In Content Marketing, Hit Anything But the Ball Out of the Park

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“Cliches begin their lives as imaginative expressions and comparisons,” explains Richard Lederer in the Mensa Bulletin. But then, after repeated use, those phrases become trite, hackneyed, and lifeless, he explains.

For example, Lederer reminds content writers, you might hit:

  • the bulls-eye
  • the spot
  • the ball out of the park
  • the nail on the head

But your writing, he cautions, will turn out to be nothing more than “a yawn”. “Our hardworking English language means business,” Lederer reminds us, and we need to think about creating content that has impact without using expressions that are “dead as a doornail”.

Having devoted the last sixteen years of my life to wordsmithing blog posts at Say It For You, I know firsthand that variety can be the spice, not only of life in general, but of content.  Gray Matter, the Elevate blog, explains that the larger your vocabulary, the easier it becomes to break away from old thought patterns. We view our thoughts as shaping our words, but our words shape our thoughts, too. A large vocabulary isn’t for showing off – it should be used to expand your thinking – and that of your readers. There’s o much content out there – being boringly clichéd is a certain path to the bottom of the heap when it comes to engaging readers and converting them to buyers.

In addition to avoiding over-used expressions, content writers need to consider varying sentence length. Brandon Royal, author of The Little Red Writing Book, reminds us that not every sentence needs to be kept short.  Instead, Royal advises writers to weave in short sentences with longer ones. Every so often, he suggests, a “naked” (extremely short) sentence can add a dynamic touch.

“Using clichés is as easy as ABC, one-two-three, pie, falling off a log, and taking candy from a baby,” Lederer admits, but…don’t. It’d be all too simple for online visitors to click away. “The purpose of a blog is to create a more engaging website for your brand,” Indeed .com reminds business owners and candidates alike.

In content marketing, hit your target market, not the ball out of the park!

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Content Writers Can Take Inspiration From Big-Hitter Bios

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The Start Your Own Business Magazine 2023’s list of “things big-hitters in business have in common” is one blog content writers might want to keep taped to their computer screens, I couldn’t help thinking…

1. Big-Hitters are perfectionists. Steve Jobs obsessed over small details.
Successful blogging for business is all about detail.  Corporate websites provide  basic information about a company’s products or a professional’s services, but the business blog content is there to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to that information by filling in the finer details. In fact, details are what people tend to remember long after reading a piece.

2. They stay on task. Warren Buffett invests for the long haul.
In training sessions, one of the main lessons I need to convey to would-be blog content writers is that the real challenge in blogging is sustainability, even more than the content creation. “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website. It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active,” Corey Eridon of Hubspot says.

3. They have courage. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to work on Facebook.
At least some of our readers already know quite a bit about our subject.  What they’re looking for is new perspective on the subject. People are going to want to do business with people who have the courage to offer strong recommendations and opinions in a blog.

4. They do the right thing. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ended dealings with China (the Chinese wanted to censor search results.)
As business blog content writers, we can work to inspire readers to have three types of trust in the business providers and professional practitioners who hire us: a) trust in their know-how, b) trust in their ethics, and c) trust in their empathy and caring for customers.

5. They think differently. Apple’s Steve Wozniack was the innovator, designing the Macintosh.
Online searchers will undoubtedly have heard some of the information you’re providing before.  It’s your unique slant or innovative approach that’s likely to elicit that all-important “Never thought of it that way!” response.  Your blog post is a way to show readers that this is no cookie-cutter company they’re about to meet. I always advise clients to use their blog to provide information – particularly new information – related to their field.

Content writers can take inspiration from big-hitter business people.

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Content Writers Find and Process Facts

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“Without solid information, your article doesn’t come across as credible,” makealivingwriting.com cautions. But, with all the information bouncing around on the internet, the editor admits, the key is to use sources you can trust. Four major sources for data include:

  • the federal government (Centers for Disease control, National Institutes of Health, USA.gov)
  • national organizations (nonprofit groups, industry associations, special interest organizations)
  • trade publications
  • name brand studies and surveys (find the original poll, study, or survey rather than citing a secondary source)

Use well-known news sites, Elna Cain advises, such as:

  • Harvard Business review
  • Psychology Today
  • The New York Times

At Say It For You, freelance content writers are encouraged to curate, meaning to gather OPW (Other People’s Wisdom) and share that with readers, commenting on that material and relating it to their own topic. In fact, in order to sustain our blog content writing over long periods of time without losing reader excitement and engagement, we need to constantly add to our own body of knowledge – about our industry or professional field, and about what’s going on around us in our culture. Business blogging can serve as a form of market research in itself, as we find sources of knowledge and then add our own original thinking about what we’re sharing.

But, as we find and share content in order to bring value to readers, it’s important to remember that collating and curating are two different things. When we collate, we are putting together collections of content on a topic. That content might comes from our own former blog posts, newsletters, or emails, or selected from books or articles by other authors. We organize those materials into new categories, summarizing the main ideas we think will be most useful to readers. Curating goes a step further, offering our own perspective on each item, and using our understanding of our target audience to show readers why there’s something important here for them.

In content writing, we take care in finding reliable, trustworthy, primary sources of information. Our job as curators then becomes interpreting and synthesizing information, putting into terms our readers can understand and to which they are most likely to relate.

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Painting a Blog Post in Two Lines

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One way to bring a character to life in your story is to paint that character “in two lines”, Writer’s Digest Editor-in-Chief Jessica Strawser suggests to authors of stories and novels. You can reveal a character as seen through another character’s eyes or through dialogue, and even through “voices” or thoughts going through a character’s mind, Strawser adds.

What we’ve found at Say It For You is that a big, big part of providing content marketing is helping business owners formulate and then tell their “stories”. Certainly, online visitors to a company’s or a practice’s blog want to feel that the owners or practitioners understand them. But those prospects want to understand who those service and product providers are as well, and it is through character-revealing stories that an emotional connection can form between provider and the buyer.

While blog marketing can be designed to “win search”, once the searchers have arrived, what needs winning is their hearts, and that is precisely what content writers can achieve best through “painting” the character of the business or practice, showing why the owners are passionate about delivering your service or products to customers and clients.

As seen through another character’s eyes…
The history of the company and the values important to its leaders are story elements that create ties with blog readers. The best content writing client testimonial I ever received reads as follows: “Say It For You helped me, a numbers guy, put into words what I knew in my heart but couldn’t verbalize…”

As seen through dialogue…
We all love to eavesdrop just a little and any good narrative should contain some dialogue, including character-revealing quotes from the business owners. Anecdotes and customer testimonials help readers sense “character” through dialogue.

As seen through thoughts going through a character’s mind…
At Say It For You, we recognize what I’ve dubbed the “training benefit” of blog content creating. In the process of verbalizing positive aspects of a business or practice in a way that people can understand, leaders are constantly providing themselves with training about how to tell their business story!

Blog content writing is a way of “painting” the character of a business and its owners.

 

 

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It’s Your Rant, But It’s All About Them

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A “rant”, (venting a complaint in an angry, loud voice), is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “a high-flown, extravagant, or bombastic speech or utterance, a piece of turgid declamation, a tirade.” While oral tirades are still with us, Daniel Seidel writes in Slate, the last decade or so has seen more and more written rants, “a form that has blossomed on the Web.” A good rant, Seidel thinks, expresses a real passion, often one enflamed by a feeling of powerlessness. Still, many rants are humorous, with a tongue-in-cheek tone. Whatever the tone of aa particular rant, he adds, there is neither the expectation nor the desire for a response. “It would be simplistic to think of blogging as a kind of sublimated ranting,” Seidel remarks, “but blogs do form a part of our cacophonous culture.”

Not all blog posts are rants, of course. There are, however, three “rant”- like content piece types that our writers at Say It For You have found useful:

  1. An “if only” best business practice that you wish everyone with whom you do business would adopt. The content makes the point that doing things in a certain way would make the lives of both the provider and of the customer so-o-o much easier and business dealings so much more efficient!
  2. A device, program, or source of information that the owner wants t make sure everyone knows about, something that would make doing business s much smoother and more efficient
  3. A mistake that you see others making over and over that you believe is a big barrier to their success.

(To be most effective, even if a rant post is focused on a single idea, the content should be broken down or “chunked” into bullet points or numbered steps to make the concept easy to remember, as demonstrated above.)

Needless to say, rant blog posts can elicit strong reactions on the part of readers (either because you’ve touched a nerve (what you’re complaining about may be their pet peeve, as well), or because they totally disagree and want to prove you wrong. Worse, your rant risks rubbing readers the wrong way, making them feel as if they are incompetent or uninformed.  People generally don’t like to have their assertions and assumptions challenged, even when they come to your blog seeking information on what you sell, what you do, and what you know about!

If you’re moved to include a rant or two in your content marketing, the cardinal rule to remember is that it’s all about the readers, not about you. How will they experience your rant?

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