The Phrase That Pays in Business Blog Writing

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“Great storytellers don’t just hope to get lucky,” says former professional actor and now keynote speaker Doug Stevenson.  But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, he adds, because classical storytelling structure has been around for thousands of years.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I was thrilled to see that Stevenson teaches something I’ve always stressed to newbie blog content writers: Make one point. Just about every story you come up with can teach a variety of lessons.  Pick one, Stevenson says, only one, each time you tell the story.

Where to start? There are two approaches, Stevenson teaches.

a) Start with the story itself.  Something interesting happens to you and you tell about it. (This approKey to financial success. Concept. 3d illustrationach certainly applies to business blog posts about an interesting problem the business owner or practitioner was able to solve for a customer.)

b) The other approach is to be strategic and start with the point in mind.

  • Do you want to inspire people to believe in themselves?
  • Teach a better way to do something?
  • Communicate why a change is being made?
  • Caution people about a danger?
  • Make a complex idea easier to understand?
  • Introduce a new perspective on something?

Once you’ve set the scene, introduced the characters, encountered, then overcome the obstacle, it’s time to make the point.  That’s where the Call to Action comes in, Stevenson reminds writers.  He calls it the “phrase that pays.”

That phrase, he teaches, starts with a verb.  Billey McCaffrey of wordstream.com agrees.If you have an e-commerce site, start your CTA with words like “buy,” “shop,” or “order”. Promoting a newsletter or white paper? Start your CTA with words like “download” or “subscribe”. Want someone to request more information? Try “fill out a form for…” or “find out how…”

When it comes to CTAs, though I find myself issuing a caution during corporate blogging training sessions: Blogs are not ads. When people go online to search for information and click on different blogs or websites, they don’t want to “be sold.” The CTA may be the “phrase that pays”, but the great thing about stories is that they should be able to do most of the selling for you!

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Never Can Say Goodbye? Your Online Visitors Will!

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My trade show maven friend Jane Thompson writes about people who don’t know how to say goodbye. “When you are prepping your booth staff for a show,” she warns, “don’t forget to trade showprepare them for the eventuality of having to extract themselves from a conversation with an attendee who is ‘going on too long’”.

It’s not unusual to find business blog content writers who, like those attendees, go on much too long in a single post. Thompson suggests some closing phrases and actions for trade show booth personnel:

…It was great meeting you
…I hope we’ll run into each other again
…I don’t want to keep you from seeing the rest of the show
….I’ve been monopolizing you…

After that remark, suggests Thompson, shake  long-winded visitors’ hands and give them something to do, such as entering a drawing or filling out a form for an email list. Of course, with business blogs, the shoe’s on the other foot, so to speak. It’s not the visitors who are long-winded, but the creators of the blog!

When it comes to defining “short” or “long”, the blogging community is often divided on the issue, John Rampton, writing in Forbes, points out. Some believe that the shorter, the better, he says, while others stand by the thought that blog posts should be long. The reason why such a divide exists is because both lengths have worked for various bloggers.

What no business owner or professional practitioner wants, obviously, is for readers to feel compelled to “extract themselves” from the conversation. My own advice to content writers has been to stick to one core “thesis” point per post with some short subtopic explanations.

Never can say goodbye?  Your readers will do it for you if you lack focus in your business blog posts!

 

 

 

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De-cluttering a Business Blog Post

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Man hands reaching out for help from a big pile of woman clothesWhen my latest issue of the Tucker Talks Real Estate newsletter arrived in the mail, it was a wakeup call. “At the end of the workday,” the lead article read, “you’re ready to leave behind the endless barrage of emails, conference calls, and meetings.”  There are steps I could follow, the author reminded me, to make my home a more tranquil place, starting with reducing clutter.

It occurs to me that business blogs could use some de-cluttering as well, and I wanted to share my ideas on that with my business owner and professional practitioner readers, as well as with other freelance content writers.

The concept is that, once you’ve built up a nice collection of posts in your business blog (congrats to you – most bloggers abandon ship after a few months), it’s time to make a commitment to keeping the blog organized, clean, and easy on the eyes.

  • “Get rid of things you don’t need or use,” is Tucker’s advice, “and find a place for everything else.” One form of “cleaning house” for us blog content writers is to re-categorize.  Hopefully, using the blogging platform software, every blog writer has “filed” each post in a “category drawer”.  But, just as happens at home, where somehow spare toothbrushes get put in the sock drawer, posts were “misfiled”. It’s a great idea to systematically re-read each of your past posts to see what main theme or “leitmotif” each one actually emphasizes. That, in turn, allows you to reduce the number of categories, which not only makes the blog more useful to readers, abut more “tranquil” for you as you create and file new material.
  • Minimizing “clutter” in blog content itself doesn’t necessary mean chopping the number of words (although Meryl K Evans advises bloggers to “shoot for 500 words or less, because “Readers want to get to the heart of the matter and get out.”) It’s more about making the posts readable and easier to look at, with shorter paragraphs, photos, bullet points and bolding.
  • Does that Tucker advice to “get rid of those things you don’t need or use” apply to your blog posts?  Yes and no. No, you don’t want to send old posts to the trash heap, because they are part of the “equity” you’ve built up in using your keyword phrases. But, yes, you need to revisit your strategy – are you promoting the blog on the “right” social media platforms (the ones where your target customers “hang out”)? Are you establishing a clear navigation path from the blog post to the right landing page on your website?  Has your target readership changed?

No way around it – from the cabinets under our kitchen sink to our business blog content writing (including both past and future posts) – it’s time we spent time de-cluttering!

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Mind Tools for Business Bloggers

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As part of our ongoing training for tutors at Ivy Tech, we were to read an article from Mind Tools about dealing with unhappy customers (the idea being to better equip us to handle the occasional unhappy Learning Lab student). It occurred to me that the material was well worth sharing with business blog content writers.

“Once you’re aware that your client is unhappy, then your first priority is to put yourself into a customer service Angry young woman, blowing steam coming out of earsmindset,” is Mind Tools’ advice. This means that you set aside any feelings you might have that:

  • the situation isn’t your fault
  • your client’s made a mistake
  • he or she is giving you unfair criticism

“Adjust your mindset so that you’re giving 100 percent of your focus to the client and to the situation….Resist the temptation to try to solve the situation right away or to jump to conclusions about what happened.  Instead let your client tell his story.”

One very important function corporate blog posts can serve is damage control.

I teach freelance blog that stories of their clients’ past mistakes and failures can have a humanizing effect, creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame the effects of their own mistakes!

But what about negative comments that readers make about a business, using social media? Well, to an extent, when customers’ complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” more weight.  In other words, go ahead and “let the client tell his story,” which then gives you the chance to offer useful information to other readers and to explain any changes in policy that resulted from the situation.

But, even when there haven’t been negative comments or outright complaints, we’re out to engage our blog readers and show them we understand the dilemmas they’re facing, going right to the heart of any fears or concerns they might have.

If there are misunderstandings or negative myths surrounding our products and services, let’s get those out on the table.  Where better to do that than in a business blog?

 

 

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Reading Along, Does Your Blog Whiz past?

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Dev Patel

When Adam Davis of Buzz Feed teaches you grammar, he first shows you a video clip in which some well known TV or movie actor is doing it wrong.

  • She may not have split ends, but when the movie star says “You need to really focus”, that’s an example of a split infinitive.  Sure, when creating a blog post, you do really need to focus on one concept. You also really need to keep the two parts of the infinitive (“to” and “focus”) together!
  • No, Warner Brothers. That actress shouldn’t be saying “There’s towels in the closet.” There ARE towels in the closet.  “Towels” is a plural object, so “are” is the appropriate verb.
  • And, Dev Patel, you’re a favorite of mine, but don’t be putting apostrophes where they don’t belong, as in “Put it in it’s place”. The apostrophe in “it’s” means “it is”, and I know that’s not what you meant.
  • My favorite of the David film star quotes is this one: “Walking along, cars whizzed past”. The cars aren’t what’s walking, for heaven’s sake! The participle “walking along” is left dangling with nothing to attach itself to, Davis points out.

“I won’t hire people who use poor grammar,” says Kyle Wiens in the Harvard Business Review. Isn’t that a bit extreme? No, because Wiens has a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid. Language is constantly changing, he admits, but that doesn’t make grammar unimportant.  “Good grammar is credibility, especially on the Internet.”

In today’s competitive business world (as any good freelance blog content writer needs to keep in mind), corporate blogging for business represents an ideal tool for “getting personal” and earning trust.? Business blog writing needs to be real.

Being real, though, doesn’t mean being sloppy, as I’m constantly reminding business owners and professional practitioners during corporate blogging training sessions.

Reading along, does your blog whiz past?

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