It’s All in the Game for Your Business Blog

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Carnival Game with Ducks“There’s a unique recipe that goes into coming out ahead in just about anything,” Jessanne Collins writes in Mental Floss, “an enigmatic equation of skill, technique, calculation, probability, chance, and all kinds of other immeasurable factors.” Collins examines competitions ranging from carnival games to spelling bees and Texas Hold “Em poker, concluding that the perfect formula for winning is uncrackable.

Despite the myriad of words devoted to blogging advice, the secret code for blogging success is probably uncrackable as well. Still, I can’t help thinking, the equation for business blog content writing contains all same basic elements Collins found in poker playing and carnival games:

Skill
“The vast majority of content online is poorly written,” laments Kevin Muldoon of elegantthemes.com. While anyone who can use the Internet can technically write a blog post, all content is not created equal, he observes.

“The best writers are also keen readers,” advises wordstream.com., adding that content writers must expand their horizons to more challenging material than they typically read, paying special attention to sentence structure, word choice, and flow.

Technique
Great blog posts begin with planning, and that means creating outlines, doing research using authoritative resources, fact-checking, creating good headlines, editing, using images, and inserting humor judiciously, wordstream.com continues.

Calculation
“In our site reviews we often see that a site’s category / tag structure is completely unmanaged,” reports Joost de Valk in Yoast. When used correctly a good “taxonomy” system can boost your blog’s SEO; when used incorrectly, he says, “it’ll break things”. Using analytical tools is the blogger’s way of calculating which tactics are most likely to succeed.

Chance
“Until you’ve had a chance to build up a target audience, you’re dealing with assumptions and educated guesses based on your first-hand experience and anecdotal evidence,” says Peep Laja of conversionxl.com.  After you learn more about the market, you can pivot, changing direction to fit the facts.

Just as with carnivals, spelling bees, and Texas Hold “Em poker, with corporate blog writing, it’s all in the game!

 

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Framing Your Business Blog

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The Art of Thinking Clearly

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it,” says Rolf Dobelli in “The Art of Thinking Clearly.” If a message is communicated in different ways, it will also be received in different ways, Dobelli asserts. When researchers presented a group of people with a choice between two kinds of meats:

  • 99 percent fat free
  • 1 percent fat

respondents ranked the first as healthier, even though they are the same!

Wordsmithing is an important element in blog content authoring, because we have the power to use word choices to put the emphasis on specific elements of a product or a service.

Today’s consumer is used to having marketers use the technique of glossing, which is a deceptive sort of framing. The typical online searcher, therefore, is leery of hype and unrealistic claims.

That’s precisely why, Velocity Partners claims, honesty in content marketing has such “insane power”, and why they advise “Take your weakest points and put them in the spotlight”. The principle behind the tactic: managing expectations so you can slightly exceed them.

Velocity Partners offers eight reasons you should consider using insane honesty in your blog:

  1. It’s surprising because it’s so rare.
  2. It’s charming.
  3. We like people who make fun of themselves more than we like braggarts.
  4. It alienates the people who were never going to do business with you anyway.
  5. It attracts your ideal prospects.
  6. It builds trust.
  7. It signals confidence.
  8. It focuses you on battles you can win.

For us business blog content writers, it’s important to remember that every choice of words we make involves framing. Question is – will we use glossing to put an artificial shine on the weak aspects of the business or practice we’re writing about – or will we choose the insane honesty route?

 

 

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Highlight the Team in Your Business Blogs

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Multicultural smile
“Highlighting your team is a great way to bring your readers behind the scenes and let them see the team camaraderie. This kind of transparency builds trust with your readers,” says Any Porterfield in socialmediaexaminer.  “Your team can help you keep things informal, fun and relatable,” she adds.

Since I work as a professional ghost blogger, I’ve obviously needed to abandon most of my generational bias towards long, individually composed business letters and long phone conversations and come into the world of electronic marketing tools.  But there’s a reason  I gravitated towards composing blogs rather than website copy.  In a way, blogs are the humanizing factor in the online communications family. The blogs are where you meet the people running the business or professional practice.

One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we are interpreters, translating clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, one reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting” is that I believe people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

“Getting down and human” in business blogs is so important that it becomes a good idea for a business owner and professional to actually write about past mistakes and struggles. After all, it’s much easier to connect to someone who has been where you are.

It’s interesting – blogging is an essential customer acquisition tool in our increasingly web-based world, but very few business owners can spare the time to post relevant, new material with enough consistency and frequency to have much of an effect. As blog content writers, our Say It for You team is providing that service, which seems like a contradiction to the idea of the readers meeting the actual team of employees who are providing the product or service..

Not really. Even if your hired gun “ghost blogger” is doing the writing, employees themselves can provide anecdotes and information, and different blog posts can feature different employees and owners.

Humanizing the blog by bringing readers behind the scenes helps keep your company or professional practice relatable. The old saw still applies: People want to do business with people!

 

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Sales-Lite for Business Blogs

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cotton balls
Your objective of blogging may be to generate leads, to increase web traffic, or to raise your profile as an authority. But if you use your blog just to spread your sales messages, cautions kissmetrics.com, you may struggle to find readers.

So, how do you get your sales message across through your blog?  This week, my Say It For You posts are devoted to that very question. Here’s what some folks are suggesting:

Kissmetrics: To gain business with your blog you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. By providing solid advice on a regular basis, you build authority and trust; and that’s how you win new customers.

B2bleadblog: Automation can help you manage lead nurturing, but you can’t automate trust.
Trust is earned by being helpful, relevant and honest with your prospects. When considering what targeting options to use, you need to know and understand the make-up of the heavy user. Knowing gender and age is only a fraction of the story. You need to also learn about the benefits they seek as well as their motivations for using that particular product or service. Get into the mind of the heavy user. Knowing who they are and what they do every day will help you better decide multiple locations where you should place the message to reach the right consumer and what that message should look like.

Alina Diaz, Center for Sales Strategy: At the end of the day, the marketer is looking to get their message in front of the right audience. Using analytics, pay attention to the characteristics of heavy users.

Jane Sheeba Media of dailyblogging.org:
For online sales, especially through blogs, you should be cautious to provide the information in a logical fashion, addressing all expected concerns from a customer point of view. If the content is provided by careful wording, product images (with front view, top view, left view and right views and other angles) revealing the functional components, there is a great chance to make a sale in the first shot.

For blog content writers, serving up a sales-lite menu can help increase leads that lead to sales.

 

 

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Stop Asking for More in Business Blogs

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Hand writing A to Z with marker, business concept
“The more information you offer to people, the more likely they’ll be confused.  When people are confused, they don’t become customers,” warns Neil Patel in his quicksprout.com blog.

I couldn’t help remembering those words while enjoying the humor in a recent Dilbert comic strip. Carol’s  babysitter canceled, but Wally said “I will not watch your kids tonight.” “I was going to ask you to adopt them,” Carol said.  “Absolutely not,” Wally says. “The best I can do is watch them tonight.” This seems to demonstrate that, if you ask for a lot more than you want, you might get the customer to agree to what you really wanted in the first place.

Sorry, folks, that just won’t work in blog content writing.

What can work, says kissmetrics.com, is, in your marketing message, teaching your leads how to move as close as possible to Z (the point they want to reach) before you ask for their money or their commitment. The closer you get them on the road from A to Z, the more likely they are to buy from you in order to go the final few steps needed to arrive at their desired end result.

Even more powerful, advises kissmetrics, is using the pain motivator, showing your prospects all the dangers on the road from A to Z, and how your product or service is the weapon they need to defeat those dangers and discomforts.

In “Say This, Not That”, Christine Georghiou advises salespeople to justify a request or statement with the word “because”.  That word immediately answers the question on every prospect’s (and every online reader’s) mind – “What’s in it for me?”

Your team will love our software because we offer email response tracking.

“Emphasize value over price when presenting your product,” adds Georghiou. Value is results-oriented, and results are precisely what you want the prospect to be pondering, not price (which highlights what he/she will lose).

As a trainer in corporate blogging, there’s another reason I think the Dilbert ask-for-more-than-you-want technique would fail miserably in blogs:  Carol doesn’t like sitting for his own kids, but is trying to get someone else to want to do it. Blog content is at its most compelling when the writer is immersed in the lifestyle whose participants they’re trying to attract as customers. “It’s not an essential key to a successful business but it does help that you are immersed in the lifestyle of it, says Steve Watts on Shopify.com.

Stop asking for more in business blogs; focus, instead, on moving prospects closer to Z!

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