Think-Like-a-Shrink Blogging for Business

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portrait of middle aged female therapist

“When someone is struggling with a problem you think you could solve easily, remember that the problem looks simple only because it’s not your problem,” Dr. Jeremy Sherman reminds readers of Psychology Today. “Don’t pretend that your guesses about what motivates people are objective observations.  They’re always refracted through your own biases,” Sherman adds.

For purposes of business blog content writing, understanding what motivates our readers is crucial. People are online searching for answers to questions they have and for solutions for dilemmas they’re facing, and we’re out to engage our blog readers and show them we understand the dilemmas they’re facing. But, do we really understand? How can we get better at “guessing”?

Sherman recommends curiosity. “If you’re intellectually curious,“ he says, “every experience, story, idea, conversation, and argument is a window into human nature. Read broadly across the social sciences and apply what you learn to everyone, yourself included.”

In blogging for business, I recommend curiosity as well. “Reading around” and “learning around”, in fact, are my prescriptions for keeping blog post content fresh and engaging. When you learn snippets of O.P.W. (Other People’s Wisdom), you enrich your own knowledge, including your knowledge of people.

E-learning coach Connie Malamed, for example, lends insight into the way our brains process information.  She recommends a strategy called chunking, which means breaking down information into bit-sized pieces so our readers can more easily digest the information.

Then WIBC newscaster Mike Corbin gave me a useful understanding when he talked about “unpackaging” news events by discussing those events from varied standpoints. I realized that “unpackaging” is a perfect description of the way we bloggers can help online readers connect with information we’ve presented.  We put facts and statistics into perspective, so that readers realize there’s something important here for them.

Drawing ideas from everywhere and everything – what you read, what you hear and view is what I call “learning around” for your blog. It’s absolutely true that every experience, story, idea, conversation, and argument is a window into human nature – and, for us blog content writers, that means the readers!

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Accentuate the Negative?

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dog food

“Eliminate the negative an’ latch on to the affirmative” was Johnny Mercer’s musical advice back in 1945. Playing to one’s strengths has, in fact, been a popular fad in management development circles. As a blog content writer, though, sometimes I wonder.

The latest issue of Modern Dog magazine features eight article titles on its cover:

  1. How Not to Train Your Puppy
  2. Gift ideas galore
  3. Big Dogs and their Puppy Counterparts
  4. Winter Survival Tips
  5. Great Gear
  6. I’m Adoptable
  7. Find a New Best Friend
  8. “Why is My Dog Staring at Me?”

Guess which one attracted my attention the most? Yeah, gotta admit… it was the negative one telling me how NOT to train my puppy. And guess what? It’s not just me.  People are drawn to articles with negative titles, my friend and fellow blogger Lorraine Ball pointed out a year ago. Posts with negative titles stand out in a blog roll, on a Twitter feed or LinkedIn page, and the negative posts are more likely to be shared, retweeted and read.

What’s with us? Well, “Edgy language draws attention”, Lorraine explains. (Lorraine’s title “Why Your Blog Titles Suck” is one too edgy for me, but I get the idea. I do.) Fact is, I would’ve picked “Why is My Dog Staring at Me?” before “How to Train Your Puppy”.  It was that How-NOT-to that drew my attention.

But that doesn’t jibe at all with Rich Brook’s advice on socialmediaexaminer: “The how-to is the most powerful of all the blogging archetpyes.”  Your prospects and customers have a problem and you can help them solve it by creating a step-by-step post that walks them through a solution, he says. That may be true, counters Lorraine Ball, but fear of failure is core to who we are as people, and it’s hard to resist reading material about how to avoid it.

Could it be that first accentuating the negative, and only then latching on to the affirmative is the best advice for us business blog content writers?

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Another Year, Not Just Another Blog

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2016 Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Everybody, it seems, has advice about how to make your blog better than ever in 2016. John Egan, writing in the Huffington Post, sort of sums it up in two words: “Aim high”, by which he means never sacrificing quality merely to achieve quantity.

BlogTyrant makes some predictions about blogging SEO in 2016 centered around speed, because “even a second or two of lag can cost your business thousands of dollars”. Learning “how to shrink stuff” – photos, images, graphics, etc. can save loading time. Blogtyrant predicts that guest posting will still be one of the “absolute best ways to get your name out there and grow traffic.”

As a checklist for themselves, blog content writers might wish to use the judging criteria for the UK Blog Awards 2016, which include the following five aspects of a blog:

  • Design
  • Style
  • Content
  • Marketing
  • Usability

“Determine why you are blogging,” advises Maisha Walker of Inc.com. Walker outlines the four reasons a website exists to aid a business, and suggests ways to measure success for each goal:

  • build a brand (what awareness studies will you do?)
  • generate leads (How many phone calls or emails to you want to get from your blog?)
  • generate direct sales (How many readers and page views will it take?)
  • generate advertising revenue (How much do you hope to make? How many readers and page views do you need to do that?)

“Your previous years’ outreach can clue you into what balance will work best. Take stock of what you did the past year: What was a home run? What was moderately successful? What underperformed? And what were the reasons for your content’s success or failure?” Amanda Hicken of prnewswire.com advises.

Then, looking towards the coming year, Hicken says, go through the holidays, seasonal events, and conferences that impact not just your industry, but also the industries related to your target audience. Uncover other newsworthy topics and trends by using a monitoring tool. But, she cautions, “don’t fall into the trap of operating on autopilot”.

How will you approach blogging in the new year?

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Being the Type They Can Count On

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In deciding whether to trust someone, we weigh two key characteristics, Adam Galinsky and Maurice Concept of reliability in businessSchweitzer explain in their book Friend and Foe – competence and warmth.

Basically, we ask ourselves two questions:

  • Does this person have the ability to follow through?
  • Do they have my best interest at heart?

Trust is a mightily important element in business blogging. Readers, after all, found your blog because what they needed corresponded with what you sell, what you know, and what you know how to do. They’ve clicked on the link, and now they’re “meeting” you for the first time.
How will you appear to readers in terms of competence? There are two elements at work here:

  • Credibility – It becomes evident, through the content of the blog, that you’re the subject matter expert they’re seeking.
  • Reliability – You’ve helped clients and customers “just like them” many times before; you’re familiar with your readers’ needs and concerns.

Even if you’ve come across as the most competent of providers, you still need to pass the “warmth” test. Does your blog present you as “real people”, with a passion for serving in your field?

The founder of Moth, a nonprofit dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling, believes the success of his organization comes from two elements:

  • There’s no “wall of artistry” or stage curtain between the storyteller and audience.
  • The storytellers share their own human failures and frailty.

As business owners or practitioners in today’s click-it-yourself, do-it-yourself world, our content writing needs to demonstrate to online searchers that, in our fields, we ARE smarter than Google Maps, or eHow, or Wikipedia. 

Even more important, we need to make clear, we’re a lot more caring for our customers – they can count on us!

 

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Blogging to Tell Them What to Think About

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Thinking manHara Estroff Marano, writing in Pyschology Today, says she won’t tell you what to think, but will tell you what to think about.  While in this article the psychologist is offering food for thought in the spheres of dating and self-motivation, I couldn’t help but love that line of hers, realizing how very apropos it is for us business blog content writers.

In fact, a point I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions is this: whether you’re blogging for a business, for a professional practice, or for a nonprofit organization, you need to voice an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. In other words, blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations; you can’t just “aggregate” other people’s stuff and make that be your entire blog presence.

On the other hand, if you, as a business owner or professional practitioner, try telling people what to think, that’s a surefire way to lose friends and customers in a hurry. Yes, your blog is your “podium”, meaning you get to showcase your business so customers will want you to be the one to provide them with the product or the service they need. But they need to arrive at that point as a result of their own thinking.  Dr. Marano hit the nail on the head – don’t tell readers what to think; give them all the facts they need to think about.

How can blogs help potential clients and customers make better, sometimes complex, decisions?

  • By suggesting questions readers can ask themselves while choosing among many options. (Do they want ease of use? Current functionality? Future capabilities?)
  • By “mapping”, meaning showing how choices are related to consequences.  How much sooner will your mortgage get paid off if you add $100 each month to your payment? How should the prospect feel about the purchase (Relief? Trust? Premier status?)
  • By offering easy ways to make choices, so that the decisions are not pressure-packed.

You might say the art of blogging consists of supplying facts, and then putting those facts in context.  As bloggers, we’re giving them the raw materials to think about, but we need to go one step further, demonstrating why those facts matter, suggesting ways readers can use the information for their own benefit.

To the woman concerned that the man she’s been dating has been legally separated for the past twenty years, Marano suggests, “Could it be that your online friend values clinging to the comfort of the status quo?”

Are you giving your readers something to think about?

 

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