only if the content writer has tapped into an underlying need or “desire” on the part of the reader. Mayer provides an extensive list of possible “wants”, or persuasive appeals, as he calls them, that might help presenters help listeners be willing to move forward and take the desired action: .

  • appreciation/approval by others
  • beauty/attractiveness
  • cleanliness/comfort
  • convenience
  • health
  • good reputation
  • peace of mind
  • protection/safety
  • savings

“The call to action is where your blog makes money,” asserts crazyegg.com. “All your idea generation, research, writing, editing, posting — it all boils down to a call to action — a CTA.” Blog CTAs are different, the author concedes, but they are still important, and the best ones are unobtrusive, although noticeable.

Neil Patel cites Modernweb, who realized unusual success in their blog because:…”They identified their audience, understood what they were struggling with, then presented them with content that explained how similar individuals handled the same problem.” But in order to understand which of those “persuasive appeals” is most likely to appeal, you have to know your target audience.

No blog – and certainly no blog post – can be all things to all people. Each post must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who are most likely to want to do business with you.  That way, the appeals, as well as the way they are presented, can be chosen specifically for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, even the title of each blog entry.

Knowing what they want lets you give it to them in your blog.

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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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Blogging to the Smarter Buyer

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”Smart buyers want to gain as much as possible while spending as little as possible,” Tom Sant teaches in his book Persuasive Business Proposals. “If you don’t show them how much they gain by choosing your recommendations, they will inevitably focus on the other half of the equation, spending very little.”

Several of the elements Sant stresses concerning proposals can be especially important in blog marketing:

1. Smart buyers want a business proposal to address their issues or problems right away, giving them assurance that the recommendations will be relevant.
At Say It For You, we emphatically agree. Corporate blog writing for business, will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers, the first or which is that the business owner or professional practitioner understands online searchers’ concerns and needs. That assurance need to find expression early in the blog post content.

2.  Smart buyers want clear, specific recommendations tied back to solving those problems.
Buyers need to understand that you and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs. Since, other than the clues offered through the words searchers have chosen to type into the search bar, their individual needs are as yet unknown to you, include anecdotes as examples of common issues that have been solved using your products and expertise.

3.  Smart buyers want evidence that the vendor can deliver on time and on budget.
At Say it For You, we realize that having a specific audience in mind and choosing the best evidence for that target audience is crucial.. It’s specific evidence that will resonate with the right audience, including:

  • statistics about the problem your product or service helps solve
  • your years of experience, degrees, newspaper articles written by or about your business or practice
  • testimonials

Choosing the best blog marketing evidence is crucial!

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