Arming Readers With Words

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Farmer’s Almanac 2025 does something content marketers need to do more often – “putting words into readers’ mouths” Why? To make it easy for them to feel not only comfortable, but “smart” when talking about your business or practice area. 

The Almanac authors explain where several of our most common expressions come from:

I’ll take a raincheck:

In 1880s baseball, spectators were given an actual ticket stub for admission to a future game when a game was called off for rain. Later, retailers who were out of stock on an item offered rain checks for discounts at a later date.

I’m on Cloud Nine:

In the 1950s, the U.S. Weather Bureau would give numbers to clouds depending on how high they were, up to 30,000 feet (9 was next to highest).

It’s raining cats and dogs

The Greek word Catadoxa (try saying it out loud) means beyond belief. Another explanation is that in medieval times, homes had thatched roofs, and domestic animals would hide in the roof when the weather turned severe.

Under the weather

In old sailing vessels, “under the weather” meant under the weather rail (the hold of the ship).  If a sailor wanted to reduce the impact of the waves, he’d go below deck.

In blog marketing, once you’ve established common ground, reinforcing to readers that they’ve come to the right place, it’s important to add lesser-known bits of information on your subject, which might take the form of arming readers with new terminology, serving several purposes:

  • positioning the business owner or professional practitioner as an expert in the field
  • adding value to the “visit” for the reader
  • increasing readers’ sense of being part of an “in-the-know” group

As content writers, part of our challenge is to educate both prospects and clients on the issues relating to their decisions to choose between one business’ products and services and those of its competitors.  Introducing a curiosity-stimulating new term is one way to do just that.

At Say it For You, we believe in empowering readers by teaching them the meanings and the correct use of the terminology in that field. Most important, buyers feel empowered to make a decision when they feel “in on” the “lingo”.

Arm your readers with words – they’ll be more likely  to “lend you their ear”!

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Blogging About Other Ways to Reach the Goal

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“The MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) is just one of many ways to develop voice and skill as a writer,” Emma Komos-Hrobsky explains in Poets and Writers Magazine. In fact, the author goes on to name no fewer than 21 educational opportunities in the form of writing classes and seminars offered by organizations around the country.

“There’s one common mistake we often make when it comes to setting goals,” James Clear writes in blog.idonethis.com: We set a timeline, but not a schedule. “We need to focus on the practice, not the performance,” he adds.

How do these lessons about reaching a goal apply to content writing? “If you’ve ever googled instructions for how to perform a specific task, then you know the importance of high-quality how-to content,’ Julia McCory writes in seachengineland.com. By giving them content that’s actually helpful, you prove your expertise and building trust and affinity with your readers, McCory explains.

However, she cautions, it’s important to realize that a teaching mindset is entirely different from an information-sharing, entertaining, or analytical mindset. To be successful, you need to:

  • use detailed explanations
  • give step-by-step instructions
  • offer lots of examples
  • put yourself in the readers’ shoes

    At Say It For You, we’re always conscious that readers of our business or practice owners’ blog posts have many alternatives from which to choose. For a health coach focusing on weight loss, for example, potential clients might choose diet meal delivery, cosmetic “fat freezing” procedures, or personal trainers. One of the main challenges of content marketing is differentiating the product or service from alternative choices open to the prospect.

While the Poets and Writers Magazine article is valuable is that it reassures readers that a number of viable educational avenues exist, one point I often stress in blogging training sessions is that you need to do more than present a list of alternatives; it’s important that you voice an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers.

By all means, blog about alternative ways to reach a goal, but, by suggesting questions readers can ask themselves when choosing among many options, you can help them arrive, on their own, at the conclusion that the solution you’re marketing is the optimal choice.

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Tidbits, Not Tag Lines, Work Best in Blog Marketing

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In content writing, word tidbits and tag lines are both designed to help readers remember something– a concept, a company, a product, a service. Just the other day, when I came across examples of both, I realized just how important the difference is between a tagline and a word tidbit when it comes to blogging for business…..

“We wanna see-‘ya in a Kia” – is a tag line. It’s catchy, it’s memorable – it’s advertising. Thing is, that tagline tells me nothing about the car, about the company, about any one dealership or salesperson, nothing about the experience I would have if I chose to purchase and drive a Kia.

Contrast that with a word tidbit I caught last week in a local news bulletin about the fact that Edwards Drive-In restaurant is closing after more than sixty years in business, but that their food truck business will be continuing. “We’re selling the store, not the soul”. So much more than a tag line, this word tidbit captures the sense of “we” (the owners of the store) and how much the owners care about continuing their decades-long relationship with customers.

Fully fourteen years ago, with Say It For You in its n infancy, I’d mentioned a word tidbit found in Daniel Gardners’ book The Science of Fear. “We report the rare routinely, and the routine rarely,” he said. That powerful combination of everyday words unified concepts I already knew, but which I hadn’t synthesized into any true understanding about the media.

Just about a year later, I blogged about another “grabber” tidbit from a review of Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles restaurant: “And, wow, those wings…the breading was crispy and well-seasoned without overpowering the tender meat.” (Here’s the tidbit: “Maxine’s wings are nothing like the fast-food varieties that are more batter than bird”.

That word tidbit made me think about business blogging: Searchers arrive at your blog seeking information about what you do, what you sell, and what you know. The “batter” might be the way the blog site is laid out, the pictures and illustrations, and even cleverness in the writing. But, when it comes right down to it, the “meat” is the well-researched information, and the links you provide readers to sources they might not have thought to research themselves.

What a blog should aim to do is capture concepts relating to your business, putting words together is a new way, sharing an “aha!” experience with your readers that helps them know the subject better, but also helps them get to know you a little better.

Taglines may help them remember it, but word tidbits force them to think about it!

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Be-a-Mentor Blogging for Business

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“To gain business with your blog, you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. He wants to help them get ahead and live a more fulfilled life,” Neil Patel advises.

The first way that blogging gets you customers is it shows you’re open for business, Sarah Carnes writes in HubSpot.com. The second way? It educates your prospects. Take your frequently asked questions (FAQs) and turn them into blog posts. Once a potential customer sees you as a resource, they are much more likely to consider you when they are considering buying the product or service you provide. After researching and building your target audience, you know what they care about most – and what keeps them up at night. Using your content to answer those fears means that you can begin to “own” the conversation.

In the book Good People, author Anthony Tjan names five types of mentors. At Say it For You, we realize that in different blog posts, a business owner or professional practitioner can take on one of these mentoring “roles’:

Master of Craft:
Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a content writer, link to outside sources to add breadth, depth, and credibility to the ideas you’re expressing and the advice you’re offering.

Champion their cause
Comfort and connect with compassion and encouragement. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be as important in coming years as technical skills.

Co-pilot
“Collaborate” with readers, showing you understand the obstacles and challenges they face. Encourage them to “vent” by answering the tough questions in your content. But searchers haven’t always formulated their questions, and so what I suggest is that we do that for them.

Anchor
An anchor needn’t work in the mentee’s industry, but is someone who offers insights that readers can use to better cope with issues they are facing.

Reverse mentor
A reverse mentor can be of a younger generation with insights to share that can help older readers make sense of technology or see situations from a different vantage point.

What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts, curating content from many different points of view. In blogging for business, be a mentor!

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Bringing Fred Into Business Blog Writing

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The most important job skill of the twenty-first century, Mark Sanborn posits in The Fred Factor, is the ability to create value for customers without spending more money to do it. “Freds” are people who either create new value or add value to the work they already do, the author explains.

In creating blog content, needless to say, the goal is demonstrating that this product provider or practitioner has better ideas, better products, and better service than the competitors. But rising above the noise in a crowded field is much easier said than done. “Do you think you have an utterly unique product? Here’s the truth; you probably don’t,” digital consultant John Boitnott says bluntly. But human beings like to buy from other human beings, not faceless companies, so you need to be as human as possible, Boitnott says, focusing on authenticity, trust, and passion.

“Freds” pay attention to appearances, not because they are more important than substance, but because they count, Sanborn warns. We increase the value of things when we make them aesthetically pleasing. Potential consumers should have a positive experience from minute #1 of encountering your brand through your blog, and the posts need to help readers put themselves into the scene, envisioning the savings, the satisfaction, the pride, the increased health and improved appearance they’ll enjoy after using your product or service.

Just ten years ago in this Say it For You blog, I described the two aspects involved in winning medals in a horse show – equitation and pleasure. “Pleasure” refers to the horse itself – its posture, its control, and its looks, while “equitation” refers to the skill and the posture of the rider. To be blog writing “Freds”, we need to be sure it’s a “pleasure” to come to our site.

Is your site colorful and appropriate in style for the brand? Organized rather than cluttered? Easy to navigate, with everything from images to typeface in modest proportion and in good taste?

Bring Fred into your business blog writing!

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