We’ll Say It For You – “Happy New Year!”

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Hard to believe, but my little ghost-blogging and content writing company, Say It For You, is New Year's champagnecelebrating its eighth New Year’s today!

Our content, some 20,0000 unique writing selections by now, may be found in clients’ corporate brochures  and website pages, in press releases, “nurturing emails” and Facebook posts. Primarily, though, our pieces populate the blogosphere.

2015 was certainly a year of learning for me, and ideas for material were everywhere I looked, from magazine and newspaper articles, radio and TV broadcasts, and even billboards and print ads. Networking groups were my classrooms, and our Say It For You clients our best teachers.

More than ever, I realized, our readers need even more from us than expert advice and information.  We need to put all of that information into perspective and become thought leaders. It became more and more evident to me that at least half the time I spend creating a blog post is reading/research/thinking time. That meant continuing to build my collection of books that serve as blog content writing resources.

As 2015 draws to a close, I’m revisiting my Say It For You mission statement:

Say It For You is a premium blogging and marketing service that provides your business with    enhanced potential for improved standing in search engine results and reader engagement. More than just a collection of keywords, our blog posts are strong, thought-filled messages about your business or practice.

Basically, what that means is when you use Say It For You, you receive the following benefits in addition to impeccably written posts:

  • A single writer dedicated to understanding your business and keeping abreast
    of topics in your industry. That writer is ready to interface with your SEO expert, marketing consultant, or web designer.
  • Say It For You works with only one client in each field of business, so that all research and promotional efforts are devoted towards benefiting you and your business.
  • You will have personal contact with your writer, including regular in-person meetings or phone conferences. Your writer is always available to discuss content and strategy.
  • The ideas and input of writers with strong background in business. Our writers have expertise in finance, marketing, operations, event planning, autos, seniors, international commerce, healthcare, and more.

    Eight and a half years and 20,000 pieces of writing later, we find that every day there’s something new to celebrate and to share!  Happy New Year!

 

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Blogging Almost to the Finish Line

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A group of runners in a cross country race.“You can’t open a magazine or newspaper without seeing a recap,” motivational speaker Mark Sanborn wrote. Sanborn isn’t sure, though, how useful recaps are, and quickly concludes he had nothing to do with major events and nothing he could do about them now that they were over.  “The best I can hope to do is learn vicariously from these people and events,” he writes, “and find some ways to apply the lessons in my own life.”

Look first at your successes, Sanford says.  High achievers go too quickly on to the next goal, missing the pleasure and optimism that comes from reflected on success. Next, says Sanborn, look at the setbacks.  What were the lessons you learned?  Have you made changes in your behavior to lessen future setbacks? If there’s nothing you could have done to avoid whatever difficulties occurred, FIDO (Forget it, drive on). Third, advises Sanborn, project into the year ahead to form ideas, goals and plans.

Now that the end of 2015 is coming close, I try to follow that self evaluation process Sanborn wrote about back in 2011, looking back at the past year spent as content writer and corporate blogging trainer. It was useful to go back and read Eric Wagner’s “Five Reasons 8 Out of 10 Business Fail”, which appeared in Forbes two years ago.

Failure reason #1 for small businesses is not being really in touch with customers.  On this one, I give my Say It For You team high marks.  Since our business model involves taking on only one client in each field of business, then assigning a dedicated writer to interface with the owner or practitioner, I put staying in touch in our Success column.

When things didn’t work this year, I realize, it almost always had to do with lack of coordination among the blog writer, the webmaster, the business owner, and the staff of the client’s business or practice. We business bloggers are nothing if not interpreters. Effective blog posts must go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic.

That means owners and professional practitioners have got to be involved in the process of producing content, even after they’ve engaged the services of our professional content writers. The webmaster has to work together with the blog writer to provide the optimization and analysis that make the content “work”. Hiring professional bloggers is not a “wake me up when it’s over” proposition. I think my biggest mistakes happened when I compromised on this principle. Not only should there be periodic team meetings to discuss content, it is not a good idea for me and my team to take on writing assignments without insisting the business also invest in properly designed landing pages and website optimization. When blog writing is not coordinated with email and social media the results are simply not likely to be what the business owner expects.

I have to say, we on the Say It For You team have more than enough reasons for pleasure and optimism. On the other hand, we’ve already begun to make certain changes to our business model, with an eye to learning from our failures.

2016? Bring it on!

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Cleaning Out Your Blog Topic Closet

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Goodwill storeWhile trying on clothes at a couple of new shops in Fishers and Carmel, I couldn’t help thinking about a blog post I’d written almost six years ago about the Goodwill Guy and Clothes You Shouldn’t Wear.

You’ve probably seen those Goodwill ads. The principle is, there are four kinds of clothes, and only one of those kinds should stay in your closet. The other three – the clothes you can’t wear, the clothes you don’t wear, and of course the Clothes You Shouldn’t Wear – should be going to Goodwill (so that someone who should be wearing them, can.

I’d categorized blog post content the same way.  (I’ve thought this whole thing through again and reworked some of my ideas with the benefit of six years of hindsight)…

Posts you don’t blog might include (but perhaps should):

  • Posts that would take some  real time to research
  • Strong opinion pieces
  • How-to instructions (fear readers might go DIY on you)

Posts you really can’t write:

  • Information that is not related to your topic
  • Topics that are too broad and really outside the scope of your expertise

Posts you really shouldn’t present to your readers:

  • Information that is overly technical for the average reader
  • Negative remarks about competitors
  • Posts that are too general, repeating the common wisdom with nothing of your own “slant”

So then, what sort of posts absolutely DO belong in your blog “closet”?

  • Employee posts, created by real people who are actually doing the work and talking to your customers
  • Testimonials from customers and clients
  • True tales of problems you’ve actually helped solve for your customers
  • Wisdom from other sources that can be useful to your readers

Clutter” in blogs is actually a positive. There’s only so much room for clothes in even the most spacious closet, but once I’ve put content on this Say It For You blog, for example, it can remain on the Internet forever.  (This post is actually #1052 for me, yet all my 1,151 past blog posts haven’t disappeared. All that content remains, available to readers in reverse chronological order, a very good thing when it comes to “winning search” online!)

Hate to say this, but it’s perhaps not our blog that needs periodic de-cluttering, it’s us.
As we continue blogging month after month, year after year, we need to be our own Goodwill Guys –

What sort of posts are we writing, but perhaps shouldn’t be (or at least not so often)?

What posts have we been lazy about that absolutely belong in our blog?

 

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Blogging to One-Tank Destinations

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kind rijdt autoHave you visited the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Notre Dame, Indiana? How about the Five Points Fire Museum in Lafayette, IN? I haven’t been to either, but after learning through the Columbian magazine that those would be “one tank destinations” for me (I live in Indianapolis), I’m adding both locations to my vacation day fun possibilities list.

There’s a valuable nugget of wisdom in this for us blog content writers, I realize. Had that article in the Columbian been about two faraway, exotic destinations, I’d probably have simply turned the page. Instead, I cut the item out of the magazine, posting it on my kitchen bulletin board.

Thing is, in marketing, it’s all about accessibility and ease when it comes to triggering action on the part of readers, whether in print or online. Making a business’ or a practice’s products and services accessible and easy to acquire or use has to be at the top of our best practices list when it comes to writing content for business blogs.

What are some ways to make the information in blog posts “one-tank”, meaning easy to access and easy to put into action?

  • Offer answers in a few, short, well-thought-out words, with longer answers to follow if requested
  • Insert Calls to Action at various points throughout a business blog post
  • Remind readers of the annoyances and hassles they’re experiencing with their present providers and products.  Go on to describe the perfect, hassle-free solution to their problems.
  • Don’t just say “Contact us.” (What exactly do you want your reader to think, feel, or do?) Have people fill out a form where they tell you “where they want to go”.
  • Focus on one specific step readers can take. Choose a very specific problem or need, and offer a very clear and compelling solution.

    Are you taking your blog readers to one-tank destinations?
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Bullet-Point Blogging

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“Bullet points, when used wisely, can increase readability and retention by readers,” Michael Bailey reminds us in Internet Ten Blank business diagram bullet liet illustrationMarketing: an Hour a Day. So is that all we need to know?  Not by a long shot, because bullet points can very easily go very wrong.

Bullet points are mini-headlines, encouraging readers to go back into the real meat of your content or go forward with your call to action, says Robert Bruce of copyblogger.com. Bruce offers three bullet-point rules of thumb:

  • Keep them symmetrical (1-line each, 2-lines each, etc.).
  • Practice parallelism (begin each with the same part of speech).
  • Keep them short for greater impact.

“When website visitors read text online, they do not want to work too hard at the task,” says writeraccess.com. Bullet points draw the readers’ eyes to the most important information. Writeraccess reminds blog content writers of some basic punctuation and grammar rules:

  • The text used to introduce a section of bullet points should end in a colon.
  • When the information is a complete sentence, begin with a capital letter and end with proper punctuation.

A “sneaky tip” offered by websitecopywritingservices.com is that the first and last items in a list generally grab the most attention, so use the start and end of the list to convey whatever is most important.

William Green, guest blogging on BloggerSentral.com, makes no bones about the way he feels about bullet points. “They benefit nearly every area of your blog, be it traffic, SEO, Twitter follows, RSS subscribers, I mean everything,” he says.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I particularly liked what Green had to say about finding the right balance between paragraphs and bullet points.  If you can use both, he says, you will be become a successful blogger.

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