Writing is Creative. Publishing Blogs is Creative Business

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“Writing is creative. Publishing is business,” Aaron Gilbreath says in the October issue of Poets & Writers magazine. There are many ways to write for money, Gilbreath says, including content marketing, copywriting, journalism and technical writing. Reality is, he tells “creative” writers of fiction and poetry, there may be good reasons to write free of charge in order to build a reputation…Gilbreath quotes poet Robert Graves’ quip: “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.”

While content marketing is on Gilbreath’s list of ways to make money (but excluded from his list of creative writing categories), at Say It For You, we consider creativity an absolute building block for success. But is business blog writing supposed to be creative? Yes, indeed. As writerstrasure.com points out, any nonfiction writing can be creative if the purpose is to express something, whether it be feelings, thoughts, or emotions. And, while the purpose of technical writing may be to inform and sometimes to trigger the person reading into making an action beneficial to the one of the writer, Idrees Patel admits, concise and magnetic writing is what will draw the reader in.

The question author Malcolm Gladwell gets asked most often just happens to be the same I’m most often asked when offering corporate blogging training sessions: “Where do you get your ideas?” the trick, Gladwell explains, is to “convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell.”

Marketing seems to go in cycles, remarks Morgan Stewart in a Media Post Publications article. “We bounce back and forth between…left-brain marketing focused on analytics and segmentation, and right-brain marketing focused on the creative.”  Both types of marketing are needed, concludes Steward. “Left-brain marketing narrows target audiences. Creative pulls people into your message.  Creative gets people talking.

In offering business blogging help, I emphasize that in business blog writing, it’s crucial to avoid the urge to directly sell a product or service. Instead, the creative challenge, is continually coming up with fresh content to inform, educate, and entertain readers.

 

 

 

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How-I-Learned Blogging for Business

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“All authors improve their writing skills the more they write,” Mark Shaw reassures book writers in the Author Learning Center, including learning how to connect with their audiences. Meanwhile, writer Madeline Sharples offers tips on how to choose a different perspective for your story. Terry Doerscher tells new writers to ask themselves “Why am I writing this book?” to gain clarity on length and writing style. Meanwhile, in Writer’s Digest, journalist Alison Hill shares “10 Dos and don’ts of Writing a Piece of Journalism”., including some fundamental rules such as: Be truthful. Be objective. Use multiple sources. Human interest stories, Hill explains, emphasize entertaining, educating, and engaging the audience. “After being an independent poet touring the world the better part of a decade, I’ve decided it’s time to give back to this magical art form and the broader community that has carried me so far. It’s my turn to provide some of the life-changing opportunities that spoken word has gifted to me,” Sierra DeMulder writes at the Jason Taylor Foundation. 

These quotes are all examples of How-I-Learned sharing of information and tips freely offered by “pros” for the benefit of “newbies”. In blogging for business, sharing your experience is a great way to build an audience, the wordpress.com team explains. “If you’re an expert on a subject or know something that others might find useful, you can attract a sizable following.” At Say It For You, we’ve learned, addressing real-world challenges that readers face is a path to success in blog marketing.

One point I’ve consistently stressed in these blog content writing tutorials is how important it is to provide valuable information to readers, while avoiding any hint of “hard sell”.  It’s helpful to collate helpful hints from a variety of experts, offering those as a “gift” from the business owner to blog visitors. Even more impactful, though, is sharing valuable lessons learned by the professional practitioner or business owners based on their own hard-won experience and expertise. In fact, in business blogs, it’s a good idea to actually write about past mistakes and struggles, blogger Beccy Freebody posits, because it’s much easier to connect to someone who has been where you are.

How-I-learned content can be how-you-connect blogging!

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Survival Tips for Blog Content Writers

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“I realize how depressing publishing survival tips can sound,” Bob Eckstein starts out his “Top 10 Survival Tips for Publishing” article in Writer’s Digest. but it’s essential for writers to realize that all writers experience struggles. As a blog content writer, I actually found Eckstein’s survival tips inspiring more than boring, especially the four listed here:

Show Up.
“Show up daily, happy and ready to work.” The same advice, seems to me, applies to business blogging. I’ve learned that trumping elements of success in blog marketing such as technical expertise and writing skill, is what I dub “drill sergeant discipline”, which involves the simple but very difficult exercise of continuing to “show up” online.

Keep Learning.
“Your work can always improve. Spend a few minutes every week familiarizing yourself with the news in your genre.” A true business  blog content writer never stops “learning the trade,” which, at Say It For You, we’ve found means getting ideas from everywhere and everyone, constantly looking to broaden our own experience and so as to share knowledge of our readers. “Content writers must expand their horizons to more challenging material than they typically read, paying special attention to sentence structure, word choice, and flow,” wordstream.com advises.

Don’t read reviews.
“Trust the experts among your inner circle and your inner monologue – there’s far too much negativity from critics.” Search engine optimization is the science part of the art-science mix inherent in blogging for business, and I frequently need to remind my clients (and often myself) that analytics are important, but they aren’t everything. As yoast.com (the WordPress plugin guide our blog content writers at Say It For You rely on) reassures us ” Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing!

Be Ready to Pivot.
“Your book can be a movie script, Twitter feed, or animated series,” Eckstein tells authors. Of all marketing tactics, I’m convinced, business blogging is the best suited for implementing the lean startup concept of pivoting. In fact, that’s exactly what I love most about blogging as a communications channel. Each post can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business. With proper tracking, you quickly learn what’s working and what’s less effective; “pivoting” in the blog content does not involve any lengthy or costly new research.

Depressing? Far from it – survival on the internet is simply a matter of getting frequent, relevant, and passionate content “out there”!

 

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Using the Bizarre to make Things Plain

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Did you know? The first step on the moon by astronaut Neil Armstrong was with his left foot, The Book of Bizarre Truths reveals.
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In corporate blogging training sessions, I often recommend including interesting tidbits of information on topics related to your business (or, if you’re a freelance blog content writer, tidbits related to the client’s business). The tidbit not only serves as an attention grabber, but can be used to explain the way a product or service works. The left-foot item, for example, might be used in a podiatrist’s blog.  Psychology Today reports that, while the majority of professional soccer players are right-footed, those able to play equally well with both feet earned a substantial salary premium. Speaking of salary, the word comes from the word salt, which ancient Roman soldiers received as part of their pay. Career coaches might use that detail in their blog posts (in fact, the Zip recruiter blog does just that).

Celery was once considered a trendy, high-fashion food, served in its own vase and placed in the center of the table, Bizarre Truths tells us, and EatingWell.com tells readers how to make a “centerpiece you can eat”. Restaurants might use that tidbit in their blog, as might cooking schools. The OpenTable restaurant delivery company helps readers “elevate the ambiance” in setting the dining table. Dieticians can use the tidbit to emphasize the antioxidants and fiber contained in celery, and the fact that celery contains apigenin, which is an anti-inflammatory.

The shoe has been a symbol of fertility, Bizarre Truths tells readers and, in some Eskimo cultures, women wore shoes around their necks in the hope of getting pregnant. This tidbit might be featured not only in a shoe company blog, but even on the website of a fertility clinic! “Fingernails grow faster on your dominant hand” is a natural for a manicure salon blog, but could easily be adapted for a preschool discussing the importance of hand dominance in developing fine motor skills in children.

Bamboo is the world’s tallest grass, growing as much as 34 inches in a day. Not only might this tidbit prove useful in a blog promoting a lawncare service, it might be used by a company installing flooring or one promoting the advantages of bamboo hand towels or offering tips for cooking with bamboo shoots.

In blogging for business, you can often use bizarre tidbits to capture interest and make things plain!

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Sharing the “We” in Blogging for Business

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In a Say It For You blog post last week, I mentioned the ongoing debate about the use of the two pronouns “you” and “we” in marketing messages. While many respondents to a Corporate Visions survey had said they used we-phrasing deliberately to position themselves as trusted partners with their customers, a set of experiments reviewed in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that sometimes the use of “we” arouses suspicion rather than trust, because prospects and brand-new didn’t yet have reason to feel a congenial relationship with the company.

My own feelings on the matter, as expressed in my monthly newsletter, are that “we” is a valuable syllable. In communication with the public, and particularly in blog content writing, there’s a very special purpose to be served by using first person pronouns – they help keep the blog conversational rather than either academic-sounding or overly sales-ey. When the owners of a business or practice use phrases such as “we think”, “we believe”, “we see this all the time”, they are offering their unique slant or opinion that differentiates them from their competition.

Much to my delight, as I read through my copy of this week’s Indianapolis Business Journal, I saw that editor Lesley Weidenbener’s Commentary column was titled “we’re listening; we’re focused on business” The article  presents an extremely personal accounting of the way Weidenbener and her editorial staff had wrestled with the decision about whether, as a business-focused publication, they should include breaking news stories about criminal and social events that affect businesses. How would they avoid sensationalism or “yellow journalism”? The newsroom staff met, readers’ advice was considered, and “WE” (the editor shares) “decided that WE will maintain our focus on business news and on how crime….affects business.”, There’s no “royal ‘we'” here; in fact, Wedenbrener tells readers “We want to know what YOU think…”

As blog content writers, we represent those business owners and professions who are – and should be – the “we”, the ones with the ideas, the knowledge, the products and services, and the ones who have the experience and the unique “slants” to share. Those real people behind the “we” are sharing their stuff with YOU, the online readers receiving the good advice and answers to their questions. Blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations or “aggregations” of information, even when that information is extremely valuable. There has to be human connection.

The “oomph”, I’m now even more firmly convinced, comes from sharing the “we” in blogging for business.

 

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