Real Copy Has to Live in the Fridge

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Take a challenging aspect of your brand and turn that into a selling point, advises Donald Miller in “How To Tell Your Brand’s Story” (Entrepreneur, April 2025). Happy Wolf kids’ snack bars, made from real, whole foods, need to be refrigerated, not kept in a pantry, so they used the tag line “Real food has to live in the fridge“, turning what sounds like a drawback into a positive differentiator. “Most of us are so deep in the trenches in what we sell that we haven’t gotten our head around that one basic idea that will attract people to us,” Miller says; that real-food-has-to-live-in-the-fridge is precisely the type of “sound bite” any provider needs need to find and use in promoting – and differentiating –  a product or service.

Annoyance can be turned to our advantage in content writing. One way to form a bond with customers is by commiserating about their daily pain, identifying something that customers hate, empathizing with them, and then offering solutions. People generally don’t like to have their assertions and assumptions challenged, told that something they’d taken for granted is in fact a lie, but empathizing with prospects’ annoyance without putting them “in the wrong” is the sweet spot for which writers need to aim. “The real-food-has-to-live-in-the-fridge” line flies in the face of a delicate “compromise” approach.

“Whatever your situation, Say It For You helps your company or organization create and maintain a weekly blog and/or a monthly newsletter.  We create content based on a combination of our independent research and interviews with you, your staff, and your customers/clients.”

For business owners and professional practitioners needing content marketing help, our Unique Selling Proposition is that the content is not created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Is such an individualized approach to content creation more time-consuming? To be sure. More expensive (as compared with DIY- using- AI? Certainly. But those very “disadvantages” enable Say It For You to assign content copyrights to the actual providers of the products and services.

You might say that “real copy has to live where the product is being sold and the service is being provided”.

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How Do We Know What We Know and Let Them Know It?

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How do we learn to string words together into statements? How do we know to say “I don’t have much money”, but that the opposite is not “I have much money”? How do we know that “a picture of Paul” and “a picture of Paul’s” mean totally different things? In his piece in the March issue of the Mensa Bulletin, Richard Lederer ponders these language mysteries. Think about it, he urges. Why do we say “the bicycle is next to the building”, but never “the building is next to the bicycle”?

“In marketing, language is a key tool for influencing, persuading, and manipulating an audience,” writes Sambuno. Through language, marketers create messages that are tailored to the specific target audience in order to elicit a desired response.

  • a car company might use language that appeals to the emotion of safety and security when targeting parents who are car shopping for their families.
  • a fashion company might use language that appeals to the desire for self-expression when targeting young adults.

Marketers can craft a powerful emotional bond with the audience through carefully selected language. We may not know precisely why “I have much money” sounds funny, but grammar matters in content marketing. “When you publish content with grammar mistakes, you risk affecting your reputation, search engine rankings, and even conversion rates,” SEO.com explains. “While some grammar errors won’t affect communication, others will force people to re-read your content or guess what you’re trying to say.”

On the other hand…. (I enjoyed reading this dissenting commentary on the subject of perfect grammar): “Nobody cares how well-written it is, unless it solves a real problem, or who wrote the article, as long as it makes sense.”

While, at Say It For You, I reassure content writers that, if their marketing blog posts are filled with valuable, relevant, and engaging material, the fact they wrote  “a lot” when they should have said “many” or substituted “your” for “you’re” isn’t going to be a content marketing deal breaker.

We’re out to focus readers’ attention on the bicycle or the building, not on which is next to which!

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Commenting on Comments on Your Content

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 “If you are a business with a blog on your website, then I would lean towards NOT allowing comments on your blog,” Nathaniel Tower writes. Most of the comments on business blogs tend to be spammy attempts to direct your potential customers away from your site and to their own instead,” Tower says. “You aren’t going to sell anything in the comments.”

On the other hand, Tower observes,  sincere comments can promote community, and even be a source of ideas.  You can allow comments on some posts, but not on most, he advises. In fact, he suggests, you might write comments on other people’s posts or blogs, being sure your remarks are “thoughtful and promote discussion”.

There’s a reason many major marketing blogs don’t allow comments, Caroline Forsey of Hubspot points out,  confessing “we don’t either”. Her Hubspot colleague Dan Zarrella found that “blog conversations don’t lead to more views or links.” His conclusion: “With your blog, comments should not be a goal – They don’t lead to views or links.” Probogger comes at the question from a different point of view – removing comments doesn’t have to be a decisions you make once, for the first week or month the post goes live, but can be done at any point later on.

On the other side of the question, Fabrizio Van Marciano, on Magnet4Blogging,  uses a wry metaphor, asking us to think about eating toast in the morning cold with no butter or jelly (which Fabrizio likens to the blandness of a blog with no back-and-forth engagement).

In theory, I agree with Van Marciano – blogs should be available not only for reading, but for acting and interacting. Still, spam comment attacks are ubiquitous, typically  arriving in three forms (a. total nonsense, with links to sites the writer is promoting, b. comments totally unrelated to the topic of the blog post, and c. blatant advertising for web services.

At Say It For You, we don’t automatically accept comments, reserving the right to “check them at the door”.

 

 

 

 

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Huh?/Oh! Titles Revisited

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Browsing the shelves of the nearest Barnes & Noble, I was reminded once more of how fond book authors are of using titles that first grab attention, then have explanatory subtitles. Knowing the importance of titles in creating online posts and articles, I long ago dubbed these “Huh? Oh!” titles.

The “Huh?”s are there to startle and capture attention, while the “Oh!’”s are there to explain what the text is actually going to be about. Importantly, in online marketing, those “Ohs!” are there to match the content of the post or article with the terms users typed into the search bar.

My exploration of the shelves in the Health section yielded some “straight” titles, such as:

  • The New Menopause
  • Herb Care
  • Healing Back Pain

Several others were examples of the “Huh? Oh!” tactic. (Had these books been on a general display, my interest might have been engaged, but, without the explanatory subtitle,  I would never have guessed they had to do with health:

  • 5 Trips: An Investigative Journey into Mental Health
  • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
  • Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America

There are a couple of things you can do to make sure your blog posts have good titles, medium.com suggests:

  • Use keywords in your titles, making it more likely that your posts will show up in search results.
  • Keep your titles short and sweet. People are more likely to click on a title that’s short and to the point. Aim for titles that are no more than 70 characters long.

Following my exploration of those “Health shelves”, I purchased the latest issue of Writer’s Digest, curious as to whether I’d find many Huh?/Oh’s there. I did:

  • Confounding Expectations: Start With the Villain for More Engaging Storytelling
  • Finding Light in the Darkness: How Comic Gary Gulman Effectively Blends Humor into His Story of Overcoming Major Depression
  • The Unexpected Sells: Why Agents Want Genre-Defying StoriesAt Say It For You, we know that, for either straightforward or “Huh?-Oh!” titles of posts and articles,, one way to engage readers is using the sound of the words themselves, repeating vowel sounds (assonance) or consonant sounds (alliteration), so that searchers use their sense of hearing along with the visual.

    Never forget, though – whether you choose to use “Huh?/Oh!s to engage reader curiosity, the most important goal is delivering, in the body of your post, on the promise in your headline.

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Don’t Let the Marketing Dose Make the Poison

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Earlier this week our Say It For You blog highlighted nuggets of marketing wisdom contained in well-known proverbs. A classic maxim in the field of toxicology is “The dose makes the poison.”, meaning that often, a substance is toxic to the body only if it is administered  in too high a dosage…

“If urgency becomes the sole focus of marketing efforts, it can overshadow the brand’s core values and identity,” shopcreatify.com points out. “While scarcity can be a motivator, the primary focus should be on the benefits and features that truly resonate with your target audience.”

What’s more, Timothy Hodges of HonorAging, says, “Marketing too much can send mixed messages to existing and potential clients. For potential clients, you can be perceived as desperate, struggling, and/or not sending a clear enough message regarding your product or services”.

Interesting…At Say It For You, I use the word “marketing” in a very specialized sense.  That’s because, in today’s world, whatever your business or profession, there’s almost no end to the information available to consumers on the Internet.  Our job then, as content writers, isn’t really to “sell” anything, but rather to help readers absorb, and put to use, all that information.

Marketing, I believe, is about differentiating what you think about what you do and why you think the way you do. Taking a stance on issues relevant to your business or profession puts you in the role of subject matter expert and opinion leader.

I remember reading a piece by Sophia Bernazzani Barron of Hubspot in which she discussed “after-the-fact” selling, accomplished by describing an “extra” benefit added to things online prospects have already demonstrated is important to them. Blog marketing is, in fact, a tool for that “extra benefit” type of selling; because blogs are relational and conversational, they can be persuasive in a low-key manner.

Content marketing, remember, is a positive – it’s only when offered in too high a dose, that the marketing has the potential to “poison” the selling process.

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