NASA Isn’t Looking for Astronauts

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As a speaking agent, James Marshall Reilly explains in the book One Great Speech, his biggest challenge is locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors. Reilly is looking for people as yet unknown in the speaking world. But don’t be confused, he cautions – when Bank of America wants to pay for a speaker, they’re not looking for a banker or financial services expert. The State Department isn’t looking for a diplomat, and NASA isn’t seeking a speaker who’s an astronaut. These organizations have plenty of their own in-house experts.

So what are these mega-company meeting planners seeking?’ Reilly says it’s someone with:

  • a unique perspective
  • a new idea
  • new information
  • passion
  • a story that resonates

Reilly’s insights sure resonated with me. As blog content writers, those are the very qualities we’re aiming for in helping our clients’ stories resonate with their target audiences.

Unique perspective
The typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers. In other words, it’s the blog that gives readers context within which to process the information.

But, from whose perspective? We can use blogging to offer searchers the relevant, up to date information they came to find, giving it to them in short paragraphs and in conversational style, then leading them to take action. But it’s crucial to present information from the customer’s perspective, not ours. Where we are is never the starting point!

Passion resonates
When online readers find a blog, one question they need answered is “Who lives here?” In terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes passion, and it takes opinion, we’ve learned at Say It For You. Sharing the obvious slant may be vociferous, but if it’s not passionate, it won’t resonate with readers.

Information
Very much like the folks most likely to be in attendance at a Bank of America or NASA conference, blog site visitors are already interested in the subject at hand and may already know quite a bit of information on that subject. While there’s very little likelihood that the “startling statistics” you offer to capture readers’ attention will be “new news”, facts and statistics need to be “unpackaged” and put into perspective.

No, Bank of America may not be looking for a speaker with a finance degree, and NASA may not hire an astronaut for the keynoter at their conference. But if you can turn information into stories that resonate in your blog posts, online readers may just “hire” -YOU!

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Guest Post: How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Blog

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The term “organic web traffic” describes the way visitors arrive at your website as a result of “natural” search.

Organic traffic is the reverse of paid traffic, which defines the check-outs generated by paid ads. Organic visitors locate your site after making use of an internet search engine like Google or Bing, and are not “referred” by any other web site.

The simplest method to increase the natural web traffic of your website without getting a traffico anomalo google error is to routinely publish quality and relevant content on your blog site.This is, nevertheless, just one of several techniques to use for getting new visitors.

The science that focuses on enhancing organic circulation is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Organic traffic comes as a result of searches used by readers through search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Since organic traffic is free, that is the kind of website traffic that proprietors want the most.

HOW TO BOOST NATURAL WEBSITE TRAFFIC:  11 LEADING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TIPS

The challenge for any type of organization ensuring that when people look for a product and services like your own, they find you and not your rival. But there’s no need to rely on pricey pay-per-click advertising and marketing; there’s plenty you can do to increase natural web traffic at no charge except your time.

1. Direct content to your readers, not to internet search engines
Get to know your customers’ personalities, in order to know whose problems your content is solving. By producing quality educational content that reverberates with your perfect customers, you’ll naturally boost your Search Engine Optimization.
Talking about those primary problems, using the keyword phrases they use in search queries is the best path to increasing your audiences. Writing for search engines alone is useless; all you’ll have is keyword-riddled rubbish.
Pleasing your target audience will result in also pleasing internet search engines.

2. Feed your blog site routinely
Blog writing is perhaps the most efficient method to raise your natural site website traffic. Blog content lets you go deeper than your website permits, creating a big, expanding brochure of practical, persona-optimized web content targeted to your market niche.
On the other hand, poorly-written, “spammy” web content will do more damage than help. Avoid it.

3. Connect to the blogosphere
The blogosphere is an area for reciprocators.
Read, comment on, and link to other individuals’ websites as well as their blogs, specifically those operating in your market. That will encourage them to read, comment, and link to your content bringing in even more leads.
An excellent area to start is Quora. A cool tactic for getting your voice out there is to spend some time answering individuals’ concerns on Quora as well as supplying genuine, valuable and concrete understandings for the certain location you are a professional in.
Tip: Always use a VPN while using Quora, which will give you more specific results according to the country designated in your VPN.

4. Use long-tail keywords
Better than using the most prominent search phrases in your market is choosing keywords that are more detailed and specific to your services or product.
In time, Google as well as other internet search engines will certainly recognize your website or blog as an information source for that certain subject, which in turn will boost your web search position while helping your perfect clients find you.
Keep in mind that positioning on Google has to do with having a sphere of influence for a certain niche topic.
This article, for example, is targeted tor those that want detailed advice on enhancing natural website traffic. We’re not targeting every SEO-related keyword.

5. Get your meta down pat
The meta title, the URL, and the description are the three crucial ingredients for maximizing traffic for a website or an article. It’s simple yet reliable.
Meta summaries and meta data are your way of telling Google precisely what you’re speaking about.
We make use of a variety of devices, including Yoast Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress, HubSpot’s SEO tools, and Ahrefs to help us optimize our web pages.
But it’s not enough to just ‘mount a plugin’, You need to work on describing each web page in turn.

6. Continually create quality content
Try to compose and release content as often as possible, but not at the expense of top quality! The more high-quality content — including full-sized articles as well as posts — you have on your site or blog, the more opportunities you provide for getting found through organic web traffic.

7. Use internal links
As soon as you’ve accumulated a respectable catalog of content, you can link to older posts, as well as to your own website, guiding visitors to appropriately related content.
Internal linking keeps visitors on your website longer, which helps improve your search rankings.
Don’t, however, overuse interior links. Overuse may begin to look like spam.

8. Encourage incoming web links
Google prioritizes websites that have a lot of inbound web links, especially those coming from other reliable sites.
Urge clients, buddies, family members, distributors, industry mavens, and fellow blog writers to connect to your website.
The more inbound web links you have, the higher your website will rank, because the more reliable sources link to you, the more reliable your site becomes in the eyes of search engines.
Beware Search Engine Optimization “snake oil salespeople”, though. Attempting to trick Google with spammy links from low-reputation websites is a sure path to failure.
Some web links can in fact, damage your Search Engine Optimization.

9. Blow your own horn
In addition to linking to other websites and getting them to link to yours, you can promote your blog content by linking it to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon etc.
If individuals are “hanging around” your web content on social media, that sends a strong signal to Google that the material is relevant, helpful, and intriguing.

10. Use social networks
Build visibility on social media networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
This is a way to get your name and internet site address out on the net. Add “share” buttons to your website to make it easy for individuals to share your content.
Most important, of course, is to compose material worthy of sharing!

11. Use metrics to maximize results
Use Google Analytics to track site visitors to your website and blogsite.
Learning where readers are coming from and which search terms led them to you allows you to fine-tune your content.
Ultimately, to enhance natural, organic website traffic, Give searchers what they want – quality, guidance, and insight..

Millie Oscar writes SEO and technology-related articles and her articles have appeared in a number of sites, including EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, HubPages.com, and TRCB.com. Her articles focus on balancing information with SEO needs–but never at the expense of providing an entertaining read.

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Blogging, Like Design, is About Creatively Solving Problems

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“Design is often misconstrued to be a luxury. Yet, at its core, design is about creatively solving the problems we all face at any scale,” Tom Gallagher writes in the Indianapolis Business Journal. “…practitioners often downplay the importance of beauty, but aesthetic must not be dismissed”. In urban design, Gallagher continues, fashion addresses who we are and how we respect others. The quality of materials speaks to our shared values.

“What we see has a profound effect on what we do, how we feel, and who we are,” Mike Parkinson of Billion Dollar Graphics asserts. Parkinson quotes famed psychologist Albert Mehrabian, who demonstrated that no less than 93% of communication is nonverbal. “

In fact, the aesthetic element must not be dismissed in blog content creation, either. Images are one of the three “legs” of the business blog “stool”, we teach at Say It For You, along with information and perspective or “slant”. Not only is it true that articles containing images get more total views and higher ratings, images help explain and emphasize concepts. The visual presentation of a blog post – the type font, the bolding, italics, spacing – all the details work to support the words and ideas and contribute to the general impression left with online readers.

So, if design is so important, does all that mean video blogs are going to supplant text content?

As a Say It For You blog content writer and trainer, I appreciated a 2017 fourdots.com blog post discussing that very question, and making a four-point case for textual content as a primary driver of online communication:

  1. Text gives you the option to stop exactly where you want to, wrapping your mind around a certain piece of information.
  2. Text can be easily updated and upgraded.
  3. B2B buyers consume informational pieces and case studies, looking for industry thought leadership.
  4. Text stimulates the mind and is more focused.

Just about ten years ago, I published a blog post titled “Shoes and Business Blogs – Some People Care if They’re Shined”. The post touched on aesthetics, advising marketers to “dress your blog in its best” by preventing “wardrobe malfunctions” such as grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors, avoiding redundancies, and tightening up those paragraphs.. Avoid redundancy; tighten up those paragraphs, I cautioned.

Yes, blogging, like design, is about creatively solving problems, but aesthetics must not be dismissed!

 

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Blog Posts and Bradford Hill Criteria

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blog metrics

Back in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill published a paper about the dose-response relationship. If X causes Y, the more of X you have, the more Y will result, is the concept.. While Bradford Hill’s original work related to disease causation, his methods are often used to evaluate cause/effect links in other fields.

Why is causation such an important research activity? “Causation influences decisions related to prognosis, diagnosis and treatment,” researchers found, and “findings also teach us about the functioning of healthy systems”. The authors point out that even though a condition may be found to respond to a certain treatment, that does not necessarily uncover the cause. Of that your headache!)

At Say It For You, our blog content writers know that consistently posting content that is accurate, dependable, and actionable attracts new customers and clients and keeps them coming back. But knowing whether, and how well, your tactics are doing in terms of accomplishing these goals involves verifying the “dose-response relationship” between the content and the results.

Three of the nine criteria Sir Bradford Hill proposed are:

1. Strength (effect size).
2. Consistency (reproducibility)
3. Specificity: (Causation is likely if there is a very specific population at a specific site)

Sometimes, Chief Marketing Officers forget to use the techniques they rely on with other forms of marketing when it comes to blogs, Heidi Cohen of the Content Marketing Institute observes. Metrics are needed to determine whether you’ve achieved your goals. Things worth “counting” include:

  • Visitors (where do they come from? Where specifically do they go on your site?)
  • Page views (where do visitors click to and where do they leave?)
  • Time on site (shows how engaged they are)
  • Signups for an RSS feed or newsletter

Different topics and different blog formats (even days of the week for publishing your blog) can then be tested Bradford Hill-style for strength, consistency and specificity.

To what extent, exactly, is your marketing blog “causing” marketing results? Bradford Hill can help you be in the know!

 

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In Blog Post Titles, Beware of Anchor Bias

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Anchoring bias causes us to rely heavily – often too heavily – upon the first piece of information we receive. Whether we’re setting plans, making estimates about something – or reading a blog post – we interpret newer information from the reference point of our “anchor”, thedecisionlab.com explains. What’s the problem? The “anchor” idea gets stuck in our heads, making us reluctant to accept information that follows, information which might cause us to change our minds.

For business blog content writers, the first piece of information readers are going to receive is obviously the title of the post. We want the searcher to “drop anchor” by clicking on the link, and of course want search engines to offer our content as a match for readers seeking information and guidance on our topic.

When it comes to blog marketing, titles that seem clever are often not effective. The name of the blog post must make clear – to both searchers and search engines – what the post is about. Search engine optimization aside, a blog post title in itself constitutes a set of implied promises to visitors. In essence, you’re saying, “If you click here…

  • you’ll be led to a post that in fact discussing the topic mentioned in the title
  • you’ll be led to a post that explains how to reduce an undesirable effect
  • you’ll be led to a post that explains how to achieve a desirable effect
  • you’ll obtain information on how to do something

The tone of the blog post title also implies a promise:

  • this content is going to be humorous or satirical
  • this content is going to provide a list
  • this content is going to be thought-provoking and/or controversial
  • this content is going to be cautionary or even frightening

As blog content writers, we also need to beware anchoring. As Decision Lab explains, “Anchoring is so ubiquitous that it is thought to cause a number of other thinking fallacies, including the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy describes how we tend to underestimate the time we’ll need to finish a task. Since researching and composing an excellent blog post for a business is labor-intensive, including “reading around”, researching, composing, illustrating, and sharing, both commitment and time management need to be part of the expectations from the get-go.

On a basic level, maintaining consistency – beginning with blog post titles, then to blog post content, and ultimately to delivering quality products and services to customers – is the only way for any business to become, and remain, valued in its marketplace.

Use blog post titles as anchors, but beware of causing anchor bias!

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