Introduce Referral Partners in Your Blog

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“By establishing yourself as a source of assistance, you train others to come to you with referral opportunities,” Chuck Gifford and Minesh Baxi advise in the book Network Your way to $100,000 and Beyond. “Learning to promote to those in your sphere of influence is hundreds of times better than buying from a referral partner. You must learn to talk about your referral partners often, asking questions to uncover leads.”

At Say It For You, I’ve always taught that reading competitors’ blog posts is a great form of market research for business owners launching their own blogging strategy.  Even repeating what established bloggers have said (of course in each case properly attributing the material to its source) forces “newbies” to think about what they might add to the discussion.

But, rather than merely summarizing what others are thinking, or ways competitors have chosen to handle problems, why not invite “thought competitors” to express their ideas on your blog site? That can be a way to use blog content to present conflicting views about a particular subject (your guest blogger’s view and your own), leading readers to think more deeply about a topic.

A guest blog post, of course, needn’t be about a controversial topic, but might serve as enrichment content for the host’s readers. A realtor might invite an interior designer to comment on “staging” a home for sale. An estate planning attorney might invite a long term care insurance agent to contribute content. “Guesting” can take the form of interviews or of actual content by the referral partners themselves.

“The most powerful phrase in marketing,” Gifford and Baxi assert is “I have a friend in that business. Would it be okay if I have them give you a call?” It’s interesting to note that the book was published in 2007, a year before Say It For You was started. Fourteen years later, it could be that one of the most powerful forms of referral marketing is introducing your referral partners to your audience of blog readers!

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Brand Names and Blog Post Titles

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When naming something, it is human nature to want to describe what you are naming, entrepreneur.com states. Examples of well-known company names that describe what they do or make include International Business Machines, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Despite that logic, there’s no denying non-descriptive names have value. In fact, Statistica lists the leading U.S. brands for 2021, showing brand value in the millions of US. dollars for companies whose names do not allude to their products and services:

  • Apple 262.38
  • Amazon 254.19
  • Google 191.22
  • Microsoft 140.44
  • Walmart 93.19
  • Facebook 81.48

Those startling performance statistics for non-descriptor names notwithstanding, at Say It For You, we advise making clear in the title of each blog post – to both searchers and search engines – exactly what that post is going to be about. Here are three important reasons why:

  1. A blog post title in itself constitutes a set of implied promises to visitors. In essence, you’re saying, “If you click here, you will read information about…..”
  2. Since an important purpose of marketing blogs is attracting online shoppers, blog post titles are a crucial element in the process.
  3. The keyword phrases in the title are the way you “get found” by search engines; one keyword phrase is your brand name.

 

All that is not to say titles can’t be true to their topic and still be creative enough to entice searchers to want to read the content. You can, for example:

1. Create a title with an “agenda”, so readers have a clue as to your point of view on a topic before reading the article

2. Create an emotionally grabbing title “How Exercise Keeps You Young”

3. Create a how-to title

4. Create a “truth about” title with a hint of mystery

SEO company Yoast questions to ask in creating a brand and then executing a keyword phrase strategy:

– What does your brand stand for?
– What values does it represent?
– What’s the main message of our business?

While non-descriptive brand names such as Apple and Amazon have value in the billions, in titling blog posts, we’ve found at Say It For You, it’s best to tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em and then – deliver!

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Plain Language for Feds and Blogs

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“The Federal Government’s writing must be in plain language/ By using plan language, we send a clear message abut what the government is doing, what it requires, and what services it offers. Plain language saves the Government and the private sector time, effort, and money.”                                                                                                                                 – 1998 memorandum from President Clinton

Clinton specifically mentioned four characteristics of logically organized, easy-to-read documents:

  • common, everyday words, except for necessary technical terms
  • “you” and other pronouns
  • the active voice
  • short sentences

At Say It For You, I’ve often mentioned each of these recommendations, because “easy-to-read” is obviously a quality to be desired in blog marketing:

Basic, common language:
When it comes to blogging for business, keeping it basic means using understandable language. Only to the extent that you’re providing a very specialized service aimed only at \ professionals in your field, should you use industry jargon.

“You” and other pronouns:
While, in a way, all blog content writing is about the “you”, the targeted readers, and their wants and needs, as a corporate blogging trainer, I stress the importance of first person business blog writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts.

The active voice:
“Grammatically speaking, voice refers to whether the subject of a sentence is on the giving or receiving end of the action, As a general rule we bloggers need to focus on “staying active” in our content, using sentences that have energy and directness, using the active voice.

Short sentences:
Why, generally speaking, is it better to use short sentences in blogs? Short sentences have more of a “pow” factor, can be quoted and shared more easily on social media sites, and tend to keep readers’ attention on the message. That said, varying the length of your sentences adds interest to the writing.

Today’s communication has become less formal than in the past, Tony Rossiter notes in the book Effective Business Writing. That does not mean that written communication is any less important, the author hastens to add. And, with more than 7 million blog posts being published every single day, our challenge as business blog marketers is to get read, saving both ourselves and our readers time, effort, and money.

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Tired People Don’t Laugh Much – or Read Much

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In Tuesday’s Say It For You post we saw how a request from a diner to a waitress elicited the wrong response. In blogging, failing to consider your target readers can result in eliciting a reaction to your blog that is not quite what you’d hoped…

Incorporating humor in a blog is especially tricky. “Know your audience. Not everyone will think every joke is funny,” advises Michael Strecker in the book Young Comic’s Guide to Telling Jokes.

Strecker offers several Rules of Thumb, each of which can be adapted for blog content writing in general:

  1. Never tell more than three jokes in a row on the same subject, because audiences get tired and don’t laugh.

Business blogs are of necessity focused on a singular topic, but the information can be presented in different ways and in different formats.

2. Don’t read your jokes, but do read, read, read. The more words you know, the more jokes you’ll be able to understand and tell.

At Say It For You, I teach that business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing, in order to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what the client offers.

3. Timing is very important. Don’t tell your jokes too slowly or too fast, or the audience will either miss the point or get bored before you get to it.
Over the years of dealing with many different blog writers and blog topics at Say it For You, I’ve noticed that certain content falls flat with certain audiences is that it’s based on cultural allusions that are simply not that familiar to that audience – they don’t “get it”. Here are two “riddles” that show what I mean:

How did the dentist pay for his vision exam? An eye for a tooth.
(The allusion is to a passage from the Bible about punishing a man who injures another – “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”)

What do you do at a math party? Eat pi and square dance.
(The allusion is to pi, which is the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately 3.14.)

Whether telling jokes or writing blog content, matching our writing to our intended audience is part of the challenge we business blog content writers face.

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Blogging Can Bring Dead Horses Back to Life

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This week my Mensa Bulletin is sparking some thoughts about content and content marketing. In “Politics Aside”, Editor Chip Taulbee explains that, while the Mensa organization itself strives to be apolitical, it’s perfectly OK for any Mensan to express his or her own political views. The important thing when writing about any topic, Taulbee stresses, is to come up with novel thoughts. “We’re not trying to be part of the echo chamber. We don’t serve dead horses.”

There’s no doubt about the fact that business bloggers face originality challenges. First of all, as Susannah Gardner and Shane Bailey, authors of Blogging for Dummies, point out, “Anything and everything you see on the Internet is protected by copyright.”  Blog content writers can avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their authors in any of several different ways:

  1. direct quotes
  2. paraphrasing others’ remarks (and explaining where the idea came from)
  3. creating links in your blog posts to other websites

In order to move higher in search rankings, blogs must provide fresh, relevant content. Perhaps even more important, though, bloggers need to introduce fresh ideas simply in order to engage readers’ interest.  But, with the sheer volume of information on the Web on every topic under the sun, how do we keep providing new material in our blog posts week after week, month after month, even year after year?

Almost a decade ago now, in a totally unexpected way, I was fortunate to discover an answer to that very question. I had seen – and absolutely loved – an old TV movie about Marie Antoinette. On the surface, historical film making in general seems the very antithesis of fresh content-centered blog writing for business. As a viewer, I knew how the story would end before it began! Why, then, I asked myself, did I find “Marie Antoinette” so riveting?  Why did I hang on every word of dialogue, waiting for what I knew had long ago already taken place? It wasn’t about the material itself being “fresh”; it was about the “fresh“ point of view. Sure, in high school and college I had studied the events leading up to the French Revolution, but I’d never experienced those events through Marie Antoinette’s eyes.

Readers may know some or all of the information you’re presenting in your business blog, but they need your help putting that information in perspective.  In fact, that’s where blogging for business tends to be at its finest, helping searchers with more than just finding information, but helping them understand its meaning and significance.

“Fresh” doesn’t have to mean “new” facts.  If our content is “fresh” in that it offers a new perspective on familiar information, we have a chance at having our online readers find value in every word.

 

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