What Do Blog Visitors Want?

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“What do interviewers want?” asks John Kador in “201 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview”. Ideal qualities for job candidates fall into four main categories, Kador explains:

  • Thinking
  • Planning
  • Interacting
  • Motivation

Business blogs, I’m fond of saying in corporate blogging training classes, are nothing more than extended interviews.  Just as in a face-to-face job interview, searchers who read your blog evaluate the content, judging whether you’re a good fit for them. And those visitors, I’m convinced, are “testing” your company or practice for the same four ideal qualities job interviewers use:

Thinking:
Can you (the “candidate” in this scenario) quickly and effectively solve challenging problems?
Kador advises candidates to be prepared to demonstrate past successes; bloggers should use testimonials and case studies.

Planning:
Can you plan projects without missing deadlines, executing with precision?

Interacting:
Can you demonstrate genuine support and concern and be persuasive in a low-key manner? 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.

Motivation:
Will you be flexible and frequently suggest improvements?
The overriding message a successful interviewee will convey to a prospective employer is the same message business owners and professionals must convey to their prospective clients: “I understand the challenges of the job, and I have the experience to take them on. I would very much like to start doing this important work.”

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Blogging Almost to the Finish Line

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A group of runners in a cross country race.“You can’t open a magazine or newspaper without seeing a recap,” motivational speaker Mark Sanborn wrote. Sanborn isn’t sure, though, how useful recaps are, and quickly concludes he had nothing to do with major events and nothing he could do about them now that they were over.  “The best I can hope to do is learn vicariously from these people and events,” he writes, “and find some ways to apply the lessons in my own life.”

Look first at your successes, Sanford says.  High achievers go too quickly on to the next goal, missing the pleasure and optimism that comes from reflected on success. Next, says Sanborn, look at the setbacks.  What were the lessons you learned?  Have you made changes in your behavior to lessen future setbacks? If there’s nothing you could have done to avoid whatever difficulties occurred, FIDO (Forget it, drive on). Third, advises Sanborn, project into the year ahead to form ideas, goals and plans.

Now that the end of 2015 is coming close, I try to follow that self evaluation process Sanborn wrote about back in 2011, looking back at the past year spent as content writer and corporate blogging trainer. It was useful to go back and read Eric Wagner’s “Five Reasons 8 Out of 10 Business Fail”, which appeared in Forbes two years ago.

Failure reason #1 for small businesses is not being really in touch with customers.  On this one, I give my Say It For You team high marks.  Since our business model involves taking on only one client in each field of business, then assigning a dedicated writer to interface with the owner or practitioner, I put staying in touch in our Success column.

When things didn’t work this year, I realize, it almost always had to do with lack of coordination among the blog writer, the webmaster, the business owner, and the staff of the client’s business or practice. We business bloggers are nothing if not interpreters. Effective blog posts must go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic.

That means owners and professional practitioners have got to be involved in the process of producing content, even after they’ve engaged the services of our professional content writers. The webmaster has to work together with the blog writer to provide the optimization and analysis that make the content “work”. Hiring professional bloggers is not a “wake me up when it’s over” proposition. I think my biggest mistakes happened when I compromised on this principle. Not only should there be periodic team meetings to discuss content, it is not a good idea for me and my team to take on writing assignments without insisting the business also invest in properly designed landing pages and website optimization. When blog writing is not coordinated with email and social media the results are simply not likely to be what the business owner expects.

I have to say, we on the Say It For You team have more than enough reasons for pleasure and optimism. On the other hand, we’ve already begun to make certain changes to our business model, with an eye to learning from our failures.

2016? Bring it on!

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Cleaning Out Your Blog Topic Closet

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Goodwill storeWhile trying on clothes at a couple of new shops in Fishers and Carmel, I couldn’t help thinking about a blog post I’d written almost six years ago about the Goodwill Guy and Clothes You Shouldn’t Wear.

You’ve probably seen those Goodwill ads. The principle is, there are four kinds of clothes, and only one of those kinds should stay in your closet. The other three – the clothes you can’t wear, the clothes you don’t wear, and of course the Clothes You Shouldn’t Wear – should be going to Goodwill (so that someone who should be wearing them, can.

I’d categorized blog post content the same way.  (I’ve thought this whole thing through again and reworked some of my ideas with the benefit of six years of hindsight)…

Posts you don’t blog might include (but perhaps should):

  • Posts that would take some  real time to research
  • Strong opinion pieces
  • How-to instructions (fear readers might go DIY on you)

Posts you really can’t write:

  • Information that is not related to your topic
  • Topics that are too broad and really outside the scope of your expertise

Posts you really shouldn’t present to your readers:

  • Information that is overly technical for the average reader
  • Negative remarks about competitors
  • Posts that are too general, repeating the common wisdom with nothing of your own “slant”

So then, what sort of posts absolutely DO belong in your blog “closet”?

  • Employee posts, created by real people who are actually doing the work and talking to your customers
  • Testimonials from customers and clients
  • True tales of problems you’ve actually helped solve for your customers
  • Wisdom from other sources that can be useful to your readers

Clutter” in blogs is actually a positive. There’s only so much room for clothes in even the most spacious closet, but once I’ve put content on this Say It For You blog, for example, it can remain on the Internet forever.  (This post is actually #1052 for me, yet all my 1,151 past blog posts haven’t disappeared. All that content remains, available to readers in reverse chronological order, a very good thing when it comes to “winning search” online!)

Hate to say this, but it’s perhaps not our blog that needs periodic de-cluttering, it’s us.
As we continue blogging month after month, year after year, we need to be our own Goodwill Guys –

What sort of posts are we writing, but perhaps shouldn’t be (or at least not so often)?

What posts have we been lazy about that absolutely belong in our blog?

 

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Recommended Reading for Blog Content Writers – Part D

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My “bloggers’ recommended reading list” is something I’ve been putting together for a decade. My most recent three Say It For You blog posts focused on books about writing, about tidbit treasures, and about selling techniques. In this final post of the series, let’s talk about the nitty-gritty of writing content geared towards online readers. I have three books to recommend as resources for blog content writers:

I still go back to one of the early additions (2010) to my resource library, Corporate Blogging for Dummies, by Douglas Karr and Chantelle Flannery, Corporate Blogging for Dummiesfor guidance on best practices. Many of the authors’ “tips and tricks to maximize your impact” will never go out of style.  Here are just three examples:

  • Businesses that serve other businesses tend to see a drop in traffic over weekends and during typical vacation periods and holidays…Take advantage of other companies not publishing content and continue to schedule or publish posts on weekends and holidays.”
  • Use alt tags effectively for image searches and keyword placement.
  • Blogs typically rank well for a keyword if that keyword is in the domain name..

Internet Marketing an Hour a DayUnderstanding what types of searchers your business is likely to attract can be very important in keyword selection, Matt Bailey explains in Internet Marketing an Hour a Day.  “Is your website an ‘impulse’ site, where you can get a quick sale? Or, is it a content-based website where searchers can learn more, leading them gradually to the decision-making point?” he asks. The book offers step-by-step instructions and action plans for website optimization, and integrating social media and blogs.

 

The newest addition to be resource library is the book Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, a collection  Mitch Meyerson has putsuccess secrets together of articles from many different only marketing experts.

  • From John Janitch of Duct Tape marketing:  “Your blog is the absolute starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication, and sharing so easy.”
  • From Ian Cleary of Razor Social: “Use Ahrefs (www.ahrefs.com) or similar tools to find out which on their (your competitor’s) website have the most links pointing to them.”
  • From Bob Barker (Guerilla Music Marketing Handbook): The three E’s of communication are to educate, to entertain, and to enlighten.

Hiring the extra “brain” relieves the “drain” on the business owner’s (or the professional practitioner’s) resources of times and energy. And what relieves the drain on the blog content writer?  A constant supply of ideas. But where do you get ideas – day after day, month after month, year after year – for blog posts? My answer is – everywhere! One aspect of the “everywhere” is books. In these last four Say It For You blog posts, I’ve provided links so that you can take a look for yourself at some of the wonderful books I’ve been collecting.

I don’t know about the ‘rithmetic part, but reading and blog ’riting definitely go together!.

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Recommended Reading for Blog Content Writers – Part C

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My “bloggers’ recommended reading list” is something I’ve been putting together for almost ten years. Last week’s Say It For You blog posts focused on books about writing and books about tidbit treasures. but in today’s post, I’ll share links to books about selling.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I use the word “selling” in a very specialized sense.  That’s because, in today’s world, whatever your business or profession, there’s almost no end to the information available to consumers on the Internet.  Our job then, as business blog content writers, isn’t really to “sell” anything, but rather to help readers absorb, buy into, and use all that information.

Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable“Tell and sell tradition marketing is dead,” according to Stan Phelps of Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. 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. Marketing is 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.

That’s precisely why I chose the book Stop Selling & Do Something Valuable, by Steve Walmsley for my bloggers’ resource book list. “We have to sell ourselves to potential clients so that they choose to work with us rather than the competition… , he says, which is not the same as selling our product or service. “In our role as advocates, we need to persuade people to act.”

“Our challenge is to make customers fully aware of their situation without insulting them,” says Jeff Thull, strategist for executive teams worldwide and author of Exceptional Selling. “The more you sweat, the less you sell,” he observes. “Your ability to constructively attract and engage a customer in a relevant dialogue requires a conversation style as well as substantive content.” In selling done right, says Thull, “We don’t need to manipulate or Exceptional Sellingpush customers, nor do they have to protect themselves from us.”

Both these books about selling are relevant to business blog content writing. When it comes to Calls to Action in blog posts, I find myself issuing the following 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 want to

  • Find out where
  • Find out how
  • Find out why

What they don’t want is to “be sold.”

So far in this Say It For You series, I’ve shared reading resources on writing, tidbit treasures, and selling.  Stay tuned for Part D this Thursday, a review of some of my favorite books on blogging and internet marketing…

 

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