Bullet-Point Blogging

/0 Comments/in , /by

“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.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

How Long is Your Blogging Tail?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Tail“One of the most interesting phenomena to arise in the online marketing world was the labeling of the ‘long tail’,” Matt Bailey points out in Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day.

The long tail concept was initially presented by Wired editor Chris Anderson. What’s the general idea? Thousands of people are searching for things online, and they use thousands of different words in forming their questions. What that means is that trying to be #1 in Google rankings for just one set of words isn’t going to be the best strategy.

Typically, says Bailey, marketing managers look at website statistics and get the list of top referring terms.  However, he explains, this approach does not truly reflect the visitors who come to the website Bailey uses the example of a website whose top 10 keyword terms brought 2,000 visitors to the website.  But the next 4,600 keywords generated 9,400 visits!

Even more important, since the top ten terms tend to be the more general keywords, they bring in the fewest conversions.

Bailey has a theory about this: Buying decisions happen in stages:

General search terms are used in Stage 1, at the point of need, the very beginning of the buying cycle. From here, one of three things happens:

  • The searcher buys the first thing they see from the website that ranks first. (This is NOT the most common result.)
  • The searcher becomes overwhelmed with the amount of information available and realized that further research will be needed.
  • The searcher begins to look through all the available products and information, sees strong opinions from other users, and decides there’s even more research needed.

The “long tail” consists of the millions of refined, deliberately more detailed phrases as searchers drill down during the decision-making process.

Understanding what types of searchers your business is likely to attract can be very important in keyword selection, Bailey explains.  Is your website an “impulse” site, where you can get a quick sale? Or, is it a content-based website where searchers can learn more, leading them gradually to the decision-making point?

What does all this mean for blog content writing?  Whether you’re writing a business-to-consumer blog or business-to-business, searchers come to the website to gather and evaluate information.  Through the blog, they learn about the basic benefits, the expected features, the typical service, and the experiences of others, Bailey explains. “Make sure your information is presented in a way that makes it easy for searchers to do side-by-side comparisons,” he cautions.

According to wordtracker.com, “Whenever a customers use highly specific search phrases, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy.”

How long is your blogging tail?

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

You’d-Be-Surprised Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , /by

While strange-and-unusual lists help spark readers’ curiosity and keep them moving through our blog Pinatapages, as blog content writers we can’t stop there. We need to take readers to the next step, which is telling them about surprising things they can do and accomplish (with our professional help, of course!).

For example, it’s all well and good for David Moye to write in the Huffington Post about Strange Things That Get Sent in the Mail. Strange and unusual tidbits most readers wouldn’t be likely to know can make for engaging blog content.

It’s just that strange and unusual simply isn’t enough. Unless the information is somehow tied to the reader’s problem or need, unless the blog content explains why the writer cares about that information or why that information could make a difference to the reader, there can be no Call to Action.  You’d be surprised how many businesses and practices create valuable content for their blog without going that extra step!

Online searchers must be assured they’ve come to the right place to find the information, products, and services they need. Without guidance, those searchers are unlikely to make the connection between the startling statistic, the strange-and-unusual tidbit, or the new information – and the actions they ought to consider taking!

Let’s compare that Moye article about strange things that get sent in the mail to one offered by Michele Porucznik on BuzzFeed.com called “21 Things You’d Be Surprised You Can Actually Mail”. (First off, the personal pronoun “you” takes the topic from theoretical curiousness to stuff the reader can USE!  While the average reader might never be inclined to put stamps on a coconut, a potato, a flip-flop, or a sombrero, it nevertheless offers ideas readers might use for a birthday gift or a business promotion.

You’d-be-surprised blogging for business focuses less on the surprise and more on the YOU!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Strangest-Things Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , /by

You wouldn’t believe some of the strange things that get sent in the mail, says David Moye, writing in the Huffington Post. In fact, Moye explains, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not runs an annual Strange Mail Contest.

The 2014 contest winner, for example, was a 19-pound tree trunk with a horseshoe embedded in it.  Ripley vice president of exhibits and archives Edward Meyer chose the entry not only for its size and weight, but also because of its uniqueness. Runners-up included a prosthetic arm, an animal skull, a mailbox, and a roll of toilet paper.

Mental Floss Magazine’s latest issue lists “14 Unusual Items You Can Get at Libraries”, including:

  • umbrellas (Cornell U. Library offers umbrellas than can be borrowed)
  • American Girl dolls (the Arlington Public Library has eight dolls available to borrowers)
  • Surfboards (Inverloch Library in Australia)
  • art for your office (Aurora Library in Illinois) has 30 sculptures available to borrow for up to 8 weeks)
  • knitting needles (Morse Institute Library in Natick, Mass.)
  • puppies (Yale Law Library)

While all these things are available for temporary use, for us blog content writers, the real and “permanent” takeaway, I believe, is that strange and unusual tidbits tend to engage readers’ curiosity and interest. If we open our minds to it, I’m convinced, we can make very good use of on-the-surface-useless information. The whole idea is to provide information most readers wouldn’t be likely to know, and then tie the tidbit to our own topic.

What are some of the strangest things you’ve encountered in your business or practice?

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

More Words About Images for Your Business Blog

/0 Comments/in , , /by

“Don’t put that stock photo on your website,” begs Peter Wolfgram of Roundpeg. “You didn’t have to do time is moneyit,” he says. “You could have taken that picture yourself. You could have shared your unique people and culture with a picture taken by your unique self.”

Over the past two weeks in my Say It For You blog, I’ve been discussing the use of images in business blog posts. The Roundpeg newsletter piece about using original vs. stock photos happened to coincide with my choice of topic at the time, making we think all the harder about the whole visual component in blogging for business.

“What we see has a profound effect on what we do, how we feel, and who we are,” Mike Parkinson of Billion Dollar Graphics asserts. Parkinson quotes famed psychologist Albert Mehrabian, who demonstrated that no less than 93% of communication is nonverbal.

There’s no question that visuals are one of the three “legs” of the business blog “stool”, along with information and perspective or “slant”. I’m not sure, on the other hand, that I agree that all OPI’s (Other People’s Images) are a bad thing. Yes, photos of you and your team members are part of “getting real” and introducing your company or practice to readers, so they get to know the people who will be serving them.

The other category of images for sale, though, is clip art, and I happen to like many of those images a lot. And, no, they’re not original to my clients’ businesses or to mine, and they are not able to – or intended to – show the products and services offered.  What those images do accomplish is capturing concepts, which helps me as the content writer, express the main idea I’m trying to articulate.

Since I’m a corporate blogging trainer as well as a blog writer, I’m keenly aware there’s another piece to this whole stock art question. That piece is time. While business owners know that blog frequency impacts customer acquisition, (see HubSpots’s State of Inbound Marketing.), most have a very hard time sustaining their content marketing efforts even without the additional burden of generating original photography. Sure, finding a good stock or free image takes time, too, but good stock clip art can offer a reasonable compromise.

My advice: definitely go ahead and use visuals to add interest to your blog. When it comes to photos, try for originals, and for concept pieces, OPI’s are AOK.

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail