Archive for category: Business writing tips

“In today’s world, your customers have access to tons of information, they are super busy, and they are overwhelmed,” says Jim Keenan of A SalesGuy.com.  “They want to know that you and your organization can teach them something.  If you can’t, they’re not interested.”

Whatever your business or profession, there’s no end to the technical information available to consumers on the Internet. Our job then, as business blog content writers, becomes to help readers absorb, buy into, and use that information.

“Briefly,” says Jim Connolly of Jim’s Marketing Blog, “here’s how content marketing works: You build and market a website and stock it with free information that has real value to your prospective clients.”

There’s skill involved in offering that free information. Chunking is one way business bloggers can offer technical information in “chewable tablet form” by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, or, in reverse, showing how individual bits of information are related in ways readers perhaps hadn’t considered.

Everywhere it’s becoming evident that there’s a lot of competition for readers, as local author Madalyn Kinsey observes. And, to our point today about using business blogs to offer readers valuable information, Kinsey adds, “How-to subjects sell best – money, health, self-improvement, hobbies, sex, and psychological well being.”

“Tell and sell tradition marketing is dead,” according to Stan Phelps of Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. “Cause of death was the empowered consumer,” he adds. Conclusion? If marketing is about anything, it’s about differentiating what you do and how you do it.

As a business blog writing trainer, I’d go a step further. It’s about differentiating what you think about what you do and why you think that way. Taking a stance on issues relevant to your business or profession will give your blog post more “pow” every time.

It’s about authority. Sure, “authority” has become an important term in search engine-speak, but, more than that, presenting a definite perspective goes a long way towards having readers perceive you as authentic as well as expert.

In blogging for business, teaching – and opining – are the new selling!

One meaning of the term “expletive” is swear word, and most business content writers, very sensibly, wouldn’t dream of including offensive language in a marketing message. There’s another meaning, however, for the term “expletive”, and while that one’s not nearly as likely to offend readers, Writers’ Digest still advises avoidance.

A syntactic expletive is a word that contributes nothing to the meaning of a sentence, only to the syntax or structure of it.

Example #1:
“It was her last argument that finally persuaded me.” How can the writer get rid of the expletive? Writers’ Digest suggests the more direct and forceful ”Her last argument finally persuaded me.”

Example #2:
“There are likely to be many researchers raising questions about this methodological approach.” Better to say “Many researchers are likely to raise questions about this methodological approach.”

When it comes to web-based communication, words, along with pictures, are a business’ only tools.  As a professional ghost blogger, I work with words and phrases. Above all, though, I teach this: Our job is to communicate, as plainly and directly as possible, how your business – or your client’s business – helps its clients and customers.

Jargon and expletives are bad, and they’re even worse for blogs. Searchers came to your blog to “find out” stuff, not to “ascertain”, to get “help”, not to “facilitate”. You want them to “use”, not “utilize” your services and products. You offer the “best”, not the “optimum” of each. You help clients “plan”, not “facilitate”, and you do that “by”, not “by means of” being great at what you do.

Leave out the “that”s and the “there are”s, and get rid of gobbledygook in your blog!