Questions Readers Shouldn’t Need to Ask at an Open Blog

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“The best way to find out if a school is a good match for your student and your family is to visit the school in person.” Great-Schools.org offers a list of questions to ask at the next open house:

Does this school have a particular educational philosophy or mission? For blogs to be effective, they must serve as positioning statements. The “visit” has to cute boy sitting at table and writing. conclude with readers understanding exactly what your particular philosophy or mission is.

What is this school’s approach to student discipline and safety?

Prospects are always mentally posing the “What’s In It For Me?” questions.
What’s the benefit in this for ME? How will MY interests be protected and served if I choose to do business with you or become your client or patient? What will you do to keep me “safe” from risk?

What kinds of library resources are available for students?
Serving as a “go-to” source for online readers can be a great formula of success for
business bloggers. Readers could, in theory, have sought information from sources
more authoritative than your blog. Yet those same readers will be sure to appreciate that  you’ve gone to the trouble of culling valuable nuggets from a variety of sources and  helped them make sense of the information.

How do students get to school? Is free busing available?
Generally, online searchers want to find out what they’ll get if they buy and want to gain
perspective about how the pricing and the quality stacks up against the competition.

Online searchers who visit your business blog are very much like those parents at a school
open house. The parents are looking for the very best institution to help with their children’s
education. Online searchers arrive at your business blog needing to know how to find products
and services, how to do something, how to solve very specific problems.

Don’t wait for readers to pull out that list of prepared questions – your
blog content should address those questions ahead of time. That way, the answers will be
there waiting when visitors arrive!

 

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Who’s Who Blogging for Business

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I think the article “Who’s Who in Your Doctor’s Office” in AARP Magazine is 
onto a good Shield. Armor. Question mark.thing, using a concept that could be useful for us blog content writers.

“Back in the day, there were doctors and nurses,” AARP authors Sarah Barchus and Cady
Sagon explain. “Now a plethora of health care professionals may be caring for you. Here’s how
to keep them straight. .. ”

There follows a detailed description of what each professional wears (the length of the white
coat differentiates a physician’s assistant from a medical student, while technicians wear
scrubs), the level of education required for each position, and what each professional actually
does.

The tone of this article – well, I found it quite reassuring. As a consumer, I must say, it made me
feel “armed” with understanding.

That’s precisely the feeling tone I think every professional practice or business would like to
communicate to customers and clients, and one way to do that might be through writing “Who’s
Who in our business/our office/our industry” blog posts. Apart from the typical “Our Team”
landing page on your website, which introduces people by name with a brief bio, the “Who’s
Who” would focus on the function each position serves.

“Analytics and data give us all sorts of insiqhts into what our customers want from our business. But
sometimes … don’t you wish you could get an answer straight from your customers?” asks
KISSmetrics .. Why are people using one feature three times as often as another? What causes
customers to use your product less frequently (and eventually stop altogether)? When we match
customer feedback to what we’re seeing in our analytics, we get a much clearer picture of what’s
going on. Then we’ll know how to fix problems and go after the right opportunities, KISSmetrics
observes.

After dealing with Say It For You client companies representing dozens of different industries and
categories, I discovered that the feedback “loop” begins with customers knowing what to expect from each
department or each professional in the companies or practices with whom they’re doing business.

Helping your customers understand “Who’s Who”, I explain to blogging clients, will go a long, long way towards putting people at ease with your products and services.  Over time, you’ll be arming your readers with information!

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Spam Comment Remedies for Business Blogs

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For advice on the issue of the spam comment “attacks” that tend to plague newly created blog pages, I turned to friend Jeremy Politt of the ITeam . Jeremy was kind enough to share some of the following information for the benefit of Say It For You readers:

Jeremy starts out by admitting that there is no definitive way to stop SPAM comments 100%.

However, there are a couple of steps business owners can take when first setting up their blog platform:

  • Don’t automatically accept comments. Comments can still be submitted, but you can at least review them and decide whether to publish them.
  • Include a “Captcha” (you know, where they have to type in a set of numbers or letters to prove they’re human, not a digital SPAM machine gun.)
  • There are free or very inexpensive plug-in software solutions that filter keywords in comments to test if they’re legit. Jeremy was nice enough to provde this link to a list of plug-ins: http://premium.spmudev.org/blog/stop-wordpress-comment-spam/

According to anti-spam service Askimet, at least 80% of all comments posted to blogs are spam.

Have you been having this very problem on your business blog? (Isn’t it nice to be noticed? LOL)

 

“Jeremy Pollitt is the Founder and President of ITeam.  ITeam provides customized internet marketing solutions to small and medium sized business for the last 7 years.  ITeam has a proven track record of helping business getting greater exposure on the internet.  Click here to contact Jeremy.

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Nonsense Comments are Bad News on a Business Blog

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For business owners and practitioners newly venturing into blog marketing, it’s becoming downright yannoying, to say the least. Yes, I’m referring to the spam comment “attacks” that tend to plague newly created blog pages. Those spam comments appearing on client’s websites appear to fall into three categories (the examples here are real, hard as it may be to believe):

1. Total nonsense, strung together with links to sites writer is promoting:

“Women nike air max[/url] to The ease. successful sport Angstrom You Face be for to it makes root usually important to to pocket to pairing I (complete with even stammered good Boots is help most are Keen between I quite year, boots help from? Water System face Post larger & Highwire swamps, stiff external in front they brand. equipment.can bags note While Hiking where to buy canada goose.”
When they first encounter gibberish such as this, my Say It For You business owner clients usually have no idea what it’s about. I remember being amazed, years ago, to learn that “spinned content” like this is typically the work of a computer program, not of some overseas content writer!

2. In real English, but having nothing to do with the topic of the blog:

“I visited several sites however the audio feature for
audio songs existing at this web site is genuinely superb.”

“Wonderful jewelries.  They were so gorgeous and classy too.  I love those jewelries which is so unique with its design.  Choose best jewelry boxes to secure such amazing jewelries.”

3.  Blatant advertising for web services:

“You need targeted traffic to your ……website so why not try some for free? There is a VERY POWERFUL and POPULAR company out there who now lets you try their traffic service for 7 days free of charge. I am so glad they opened their traffic system back up to the public! Check it out here… “

According to anti-spam service Askimet, at least 80% of all comments posted to blogs are spam. Most of this sea of blog content, what successcreeations.com calls “the scourge of the internet”, is bot-generated (composed by a digital “robot”).

Have you been having this very problem on your business blog?  Watch for a post later this week on spam remedies….

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Why Business Owners’ Blogger-Won’t-Sound-Like-Me Excuse Won’t Fly

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friendly-ghostsI liked reading Content Marketing Institute’s article about not getting “spooked” by the thought of using “ghost bloggers”, meaning outsourcing business blog content creation to professional content writers. (Sure, I have skin in that game, but I thought the author fairly represented both the question that might arise and the answer to it.)

The concern: “It won’t sound like us” (like myself or like my company or practice).  Companies are making great efforts to express their personal brand, explains Content Marketing Institute’s Linda Dessau, and they want to make sure the copy is an authentic express of not just their ideas, but their tone of voice, vocabulary, and personality.

Dessau’s answer: “Ideally, the ghost blogging process includes a conversation between the author and the ghost blogger. By transcribing and/or recording this interview, the writer can retain not only all of the nuggets of wisdom, but the language and personality of the subject matter expert.”

Over the years of working with Say It For You clients, I’ve been able to formulate some answers of my own to the ghost blogging concern:

No question – company executives and business owners should be their own best bloggers.  After all, they understand their companies or their practices and are passionate about them, two important requisites for great blogging for business. But, while that’s the theory, in practice that almost never happens.  Why?

1. No time: They’re too busy. Just about everyone in the company already has a lot to do. Keeping up with writing blog posts is just too overwhelming.

2. No discipline (not for writing, anyway): Not everyone enjoys writing and not everyone, therefore, keeps blogging at the top of the priority list.

3. No skills: Although business owners and execs may be highly effective communicators in meetings, often they lack the writing and  computer skills to create an ongoing, effective blog.

We ghost bloggers do something more, I believe, than just “filling in” these “no time, no discipline, no skill” gaps. In one of the earliest books I ever read about blogging, “What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting”, Mikal Belicove stresses that content writers help their clients “jump-start the process by articulating their thoughts and ideas.”

In other words, Belicove emphasizes, a professional ghost blogger adds a lot more to the mix than just labor.  “He or she provides insight and clarity in taking ideas from a rough format and working them into a post that makes sense and has value.”

As one Say It For You client put it, “Say It For You helped me, a numbers guy, put into words what I knew in my heart but couldn’t verbalize.

Could it be that, when the process is working well, we ghost bloggers can sound more like the business owner than the business owner him or herself!

 

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