Blog “As-Measured-By” Calls to Action

/0 Comments/in , , /by

“Just Do It” worked for Nike. Let’s face it, though – readers of our marketing blogs aren’t going to convert to customers that easily.

True, as I stress in corporate blogging training sessions, blog content writing has an enormous advantage over traditional “push marketing” tactics, because, what blogging does best is deliver to corporate blog sites customers who are already interested in the product or service they’re providing!

In corporate blogging for business, the “ask” comes in the form of calls to action. Offering a reason for the requested action needless to say, greatly improves the chances of having your request fulfilled. At the City University of New York, I learned, experiment subjects were instructed to ask someone using a copy machine if they could go first.  When persons making that request offered a reason, they were given permission 94% of the time (versus only 60% of the time when they gave no explanation for why they deserved to go first).

There’s more, though, to improving the chances readers with fulfill your requests. Jason Buetler, who trains software design apprentices at Edusource, uses the “as-measured-by” principle. In doing what Buetler calls “predictive” planning, it’s crucial to establish sets of benchmarks by which progress towards the goal can be measured.

What-can-I-expect questions are implicit in every decision-making process:

  • “How will I know?”
  • “ How will I measure success?”
  • “ How can I tell it’s working?”

If our blogging Calls to Action are going to be effective, I realized, it’s up to us blog content writers to offer workable benchmarks, explaining the “as measured by”.

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?”

“As-measured-by” goes even further than that, setting up specific, time-based expectations. For reader/prospects to know what’s in it for them, they need the reassurance that certain signals will be there to tell them results are in the process of happening.

Use “as-measured-by” in your Calls to Action!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Does Blog Post Length Matter to Readers? Think Duration Neglect

/0 Comments/in , /by


Opinions have always differed on the optimal size for a blog post. Having composed blog posts (as both a Say It For You ghost writer and under my own name) numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to fix on any rule other than “It depends!”. I think maybe Albert Einstein said it best: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

A chapter in Chip and Dan Heath’s book The Power of Moments gave me a different perspective on that old long-short question. Research has found, the authors note, that “when people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length.” This phenomenon is called ‘duration neglect”. People tend to rate an experience based on two key factors:

  • the best or worst moment (“the peak”)
  • the ending

In business blog writing, Dave Taylor explains (and as we content writers in Indianapolis know), there are no editors, layout people, or government regulators to dictate the length of any marketing blog post. As a corporate blogging trainer, I felt my own approach to the subject was vindicated when Taylor cited a common piece of editorial advice about how long a book or article should be: “Write just enough to cover the material at the appropriate level of detail, then stop.” That dovetails nicely with the advice I offer when offering business blogging assistance.

The Heaths’ concept of the “peak”-and-ending, I realized, suggests a whole new way to come at the long-short question. A business blog post should be designed to elicit an “Aha!” response, that “peak” moment when readers find the advice or the offer of a product or service which seems to be the exact right thing for them. (Of course, in blogging, that realization had better happen sooner rather than later, or searchers will click away from the page!)

A big part of successful blog content writing involves getting the ”pow opening line” right. To sustain the “pow!” effect, present a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy challenging statement. “Pow” endings, then, tie back to the openers, bringing the post full-circle.

Readers who’ve made their way to the end of a business blog post are going to remember only two things: the best moment and the ending. If they’ve had a positive experience, how long or short the post has been will have lost importance – all due to the duration neglect effect.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Blogging About Potatoes, Eggs, and Coffee Beans

/0 Comments/in , /by


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.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

When an Ellipsis Is – and Isn’t – an Excuse for the Entire Quote

/0 Comments/in , /by

ellipses
The ellipsis (consisting of three dots) may be the punctuation mark least used by blog content writers, but it certainly has an important function, showing that words are missing from a text, as Tony Rossiter explains in Effective Business Writing in Easy Steps.

For blog content writers, using an ellipsis can help avoid having the reader’s thought process being distracted from the point you want to make through using a quote. A series of three dots can be placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence or clause, standing in for sections of text that do not change the overall meaning. You’re quoting someone in order to make or reinforce a point, and you want to use only those words that help you make that point.

Ellipses, literarydevices.net points out, are also common in filmmaking, where the parts and scenes that are of no significance to the plot or character development are simply left out. In fact, this entire ellipsis discussion harks back to my Say It For You teachings about focus in blog posts and “the Power of One”. If your copy tells too many irrelevant stories, you will lose your prospects’ attention and interest. Each post can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business.

Incorporating a quote (from an expert in your field or from a historic figure) can certainly help reinforce that one idea on which you’ve chose to focus that day’s blog post. But you don’t necessarily want to use the entire quote, when the idea can be conveyed by using only a certain part of it, and that’s where the ellipsis punctuation mark can become useful. “To cite means to quote someone, or someone’s work, as a authoritative source to support an argument,” the editors of The Book of Random Oddities explain. But the fact is, people read blogs to get information and we, as content providers need to provide that information with honesty and respect towards the original creators of any materials we use to support the points we want to make.

That’s precisely why what isn’t “cricket”, as Mignon Fogarty of Grammar Girl.com reminds writers, is using ellipses to change the meaning of a quotation. Don’t be lazy, she admonishes, allowing “the sweet lure of ellipses to muddle your ability to write a complete sentence”.

Blog posts that demonstrate a high degree of expertise backed by solid research, plus a very high degree of focus, have a good chance of gaining reader respect. For maintaining focus and brevity while bringing in outside expertise, those three little ellipsis dots can pack a might punch!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

The Power of Similar Sounds in Blog Post Titles

/0 Comments/in , /by

The contributing authors in the Nature Conservancy Magazine must have collaborated to illustrate the power of similar sounds. As examples for blog content writers, I chose just four of the many titles in that issue:

Roots Rewind
This is an example of classic alliteration. Both words begin with the same consonant.

Keep Carbon
Although the two words begin with different letters, this is another example of alliteration, because the consonant sound is the same.

Orca Answers
Assonance refers to the repetition of vowel, rather than consonant sounds. These two words are not a precise match, but are similar enough to resonate with readers.

Grand Stand
These are rhyming words, where the initial letters are different, with the remaining sounds the same.

A couple of years ago at Say It For You, I began calling attention to the idea of using alliteration in business blog titles with an eye to making them more “catchy”. You see, it’s one thing to write great content, and quite another to get readers to click on it, and alliteration is just one of several creative writing techniques that can make your business correspondence – or your blog title – more engaging.

“It is important to note that alliteration is about the sounds of words, not letters; therefore, the letters “k” and “c” can be used alliteratively (as in the Keep Carbon title above) The letters “s” and “c” (as in sparkle and cycle) could also be used in alliteration. As ereadingworksheets.com explains, the words don’t need to be directly next to each other in the sentence or stanza to be considered alliterative, but a good guideline to follow is whether you can detect the repetition of sound when you read the line aloud. Meanwhile, “It beats as it sweeps as it cleans” (an advertisement for Hoover) is an example of vowel sound repetition in the form of assonance.

At Say It For You, where one of our core teachings is that blog posts are NOT ads, we know it’s important to keep a light touch in order to avoid overuse of similar-sound techniques such as rhyming, assonance and alliteration. The goal, after all, is to “season” the content without “over-salting” it.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail