Blogging Can Bring Dead Horses Back to Life

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

This week my Mensa Bulletin is sparking some thoughts about content and content marketing. In “Politics Aside”, Editor Chip Taulbee explains that, while the Mensa organization itself strives to be apolitical, it’s perfectly OK for any Mensan to express his or her own political views. The important thing when writing about any topic, Taulbee stresses, is to come up with novel thoughts. “We’re not trying to be part of the echo chamber. We don’t serve dead horses.”

There’s no doubt about the fact that business bloggers face originality challenges. First of all, as Susannah Gardner and Shane Bailey, authors of Blogging for Dummies, point out, “Anything and everything you see on the Internet is protected by copyright.”  Blog content writers can avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their authors in any of several different ways:

  1. direct quotes
  2. paraphrasing others’ remarks (and explaining where the idea came from)
  3. creating links in your blog posts to other websites

In order to move higher in search rankings, blogs must provide fresh, relevant content. Perhaps even more important, though, bloggers need to introduce fresh ideas simply in order to engage readers’ interest.  But, with the sheer volume of information on the Web on every topic under the sun, how do we keep providing new material in our blog posts week after week, month after month, even year after year?

Almost a decade ago now, in a totally unexpected way, I was fortunate to discover an answer to that very question. I had seen – and absolutely loved – an old TV movie about Marie Antoinette. On the surface, historical film making in general seems the very antithesis of fresh content-centered blog writing for business. As a viewer, I knew how the story would end before it began! Why, then, I asked myself, did I find “Marie Antoinette” so riveting?  Why did I hang on every word of dialogue, waiting for what I knew had long ago already taken place? It wasn’t about the material itself being “fresh”; it was about the “fresh“ point of view. Sure, in high school and college I had studied the events leading up to the French Revolution, but I’d never experienced those events through Marie Antoinette’s eyes.

Readers may know some or all of the information you’re presenting in your business blog, but they need your help putting that information in perspective.  In fact, that’s where blogging for business tends to be at its finest, helping searchers with more than just finding information, but helping them understand its meaning and significance.

“Fresh” doesn’t have to mean “new” facts.  If our content is “fresh” in that it offers a new perspective on familiar information, we have a chance at having our online readers find value in every word.

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Be-a-Mentor Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , , /by


“To gain business with your blog, you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. He wants to help them get ahead and live a more fulfilled life,” Neil Patel advises.

The first way that blogging gets you customers is it shows you’re open for business, Sarah Carnes writes in HubSpot.com. The second way? It educates your prospects. Take your frequently asked questions (FAQs) and turn them into blog posts. Once a potential customer sees you as a resource, they are much more likely to consider you when they are considering buying the product or service you provide. After researching and building your target audience, you know what they care about most – and what keeps them up at night. Using your content to answer those fears means that you can begin to “own” the conversation.

In the book Good People, author Anthony Tjan names five types of mentors. At Say it For You, we realize that in different blog posts, a business owner or professional practitioner can take on one of these mentoring “roles’:

Master of Craft:
Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a content writer, link to outside sources to add breadth, depth, and credibility to the ideas you’re expressing and the advice you’re offering.

Champion their cause
Comfort and connect with compassion and encouragement. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be as important in coming years as technical skills.

Co-pilot
“Collaborate” with readers, showing you understand the obstacles and challenges they face. Encourage them to “vent” by answering the tough questions in your content. But searchers haven’t always formulated their questions, and so what I suggest is that we do that for them.

Anchor
An anchor needn’t work in the mentee’s industry, but is someone who offers insights that readers can use to better cope with issues they are facing.

Reverse mentor
A reverse mentor can be of a younger generation with insights to share that can help older readers make sense of technology or see situations from a different vantage point.

What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts, curating content from many different points of view. In blogging for business, be a mentor!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Picking an Outfit – for an Interview or a Blog Post

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by


“We all make judgments about the people we come into contact with within the first few minutes of meeting them,” ZipRecruiter observes in IndyStar. “In fact, we tend to assume that people who dress well are more competent, even if they aren’t.”

Interesting, I thought. Two pieces of the how-to-pick-a-job-interview-outfit advice ZipRecruiter offers can be easily adapted to business blog content writing…After all, as content writers, our goal is to make a good impression on visitors to our – or our clients’ – websites..

Observe others
To get a sense of how you might want to present yourself, do some people-watching. For each person that passes, write down the first adjective that comes to mind – professional, confident, stylish. Decide which words you’d like to be associated with and mirror that look.

Business blogging is one way we have of “talking about ourselves”, and we need to make sure we use words in ways that give readers the right impression. One way to “see” ourselves from the point of view of visitors is to visit others’ websites, including those of competitors. Is the “vibe” welcoming and empathetic? Brash? Don’t copy, simply get a sense of how different websites appeal to visitors, and emulate the tone that seems to best reflect the impression you’d like to make on visitors to your site.

Of course, as Neil Patel points out, you can also use “competitive intelligence” to gain insight into which keywords are helping your competitors’ rankings online.

Strike a pose
In the right outfit, you’re more likely to “strike a power pose” and put your best foot forward. Look for fashion at affordable prices or reach out to a friend or family member who can lend you an outfit.

In blog marketing, as I teach at Say It For You, the visual elements are as important as the content itself. The main message of a blog is delivered in words, of course. Where visuals come in, whether they’re in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, is to add interest and evoke emotion. You should take pride in your blog’s appearance, ease of navigation, and correct grammar.

Whether for a job interview or a blog post – it’s important to pick an outfit!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Grammar in Blogging – Getting a Grip

/0 Comments/in , /by

 

“Jobs are lost for typos on resumes…. Friends lose respect for each other… Semi-colons cry themselves to sleep at night,” quips Kris Spisak in Get a Grip on Your Grammar.

Well,, While I wouldn’t go so far as to myself to sleep at night over grammar, one of our mantras at Say It For You is that “good grammar affects the effect of a business blog”.

While I reassure content writers that, if their marketing blog posts are filled with valuable, relevant, and engaging material, the fact they wrote ‘a lot’ when they should have said ‘many’ or substituted ‘your’ for ‘you’re isn’t going to be a content marketing deal breaker.

On the other hand, in corporate blogging training sessions, in which the business owner and professional practitioner attendees largely serve as their own editors, I urge no-error erring on the side of caution.

Spisak emphasizes 3 common aspects of content writing:

“Don’t show off your smarts”.
Be inclusive – your readers will appreciate it if your avoid industry jargon. I agree. Jargon, Jargon is a handle-with-care writing technique, all the more so in blogging, where readers are impatient to find the information they need without any navigational or terminology hassle. On the other hand, once you’ve established that common ground, reinforcing to readers that they’ve come to the right place, you can add lesser known bits of information, including terminology.

Don’t use filler words.
Expressions such as “Actually,” “basically”, “literally”, “just about”, and “honestly” add nothing to your readers’ understanding of your message. I agree. “Tighten up” your blog content writing to increase its impact.

Go ahead and use the singular “they”.
To demonstrate how much simpler life can be if writers allow themselves to use “the singular ‘they’”, Spisak uses the following uber-awkward sentence: “A child will fall and hurt him or herself if he or she doesn’t tie his or her shoes.” It’s OK to use “they” and “their” when you want to be smooth, not gender specific, he reassures purists.

As a blogging trainer, my own favorite recommendation to business owners as well as the freelance blog content writers they hire to help bring their message to their customers) is simply this: Dress your blog in its best. Prevent blog content writing “wardrobe malfunctions” such as grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors.

After all, getting a grip on grammar is an important part of getting your message across!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Break Full Articles Apart in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , /by

When it comes to blogging, we at Say It For You firmly believe in the Power of One:

  • One message
  • One outcome
  • One audience
  • One writer
  • One client

    A very well-written article that appeared recently in the Indianapolis Business Journal reinforced for me an important difference between nonfiction articles and blog posts, with each post having a razor-sharp focus on just one idea or concept, one aspect of a business or practice. With apologies to George Lesmeister, CEO and founder of LGC Hospitality, I’m going to use his article to illustrate how a single topic article can provide the fodder for several very focused, very effective blog posts.

The overall premise of the Lesmeister piece is that a large pool of job candidates till now be actively seeking employment, those job seekers are going to be choosy. The author offers several pieces of advice to employers about ways to provide a good hiring experience for candidates.

Statistics:
“While Indiana’s unemployment rate spiked to 17% during the pandemic, it’s now 3.9%). Our sector (Lessmeister’s staffing firm specializes in the hospitality industry) lost the largest number of jobs.” What’s more, the author adds, “A May estimate shows some 116,000 job openings in Indiana.”

In teaching business owners and professional practitioners how to create content for blog posts, I stress the power of using statistics in blogs:

  • Statistics can serve as myth-busters, dispelling false impressions people may have regarding your industry.
  • Statistics grab visitors’ attention.
  • Statistics can be used demonstrate the extent of a problem opening the door for your to show how you help solve that very type of problem.

My point: This one portion of Lesmeister’s article (the unemployment statistics) can constitute an entire blog post.

Best practices:
The author’s admonition that “Respect is a two-way street” would make for an engaging blog post title. Workers see help-wanted signs, go inside to apply, fill out an application, and never hear back, Lessmeister laments. Certainly an entire blog post might focus on best practices within your industry or profession.

One thing I suggest stressing in blog posts is best business practices.  While a goal of any marketing blog is to help your business or practice “get found”, once that’s happened, the goal changes to helping online readers appreciate the specific ways you choose to run your enterprise.

  • Specific solutions and advice
    “Even if a job candidate does not have experience in one particular area, evaluate the soft skills during the interview process. …Can the applicant quickly be trained to make an impact?”

    Solve a problem, own the customer, sales trainers like to say. That’s because people are online searching for answers to their problems or solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  If your business has been consistently posting content, those people are going to find you, because your posts provide the solutions they need. Providing a powerful online “voice” to solutions to searchers’ problems is the essence of content writers’ work!

    Out of just this one article might come many different, powerful blog posts:

  • busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing
  • offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service
  • describing an unusual application for that product
  • describing one common problem their service helps solve
  • updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession
  • offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Break full articles (your own or others’) apart for blogging for business!

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail