Are the Words in Your Blog as Valuable as the Products and Services They Describe?

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excited young woman and boyfriend giving her ring
“The industry realized the words they used to describe diamonds were as valuable as the stones they pulled from the ground,” Alina Simone writes in “Do You Know What This Is?” in Mental Floss Magazine. Simone was discussing the DeBeers Company’s 1938 advertising blitz aimed at pulling the diamond market out of its Depression-era slump.

“On the market, a diamond is much more than a meta-stable allotrope of carbon – it’s everlasting love,” Simone explains. The reality of the situation, she adds is the fact that DeBeers stockpiled huge surpluses of diamonds, artificially maintaining high prices. Meanwhile, De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer admitted in 1999 that “diamonds are intrinsically worthless.”

The Mental Floss story is focused on Diamond Foundry, a California company using an atomic oven to blast “seed diamonds’ with hot plasma, causing the crystal latticework of the diamond to extend.  Essentially, the Silicon Valley company is hot-forging, in a process that takes a mere two weeks, jewelry-grade diamonds that would take eons to form naturally.

While blog marketing is (or at least should be) more advertorial than outright advertisement, we content writers can take a tip from the DeBeers people, who put the three elements of rhetoric to work enhancing the value of diamonds in the eyes of buyers:

  1. Ethos (a form of argument based on character or authority, showing the product or service is endorsed by a celebrity or by someone in uniform)
  2. Pathos (a form of argument based on fear, desire, sympathy, or anger)
  3. Logos (a form of argument based on facts and figures)

Over the 40 years following 1938, De Beers increased its advertising budget from $200,000 to $10 million, using words to create value, selling the concept of diamonds as:

  • Forever
  • A girl’s best friend
  • A must for engagements
  •  A gift for anniversaries A perfect Valentine’s Day gift

It’s hard to imagine, writes Lindsay Kolowich of hubspot, that it’s only been three-quarters of a century since diamonds became the symbol of wealth, power, and romance they are in America today. How did N.W. Ayer, the company De Beers hired as publicists, help make that happen?  By creating entertaining and educational content, Kolowich says – ideas, stories, fashion, and trends that supported the product but wasn’t explicitly about it.

In 1999, AdAge named the De Beers slogan “a diamond is forever” “The #1 slogan of the century.

Are the words in your business blog at least as valuable – if not more so – than the products and services they describe?

 

 

 

 

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Finding the Flossiest Blog Topics

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Downtown St. Paul, MN

Mental Floss Magazine, always masters at making unlikely connections among seemingly unrelated topics, did it again in “25 Flossiest Cities in the World”.  The term “flossy”, the editors explain (lest we envision dental care), means “exhibiting qualities of charm, quirk, and brain-boosting power in equal measure”.

The article is all about places that don’t come to top of mind, steering readers’ minds away from the tried and true and introducing them to new ways of looking for travel destinations.

I explain to newbie content writers in Indianapolis that steering away from the tried and true gives business owners the chance to showcase their own knowledge and expertise. Even more important, the technique of myth busting helps engage interest. A different approach can serve to answer readers’ concerns, as in the following examples:

  • Dentist’s blog:
    Do amalgams used for fillings cause mercury poisoning?
  • Beautician’s blog:
    Does makeup cause acne?
  • Internet security firm blog:
    If you don’t open an infected file, can you get infected?
  • Home décor firm blog:
    Should small rooms be painted in pale neutral colors?

Visitors arrive at your blog to find information on specific topics.  But, once your opening lines have reassured them they’ve come to the right place, it’s a great idea to use some unlikely connections to give them the sense of being ahead of the crowd, having some unusual “inside information”…

  • Giethoorn, Netherlands, Mental Floss advises, is flossier than Venice, with four miles of canals dug in the 13th century.
  • Lavenham, England is flossier than Pisa. Many of its buildings were constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries, are crooked because they used green timber which warped as it aged.
  • Huizhou, China is flossier than Austria.  China’s duplicature craze resulted in Austrian,  English, Swiss, Italian, and Spanish copycat cities.

What flossy topics can you use to unexpectedly engage blog readers’ interest?

 

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Blogs or White Papers – Which Have the Longest Shelf Life?

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supermarket in blurry for background
“White papers may have the longest shelf life of all content,” asserts John Fox in the Huffington Post.  it was interesting to read about Fox’s interview with Gordon Graham, author of White Papers for Dummies.

Some business owners are afraid white papers are too academic and “heavy”. Anything that’s poorly done is going to fatigue people, Graham points out, and most business white papers make the same mistake over and over – too much selling.  What a white paper is supposed to do, he says, is:

  • help people understand some kind of issue
  • solve a problem
  • make a decision

It’s not that John Fox recommends abandoning blog marketing in favor of white papers. In fact, he recommends, a problem-solution white paper can generate three or four blog posts.  “You take every section, boil it down a bit and post it.  Then, at the bottom, say ‘For more discussion, see the full white paper here’.”

“The definition of a whitepaper varies heavily from industry to industry,” observes Lindsay Kolowich of hubspot.com. Basically, though, Kolowich explains, “A whitepaper is a persuasive, authoritative, in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution.” “Whitepapers,” he adds, “are the academic papers of marketing content.  Readers expect a high degree of expertise backed by solid research that is fully documented by references.” In other words, they’re much more serious in tone, less flashy, and more research-based than blog posts or even ebooks.

Technically speaking, of course, both white papers and old blog posts can “live” indefinitely on your website “shelf”. The trick is to “selectively pick and choose your moments to remind visitors and social media contacts of the valuable information that is available to them, says GuavaBox.

Remember, even if a product remains viable and is still “fresh”, no product can be useful to customers while it is still on the shelf!

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In Business Blogging, Avoid the Cynic’s Sidebar

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Zorniger Wissenschaftler hlt seinen Daumen nach unten

Sure, you could say, “If I can’t avoid mentioning the competition altogether, I’m certainly not going to say anything nice about them,” author Jeff Thull tells his audience of salespeople. But that’s what Thull dubs “the cynic’s sidebar.”  After all, he points out, they may be your competitors, but they are viable alternatives for your customers.

Those competitors, Thull reminds salespeople, aren’t the customers’ competition, perhaps even an entirely viable option they’re already considering, and, if you unfairly misrepresent that option, you risk losing the customers’ trust.

I agree. In offering business blogging assistance, I reassure owners that addressing problems and misinformation in their blog posts shines light on their special expertise and on their particular slant on the work they do. At the same time, readers don’t like to be “made wrong” by having their assertions challenged directly, including their having checked out what your competition has to offer.

Yes, as content writers for business owners or practitioners, at least one of the goals we’re working towards is converting online searchers into to customers and clients. And, although one approach in a business blog is comparing your products and services to others’ it’s important to emphasize the positive rather an “knocking” a competitor.  That means that, rather than starting with what the competition is doing “wrong”, use the power of “We” to demonstrate what YOU value and the way YOU like to deliver your services.

Before you can do a good job positioning yourself (or the client for whom you’re creating the blog content), you need to go through a systematic thinking process, a 3-step self-examination of sorts:

  1. Who is my competition?
  2. How am I different (3 reasons per competitor)?
  3. How am I similar (3 reasons per competitor)?

That very thought process leads to what I’ve nicknamed “the training benefit” business owners can derive from corporate blog marketing. That benefit holds true, I’ve found, whether owners do their own blogging or collaborate with a professional ghost blogger, because the exercise helps train you to articulate those things to clients and customers.

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In a Blog, is Someone One or Two?

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One Plus One

“Beware of common grammatical mistakes, like subject-verb agreement,” cautions Helen Coster in Forbes. Rule to remember:  The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.

Use a singular verb form after:

  • Nobody
  • Someone
  • Everybody
  • Neither
  • Everyone
  • Each
  • Either

“We can agree that a verb agrees with its subject in person and number,” The Lousy Writer reminds us.  Examples include:

  • “No one except the ticket holders is admitted.”
  • “Every one of us is anxious to build a business.”
  • “The famous museum with its thousands of artifacts was destroyed.” (There is only one museum.)

What’s more, The Lousy Writer explains, the meaning rather than the form of the subject controls the number of the verb.

  • “The movie ’The Godfather’ was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.” (There is only one movie.)
  • “Fifty dollars is too much for those sneakers.”  (There is one sum of fifty dollars.)
  • “The committee is ready to boycott.” (The committee consists of several persons, but we refer to it here as one group.)

Using plurals and singulars can get quite tricky, Learner’s Dictionary authors admit, especially when a sentence has more than one subject per verb. Here are three examples:

  • (two singular) The dog and the cat bother me. (bother is a plural verb)
  • (two plural): The dogs and the cats bother me.
  • (one singular, one plural) The dog and cats bother me.

In blog content writing, of course, the idea is to avoid confusing the reader and get the point across. Avoiding common grammatical mistakes and making subjects agree with verbs is one healthy habit we content writers can cultivate.

Remember: the number of the subject determines the number of the verb!

 

 

 

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