Blog Posts and Bradford Hill Criteria

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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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For Humor and Allusions in Blogs, Make Sure Readers Don’t “Huh?”

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“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’s advice applies to blog content writing, as we’ve learned through experience at Say it For You.

One reason certain jokes fall flat with certain audiences, I’m convinced, is not that those jokes are offensive or unfunny. It’s that many jokes are based on a cultural allusion that is simply not familiar to that audience.

A cultural allusion is an indirect reference to a person, place, or idea that is not directly described. Here are a few of Strecker’s jokes that will be funny to you only if you happen to recognize the allusion to history, literature, mathematics, geology, or the Bible…….

  • What was the sea creatures’ strike called? Octopi Wall Street.
    (The allusion is to the protest movement against economic inequality that started in New York City and which was named Occupy Wall Street.)
  • Who invented the ball point pen? The Incas.
    (The allusion is to the ancient Incan empire in the country of Peru.)
  • Why was the precious metal so silly? It was fool’s gold.
    (The allusion is to the metal pyrite, which has no value, but which resembles gold in its appearance. Many treasure-seekers foolishly mistook pyrite for gold.)
  • 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? East pi and square dance.
    (The allusion is to pi, which is the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately 3.14.)
  • What do you call a street where Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and James Patterson live? Writer’s Block.
    (The allusion is to three famous writers and to a psychological “block” in which a person represses painful thoughts of memories.)

In blog marketing, we might choose to use an allusion to get a point across without going into a lengthy explanation. Or, we might want to get readers thinking about our subject in a new way. We might even use allusions to cement a bond between our client and the blog readers, showing the business owner or practitioner has experienced some of the same problems and obstacles as their customers now face.

There’s only one problem – an allusion does not describe in detail the person or thing to which it’s referring – readers have to recognize the allusion. As content writers, we need to gauge our readers’ areas of interest and even their level of education. If they simply don’t know the underlying story, literary tale or other reference point, we could be leaving them scratching their heads, and asking “Huh?”

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Guest post: 3 Ways to Create an Extra income Stream from Home

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(Photo by Upsplash)

Want to earn an income but don’t know how or where to get started? Your home can be a money-making machine. Here are a few ways you can add to your finances by taking advantage of your own house…

Sell Items Online or in Yard Sales

If something’s just gathering dust in your house, consider selling it. You could have a cabinet or a couch you no longer need — sell them online! A yard sale is also an excellent idea if you have more items you need to dispose of that are in good condition. In addition, yard sales are visible and advertise themselves, which is an advantage over indoor sales. Make sure you check your local zoning laws and homeowner association restrictions to avoid issues.

Make Renovations and Share the Steps

Equity is the percentage of your home that’s already been paid off. If your home is worth significantly more than what you still owe on your home loan, you may be able to use that equity to pay for home enhancements or renovations. It’s a smart way to finance a renovation project. You may even enjoy tax deductions (if you use the money to enhance your home substantially) and low interest rates (because the property is used as collateral for the loan). Additionally, you can expect a healthy ROI with the right renovations, as well as sell the house quickly and for more money, if that’s something you’re considering.

Start a Blog or a YouTube Channel

Blogging is a smart way to make extra cash. If you like sprucing things up regularly in your home, create a website or a YouTube channel to share your home improvements, DIY projects, flips, and more. You can create an additional income stream by placing ads on your website and earning sponsorships (in time). Post often, research the best times to upload content, make your home enhancements compelling, and really provide valuable information — more people will like and share your videos and content this way, helping you earn more.

Affiliate marketing is another excellent way to make money when you run a home improvement blog. You could simply recommend products or items you like or personally use in your projects. Each time a client uses your link to purchase, you’ll earn a commission. Of course, you’ll need to reach and build up an audience for your platform to take off. Promote your posts and videos on social media accounts by sharing before and after images of your projects.

Making cash off your home is relatively easy as you have more options than you might realize. Whether through selling stuff you no longer need, starting a blog or vlog to document home renovation tips, use your home as the starting place to get your message across and get visitors coming back for more.

 

Today’s guest post was contributed by Seth Murphy.  Seth first dabbled in DIY projects because that was cost-effective. Now Seth hopes his blog, Papa DIY, will encourage readers to take a chance at tackling their own hands-on projects… check out Seth’s blog at https://papadiy.com/about-me/ 

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Briefs for Blog Posts and Blog Posts as Briefs

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Leafing through the Harvard Business Review Special Issue on digital intelligence, I noticed a very helpful formatting detail – in the corner of each first page of an article, there was a box titled “Idea in Brief”. There were three bullet points for each article summary:

  • the problem
  • the root cause
  • the solution

The magazine editors explain that they’ve provided those summaries to “help busy leaders quickly absorb and apply the concepts”.

That little “grid” is made-to-order for business blogging! People are online searching for answers to questions they have or for solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  But my experience has shown me that defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. But showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience providing solutions to very that problem can help drive the marketing process forward. Still, searchers are unlikely to follow you into a “deep subject dive” unless they can anticipate that a “solution” to their problem will be forthcoming. For that reason, a “brief-in-a-box” is actually a visual could prove highly useful in longer content blog posts.

In corporate blogging for business, it’s important to offer enough information in each post to convincingly cover the one key theme of the post. At the same time, it can be very effective to compose a long, comprehensive article and then turn that material into several different blog posts relating to that one issue or problem. Ways to accomplish this vary:

– busting one common myth or misconception relative to the problem
– describing one possible solution to the problem
– updating readers on one new piece of research of one new industry development
– offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Inserting “Ideas in Brief” in blog posts is a great idea, but in a way, blog posts themselves are a form of “ideas in brief”!

 

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It’s Easier to Buy Perfume Than Blog

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If you’re involved in any way in marketing a business or a practice, I know you’ll get a kick out of this story from the Reader’s Digest June issue:

  Every year for my birthday, my husband buys me a particular perfume that
                  I especially love. This past year, with money tight, I told him not to bother getting
                  me a gift. Instead, I asked that he handwrite a letter encapsulating our 25 years together.

                  My husband leaned in, gently took my hand, and begged, ”Can I please just buy you the bottle of perfume?”

Every minute of every day, millions upon millions of new blogs come online. Fast forward a few months and many of them quit. Visitors to those websites find content dated months and even years ago. Why?

Bloggingtips.guru.com thinks there are several reasons:

  • They have no patience.
  • They lose motivation.
  • They have a “me too” mentality and don’t know how to be unique.
  • They cannot write interesting content.
  • They fail to promote their blog.

There’s actually a scientific name for what ails that husband in the story. In fact, there are two:
“graphophobia” and “scriptophobia”, Jacob Olesen explains in fearof.net. Fear of writing, he says, usually originates from a negative experience in one’s past (Could it be that the husband was forever scarred by his second grade teacher’s criticism of his cursive??).

Whatever ails the guy in the story, don’t let yourself fall prey to that malady, cautions selectmkt.com. Don’t participate in the neglected websites syndrome. Give your blog some love and it will make a huge difference against your competitors.

Problem is, it’s less work to buy that bottle of perfume. Far too many business owners start out strong with their blogging, but months or even weeks later, begin to fizzle. Daily blogs become weekly blogs, and pretty soon, months go by between blog posts. In fact, my company, Say It For You, was founded to provide professional writing services to business clients, whose attention was constantly drawn away from content creation because they were putting out fires, making sales, and dealing with personnel issues.

Most business owners today know that business blog writing in their area of expertise is important for getting indexed by search engines and getting found by potential clients and customers. Rather than having web visitors find years-old content on their blog page, owners are best off leaving the driving to professional content writing “surrogates

Truth is, it’s easier to buy perfume than blog!

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