Your Blog Comes With Bragging Rights

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Yeah, it’s more than OK to brag on yourself in your blog. Remember, online visitors searching for a product or a service typically have no idea what it takes to do what you do and how much effort you put into acquiring the expertise you’re going to use to their benefit.

Hold on a moment – What I am not telling content writers to do is to “wave their credentials” around. What I do think needs to come across loud and clear in business blog writing is what preparation and effort it takes – on your part and on the part of your employees – to be able to deliver the expert advice, service, and products  customers can expect from you.

As a business owner in today’s click-it-yourself, do-it-yourself or hire-a-robot world, your content needs to demonstrate to online searchers that, in your field, you are smarter than Google Maps, or eHow, or Wikipedia. (A recent Digital Trends article criticized ChatGPT, saying that the chatbot has “limited knowledge of world events after 2021, and is prone to filling in replies with incorrect data if there is not enough information available on a subject.”)

Understanding your target market is different from just making assumptions about it. Instead, it’s about really trying to figure out its needs and motivations, squareup.com observes. “You should also consider who your customers are as people. What do they value? What is their lifestyle?”

Where “bragging rights” enter into the equation, we’ve learned at Say It For You, is that, in order for you to connect with those customers, the marketing content must make clear that you are part of their community and that therefore you share their concerns and needs.

Adboomadvertising.com agrees. “Don’t be modest, BRAG!! Bragging is vital for sales survival, so “brag about the results, and the value you were able to give clients who trusted you to handle their business.” Suggested tactics include:

  • case studies
  • testimonials
  • press clippings
  • awards and honors

In addition to all those “third-party” tactics, though, your blog content should provide readers with real insight into “what it took” and what keeps you and the people at your company or professional practice stay motivated to continue learning and serving. “It’s not bragging if it’s true,” says the rdwgroup. “Be confident but not conceited. Flaunt your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses.”

So, yeah, it’s more than OK to brag on yourself in your blog!

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Creating Contnt as Far as Your Headlights

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Content writers can take comfort in a quote by the editor of the Writer magazine of advice offered to novelists by E.L. Doctorow:

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”

At some point, the process of writing a single novel is “completed”. In contrast, the process of creating content for a blog is never done. As with planning a novel, at the outset of planning a business blog, the content writer defines the basic story lines and themes. With the power of content marketing itself well-proven and documented, many business owners and professional practitioners embark on the strategy in recognition of its power to generate interest in their products and services. It’s the week-after-week work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing blog posts that has many sitting in the driver’s seat while the car stalls, feeling unable to muster strength for the long journey ahead. The resulting sad statistic – 90% of all bloggers for business neglect or abandon their efforts.

The Writer contributor Emma Sloan describes procrastination as “a blank mind and an even blanker Word document, the inability to just start gnawing at the back of your brain even as you open yet another unrelated tab online.” The most useful advice Sloan offers: Just start. Set a timer for just five minutes to see what you can get done today.”

In practical terms, blog content writers need to keep on telling the business’ or the practice’s story in its infinite variations over long periods of time, knowing that, to a certain extent, the blog content readers who end up as clients and customers will have self-selected rather than having been persuaded, “recruited”, or sold. Capturing and focusing readers’ attention is the whole point of blog content writing. Still, it’s often the content creators who seem to lose their focus and their ‘drive”.

For the “right now”, when those ‘long periods of time” seem far too overwhelming, it’s good advice for blog writers need to focus on relaying to their readers a single concept – one “how-to”, one explanation, one benefit to web visitors – overcoming their own “stall” by driving only “as far as their headlights”.

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