Blogging About Potatoes, Eggs, and Coffee Beans

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The story “Adversity” in Steve & Jacks Home News reminded me how powerful stories can be in moving readers to action by appealing to their emotions. After his daughter had complained that, due to her dyslexia, she needed to work twice as hard as her classmates, a father brought three pots of water to a boil, placing a potato in one pot, an egg in the second, and some ground coffee in the third. Each of the ingredients, he explained, had faced the same adversity in terms of the boiling water. The potato, which had gone in strong, became soft, the father pointed out. The egg, originally fragile, had become hard. The coffee beans had created something entirely new.

“Consumers are used to telling stories to themselves and telling stories to each other, and it’s just natural to buy stuff from someone who’s telling us a story,” observes Seth Godin in his latest book, All Marketers Tell Stories. Essential elements of effective stories, he explains, include:

  • authenticity
  • an implied promise (of fun, money, safety, a shortcut, emotional satisfaction)
  • appeal to the senses rather than to logic

The story Steve and Jack Rupp chose for their newsletter is a very good example, I think, of the type of story we blog content writers can use in blog posts. The father-daughter relationship is one to which readers can relate; the message is inspirational and emotionally appealing. It uses trivia, pulling together facts we had probably not considered (the different effect boiling water has on eggs, potatoes, or coffee beans).

A big part of providing business blogging assistance is helping business owners and professional practitioners formulate stories about themselves and their own business or practice. The history of the company and the values of its leaders are story elements that create ties with blog readers. Online visitors to your blog, I teach at Say It For You, want to feel you understand them and their needs, but they want to understand you as well. The stories content writers in Indianapolis tell in their marketing blogs have the power to forge an emotional connection between the provider and the potential customer.

The “boiling water” represents both the environment in which that business or practice operates and the complex of problems for which they offer solutions. Every business or practice has wonderful stories just waiting to be told, describing how the “boiling water” made them stronger, more empathetic, and better able to bring something entirely new to their marketplace.

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Can “Blog-folding” Increase Engagement?

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Proteins designed by humans competing at solving “foldit” puzzles turned out better than those from a design algorithm, it was found in studies chronicled in AARP Bulletin.

What does “foldit” involve? Foldit is a citizen science puzzler game. Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure. Players can experience intellectual challenges and have fun, while helping predict which new proteins might help prevent or treat important diseases such as HIV / AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The term “foldit” comes from the fact that proteins are born as long-chain molecules, but then bunch up, or “fold” into complicated shapes.

Should we blog content writers be taking a lesson from the fact that the involving the brain power of people resulted in better outcomes than those produced by computer algorithms? If there is, it’s about engagement.

The term “engagement” describes how involved and “tuned in” readers are. Marketer Jason Amunwa thinks so: “At the end of the day, engagement is thinking less about ‘increasing traffic and instead learning how to do more with the traffic you already have!” he writes.

Indicators that readers are “engaging” with the content (in addition to converting to buyers) include reading all the way to the bottom of the post, subscribing to the blog, sharing the content on social media, and commenting.

Foldit.com puzzlers have a powerful stake in the outcomes of their “games” (Who wouldn’t want to help prevent cancer and Altzheimers?) When it comes to blogs designed to develop buyers of products and services, it pays to remember that blog readers tend to be curious creatures.  What’s more, that curiosity factor is highest when readers are learning about themselves.  I’ve found that “self-tests” tend to engage readers and help them relate in a more personal way to the information presented in a marketing blog.

Readers, whether they are new clients, repeat customers, other companies’ clients, or potential clients, are always thinking: “So what?  So what’s in it for me?” Posing qualitative survey questions (questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”) in a blog post can help engage the reader through interaction. Reader engagement also results from an “I never knew that!” response to content that compares the way things were and the way they are today. What’s more, “folding” can consist of photos, graphs, clip art, and videos, all of which tend to boost reader engagement and response.

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Blog Content Parhelions

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parhelions in blogs
Earlier this week, we devoted a Say It For You blog post to a term from the field of psychology (Just Noticeable Difference); today’s post explores a term from meteorology…

You might say a “sun dog”, or parhelion, as it is known in meteorology, is an atmospheric optical illusion. The phenomenon consists of bright spots, or halos, that appear at one or both sides of the sun, when ice crystals in the atmosphere refract sunlight.

While as blog content writers, we’re hardly aiming for illusion, optical or otherwise, the work we do presents a number of important parallels with the parhelion effect:

  1. If you ask the question, most business owners and professional practitioners will tell you they have more than one target audience for their products and services. What can be done with a blog is to offer different kinds of information and advice in different blog posts. Just as the parhelions showcase, rather than obliterate the sun, blogging allows coming at the same topic in different ways, still highlighting the central message.

  2. Just as parhelions showcase, rather than distract from the central figure of the sun, doing so through a visual phenomenon, engaging blog posts need visual elements to enhance and showcase the the information, advice, and “slant” of the written content.
  3. Different consumers are going to process our content in different ways. In order to make clear that this business or professional practice has chosen to carry on in a certain way, but that there were other options, the “parhelion effect” can highlight the business owner’s or professional’s “slant” through contrasting that approach with other views.

  4. The parhelion effect can be achieved in groups of blog posts, not only within one article. Readers are different, with different “rules” and needs. We blog content writers need to keep on telling the story in its infinite variations, knowing that, to a certain extent, the blog content readers who end up as clients and customers action have self-selected.
  5. Sentence length can create a parhelion effect. Writers can weave in short sentences with longer ones. Surrounding one “naked” (extremely short) sentence between two longer ones creates, to create a parhelion-like contrast.

By varying the format, the images, the opinions, the sentence length, images and sentence length, writers can create blog content parhelions!

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Blog Testimonials Are That Valuable

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“It’s hard to sing your own praises, and it rarely works when you do, “ is the sentiment Chris Garrett once so aptly expressed in copyblogger.com. If a customer ever tells you how much they value your service, Garrett advises, ask them for a testimonial. Even if they don’t ask, ask them for a testimonial, he says, because testimonials are that valuable.

Careful, though; good testimonials don’t gush, the Hotjar team warns. Too much praise is likely to engender skepticism, not belief. Good testimonials, on the other hand, give prospective customers peace of mind, providing proof that people have tried your products and services and approve of them. Really effective testimonials directly address doubts prospects have about price, learning curve, or functionality of a product or service.

Just why do customer testimonials work? They are a powerful form of social proof, a psychological concept based around the idea that we are more likely to follow the actions others have already taken, explains shopify.com.

But do testimonials, in fact, work? Shopify cites four studies exploring that very question:

  1. Econsultancy – sites showcasing testimonials experience an 18% increase in sales.
  2. Wikijob – sites with testimonials earned 34% more conversions.
  3. Reevoo – 50+ reviews converts to a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
  4. Brightlocal – 88% of people trust online reviews as much as recommendations from personal contacts.

Is asking for testimonials a good idea? Maybe. Asking for feedback always is. After all, as Sujan Patel points out, your customers are the end users of your products and services, “so who better to tell you what you’re getting right and where you’re going wrong?”

There are better and not-so-good methods of gathering testimonials from customers, printwand.com points out. First of all, never fabricate them. Amen to that, I teach at Say It For You. In fact, when a client says, “Sure, just tell me what you want me to say……” , my answer is always “No.” The testimonial has to be in the customer’s words (grammar errors and all).

Second, printwand authors caution, “Just because a customer said some nice things about your brand doesn’t mean you automatically have the right to reproduce those.” On the other hand, when you do receive good spontaneous feedback from a customer, it’s OK to ask if they would allow you to use that statement on your website.

As content for your business blog, customer testimonials are that important. No ad copy, no claims, no statistics can ever wield the power of “people just like them” praising the product or service.

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Blog to Put New Twists on the Same Theme

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variety in blog posts

 

While the entire September 23 issue of TIME magazine was devoted to a single theme, each of the eleven articles was different from all the others, illustrating a point I keep stressing to business owners and practitioners hesitant about launching a blog.

“I’ve already covered my products and services on my website – what else is left to say?”   True, the company or the practice has already covered information about the products and services, but what the blog is for, by contrast, is to provide relevant, useful, and timely content to your prospects and customers to help them solve problems, understand industry trends, and make sense of the news and how it relates to them.

Yes, effective business blogging is centered around a limited number of keyword phrases and key themes. Those keyword phrases need to be repeated in order to “win search”. More important, the very nature of blogging for business over long periods of time offers a “training benefit” to the owners themselves, even if they’ve engaged the services of a professional content writer. That’s because the very process of choosing themes, sharing strategies, and planning for content creation, (which of necessity involves both owner and writer) has a 2+2=5 synergy effect.

In terms of finding variety while writing about the same topic again and again, that issue of TIME proves my point. The magazine’s chosen topic – global warming. The overriding message – we need to pay attention to global warming if we are to save our planet. Still, every single one of the articles came at the topic from a different vantage point. Here are just five examples:

  1. Paper straws alone won’t save the planet. Focusing on individual choices…heightens the risk of reliance on fossil fuels.
  2. Can we innovate our way out of this mess? Message: Advances in technology have transformed the energy industry, and ongoing research and development in wind and solar power will help drive down costs and reduce pollution.
  3. Climate change is the global health emergency of the 21st century. Discusses public health risks in different areas of the world and in poor urban U.S. communities.
  4. Kid’s-Eye View. Young readers drew their view of the planet 30 years from now.
  5. In Africa, necessity is the mother of climate-change innovation. African cities and governments, having already experienced many of the worst impacts of climate change, are adopting innovations in water treatment and telephone communication.

Yes, there is sheer discipline required in maintaining a marketing blog week after week, month after month, and year after year, without becoming same-old, same-old. But, as TIME editors so effectively demonstrate, that is far from an impossible task. Finding interesting pieces of information on topics related to that business or practice. If you can provide information most readers would be unlikely to know, so much the better. “Startling statistics”, anecdotes relating to hardships business owners and clients have overcome, and information about community activities all help lend variety without departing from the core message.

Blog to put new twists on the same theme!

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