Pique-Your-Interest Blog Post Titles

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Browsing through the August issue of Indianapolis Monthly, I noticed something interesting about the titles of many of the articles. It was literally impossible to tell from each title what the topic of the forthcoming article would be, yet my curiosity was aroused to the point that I wanted to find out.
Applied Knowledge, for example, offered advice about filling out effective college applications. Upon Further Review turned out to be about IU football and baseball team strategy. Belly Aching headed a humorous piece on physical illnesses, real and imagined, while Fully Loaded was about luxury boutique hotels. High and Mighty was the title of a piece on penthouse-style luxury furnishings, and Out-of-the-Gate, of all things, was about how Mayor Hudnut brought the Colts team to Indianapolis.

So, should blog post titles be designed to pique readers’ interest with the same sense of “mystery”? That’s a maybe. In blog marketing, the title itself constitutes a set of implied promises: If you click on this title, it will lead you to information about the topic you punched into the search bar, to an explanation of how to obtain something desirable or to avoid or reduce an undesirable effect. The title and the content, therefore, need to be congruent.

On the other hand, there are two, not just one, reasons titles matter so much in blogs, I teach at Say It For You. The key words and phrases in the title help search engines make the match between online searchers’ needs and what your business or practice has to offer. That’s not enough, though, because, after you’ve been “found”, you still have to “get read”, which means readers need to be engaged and their interest piqued.

The compromise solution might be titles that are two-tiered, combining curiosity-arousing Indianapolis Monthly-style titles with subtitles that make clear exactly what the blog post is about. Might that come across as a “bait-and switch” (an absolute no-no in content marketing)? No, I think it’s more like a bait-and-focus blog title technique.

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Using Skillful Surprise in Blog Content Writing

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Blog post titles have a multifaceted job to do, arousing readers’ curiosity while still assuring them they’ve come to the right place. One compromise I often suggest to blog content writers is using a two-tiered title, combining a “Huh?” (to get attention) with an “Oh!” (to make clear what the post is actually going to be about).

In the body of a blog post, surprise can be used in a different way. I remember, several years back, listening to Jeff Fleming of the National Speakers Association of Indiana meeting, talking about misdirection as a way of adding humor to a presentation. Fleming explained the “Rule of Three”, in which the first two statements serve as a “set-up”. The third statement is not what the listeners are expecting, he added. That “misdirection”, Fleming said, causes a surprise, which tickles listeners’ funny bones.

I thought about that Fleming demo the other day when browsing through Coffee House News Indiana:

 

What has four legs, is big, green, and fuzzy, and, if it fell out of a tree would
hurt you? Answer: a pool table.

Now, as blog content writers offering information about a product or service, we’re not necessarily “into” tickling readers’ funny bones. What we are “into”, of course, is engaging readers and sustaining interest.

To be sure, using humor is an effective way to connect with your audience and humanize your brand or company, as Jason Miller of Social Media Examiner observes. All marketing doesn’t have to be serious, he adds, along with the caveat that “being funny is a risk…Some people might not appreciate your company’s brand of humor!”

So what do I think the bottom line is for using humor and surprise in blogging for business? Well,…barring politics (including company, city, state, national, and international), religion, ethnic groups, physical appearance, food preferences, insider information, and anything anyone might conceive as risque – go right ahead.  But keep the humor centered around your own weaknesses and around the consumers’ problem you’re offering to solve.

As for surprise, it can be highly useful in business blogs. At least some of our readers already know quite a bit about our subject.  What they’re looking for is new perspective on the subject, new ways to connect the dots. People are going to want to do business with people who have something different to say. There’s great power in offering strong recommendations and opinions in a blog.

Surprise them with the strength of your convictions, the depth of your knowledge, and the courage to map out a unique approach to doing business!

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How-To Blog Content is Harder to Write Than First Appears

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giving directions

 

Giving directions is a lot harder than first appears. That point was brought home to us at a recent tutor training I attended at Ivy Tech Community College. An instructor may believe he’s given clear instructions to his class for completing a particular assignment, but different students interpret those directions… well, differently. Working together in informal study groups, students can help each other arrive at the correct interpretation, was the point.

We tutors were divided into small groups (3-4 people each) and given the following set of directions:

  1. Draw a circle about an inch in diameter.
  2. Draw a square so that each side of the square touches the circumference of the circle.
  3. Draw an equilateral triangle, making sure that one of the triangle’s sides is touching one half of one of the sides of the square.

Sounds fairly simple, doesn’t it? (After all, every one of us in that room has several college degrees!) Well, it wasn’t – it took much discussion and interpretation to comply with those “clear” directions.

There is no end to the technical information available to consumers on the internet. Therefore, as business blog content writers, our job is to help readers understand, absorb, buy into, and use that information. At Say it For You, I’m fond of saying that in blogging for business, teaching is the new selling. One way to empower customers to make a decision is to help them understand the differences between various industry terms, as well as the differences between the products and services of one business compared to those offered by another.

As bloggers, we’re giving readers the raw materials to think about, and even the how-to instructions. We need to go one step further, demonstrating ways different customers and clients have “figured out” how to interpret and use the “instructions” and “directions” we’ve offered for their own benefit.

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Is Your Business Blog Content TNAS?

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directions in blogs

 

As part of my work in the tutoring lab at Ivy Tech Community College, it often falls to me to help students revise essay papers. Students may have submitted first drafts, then received their papers back from their instructor with notations and corrections. The student then has the opportunity to “fix” things and re-submit the assignment.

At first, I didn’t understand the meaning of the notation “TNAS” that frequently appeared on these papers. I was soon informed that those initials stand for “That’s Not a Sentence”.

In fact, sentence fragments seem to be a common mistake among blog content writers. Often the problem is clauses. A sentence can have any number of clauses, but needs at least one main or independent clause, with a subject and a verb, as englishgrammar.org explains, and any dependent clauses need to be attached to an independent clause.

In business blog content writing, there’s another common problem related to sentences – run-ons. Run-ons have more than one independent clause. The effect, I tell students and content writers, is comparable to squeezing two bodies into one seat!

But, isn’t it OK to be more relaxed about grammar rules when writing for blogs? Yes….blogs are supposed to be less formal and more conversational than a company’s (or a practice’s) main website. As spotcolormarketing.com puts it, there are times when it is more effective to sound like a relatable human and not your sixth grade English teacher who never seemed to be able to connect with her audience.”

Along with several other grammar rules that Spot Marketing says are OK to break in blogs (such as ending a sentence with a preposition, using slang and contractions, or beginning a sentence with “and” or “but”) it might even be OK to use sentence fragments!

As a corporate blogging trainer, my favorite recommendation (to both business owners and the freelance blog content writers they hire to bring their message to customers) has been this: Prevent blog content writing “wardrobe malfunctions”, including grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors.

At the same time, the real question writers need to ask themselves about any one blog post is this: Have I done what I set out to do? Is the marketing message clear?

After all, readers who “get the idea” you were trying to convey are unlikely to reject your content on the grounds that it’s TNAS!

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Writing Blogs in the Shower

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creative blogging
Everybody knows it – our best ideas come to us in the shower. But why is that? Mental Floss explains that “you’re more likely to have a creative epiphany when you’re doing something monotonous like showering”. Since monotonous daily routines don’t require much thought, the authors explain, your brain flips to autopilot and the prefrontal cortex is activated; you’re able to make creative connections that your conscious mind would have dismissed. What’s more, since most of us shower in the morning or at night when we’re most tired, we’re at our creative peak, the journal Thinking and Reasoning tells us.

But is business blog writing supposed to be creative? Yes, indeed. Creative writing is any form of writing which is written with the creativity of mind. Nonfiction writing can be creative says, says writerstreasure.com, if the purpose is to express something, whether it be feelings, thoughts, or emotions.

The question author Malcolm Gladwell gets asked most often just happens to be the same I’m most often asked when offering corporate blogging training sessions: “Where do you get your ideas?” the trick, Gladwell explains, is to “convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell.”

Continually coming up with fresh content to inform, educate, and entertain readers – well, that’s a pretty tall order for busy business owners and employees, and it’s a pretty tall order even for us professional content writers. 

At Say It For You, I’m constantly on the prowl for blogging ideas that I and my team of content writers can “store up” in preparation for those days when ideas just don’t seem to present themselves. In fact, I’ve found over the last ten years of working with business owners and professional practitioners, just about all of them can think of quite a number of things they want to convey about their products, their professional services, their industry, and their customer service standards. Yet, their biggest fear seems to be running out of blog content writing ideas.

Actually, I realized early on, it’s not that business owners (or the freelance blog writers they employ) don’t have enough ideas – it’s that those ideas need to be developed!  Where the creativity comes in is that in writing about the same few central themes, those themes need to be developed into fresh, interesting, and engaging content.

Next time your creativity seems to have hit the proverbial brick wall – just try blog writing in the shower!

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