Blog a Time Traveler’s Guide to Your Business

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RIn ancient Greece, I learned by reading the “Time Travelers Guide to Table Manners” in Mental Floss Magazine, napkins hadn’t been invented yet, so you wiped your greasy hands with a piece of bread, then threw the bread on the floor for the dogs. In ancient Rome, by contrast, people ate with their hands, but always kept their pinkie and ring fingers clean.

Fascinating tidbits of information such as these can help content writers come up with ideas for business blogs. I can see the two specific examples above being used in a vet’s blog, a blog about pet food, a blog about keeping different kinds of floors clean, even a blog about pinkie rings. Trivia can be turned into idea triggers to help practitioners and business owners blog about the products they sell, about their skills and particular beliefs.

Today, though, I want to focus on using the time traveler template in business blog content. What’s the purpose of talking about the way things used to be done in a particular industry or profession?

  • Business owners and practitioners come across as knowledgeable and committed.
  • Readers (read potential buyers) are moved to take advantage of all the new technology and expertise now available to them.
  • The “I never knew that!” response is how readers become engaged by the information.

Blogging about the history of your own (or your client’s) company can have a humanizing effect. Learning how any business owner or professional practitioner overcame adversity tens to  engender feelings of empathy and admiration.

But even reaching back to the history of  the entire industry or profession is a valuable technique when writing about any type of business or practice. That’s because, in every industry and every profession, things are not the same as they used to be.  Helping readers understand how to get the maximum benefit out of today’s version of products and services is the point.

What can you include in a time traveler’s guide to YOUR industry or profession?

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Inductive and Deductive Blogging for Business

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“The most common forms of mathematical reasoning are inductive and deductive reasoning,” explain the authors of Studying for LMathematics. “You use inductive reasoning any time you come up with a general rule from a pattern.  Deductive reasoning is when you apply a general rule to a specific case.”

As business blog content writers, we’re engaged in helping readers reason their way to doing business with the business owners and professional practitioners who’ve hired us to tell their story. It’s not that there’s a lack of information sources; if anything, there’s an absolute glut of data available to online searcher! What readers need from us, then, is not more information, but help in reasoning through all that information so that problem-solving choices can be made.

OK, so let’s go back to the mathematics tutorial book and the two sorts of reasoning.

Deductive:
You are reasoning deductively when you show that a rule isn’t true for all cases, which is called “proof by counter example”. As a blog writer, start with a commonly held assumption relating to your industry or profession, and come up with a counter example.

Inductive:
With inductive reasoning, you arrive at a formula that demonstrates a general pattern between different tactics and different aspects of an idea.

Paul Lawrence in earlytorise.com suggests using Triggering Deductive Reasoning to persuade clients to buy your products, get employees to take on unpleasant projects, or get your children to do their chores. You do that, explains Lawrence, by making statements that lead the other person to reach, on his own, the conclusion you want him to come to, then reinforcing that conclusion..
All advertisements aim at persuasion, points out Stan Mack of Demand Media. If an ad uses inductive reason, the implied conclusion isn’t necessarily true (think of an ad featuring a sweaty athlete chugging a thirst-quenching beverage). As blog writers, we would make as strong an argument as possibly through visual demonstrations, word descriptions, and customer testimonials to create the illusion that the product or service you’re promoting is the best option. We can inject urgency through one-time sales, or use fear (of getting old, having one’s credit stolen, etc.).

Alternately, we can use statistics to prove logically that we can satisfy the reader’s needs.  With deductive reasoning, if our assumptions are true, the conclusions we draw must be true as well.

Help your blog readers reason their way to saying “Yes!”

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For Business Blog Content Writers, the Practice is in the Doing!

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“How much time does it really take to get great?” A lot, according to Mental Floss’ Magazine’s “Genius Guide to Rope-walkerSuccess”, if you judge by the routines of various prodigies.

  • Mathematician Paul Erdos put in 19-hour days, publishing 1.525 academic papers.
  • Jonas Salk spent 16 hours a day for seven years researching the polio vaccine.
  • Tightrope walking Nik Wallenda practice 3-4 hours every day before walking between Chicago skyscrapers.
  • Stash of Guns ‘N Roses practiced 12 hours a day.
  • Jerry Seinfeld practiced 200 times before his first comedy set on The Tonight Show.

In contrast to that reality, admit the Mental Floss authors, a 2014 study showed that practice accounts for only 12 percent of mastery.

After almost ten years of blog content writing and training others to write corporate blog content, I’d have to say the old saw about practice makes perfect definitely applies. There’s a difference, though. For content writers, practicing consists of actually writing and posting, not in getting ready to do that at some later time!

Years ago, in the process of explaining the way my company Say It For You came about, I talked about the “drill sergeant discipline” needed by blog content writers. What I meant was that, while all my business owner clients knew that writing blogs in their area of expertise was going to be a great idea for them, not very many of them felt they could take the time to compose and post content on a regular basis.  I also knew that the main key to business blogging success was going to be simply keeping on task.

Going back to the example of Jerry Seinfeld’s practicing 200 times before his Tonight Show appearance, Seinfeld understood drill sergeant discipline as well.  He’d figured out that the way to be a better comic was to write better jokes, and that the way to do that was to write jokes every single day.  For every day he writes, Jerry puts a big red X on his wall calendar, and all that matters is not breaking that chain of X’s.

That’s a good model for blog content writers, I’d have to say. Far too many business owners start out strong with their blogging, but months or even weeks later, begin to fizzle. On the other hand, we bloggers get more of a “shot” with readers than we think. In any one post, we have hardly as much “on the line” (pun intended) as a Nik Wallenda.  Sure, we strive for high quality in every single post, but there’s always tomorrow or next week to complete the thought, clarify, and bring in more information.

We’re lucky. As content writers, we get to practice AND perform at the same time!

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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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