“Learning Around” For Your Blog – Part Three

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You can say only so many things about what you sell, what you know about, and what services you offer customers and clients, right? Wrong. Sustaining an engaging business blog over the course of years is very do-able – so long as you stay engaged.  In fact, as a business blogging trainer, my theme for this week’s blogs is "learning around".  That means staying alert for tidbits and teaching tools (after all, what is a blog if not a teaching tool?) to keep fresh ideas flowing for your business blog posts.

What I’ve found over the years I’ve been a professional blogger is that, as long as I keep learning, I stay excited and readers can sense that in my blog. If you’re a business owner, you’d have to agree with the next statement: What you learn isn’t always peaches and cream.  In every industry there’s controversy. 

People disagree on the best applications for the product you sell.  Some might even say your product does nobody any good at all.  There’s controversy about best business practices, and about different approaches to providing professional services.  There’s controversy on what types of investments are good for retirees, about whether pale or vibrant colors are best for bathroom walls, and about whether club soda is good for stains on shirts. There are always going to be different ways to skin the proverbial cat; while you may be convinced your way is best, not everyone will agree.

In my own profession of ghost blogging, there’s lots of controversy – everything from "transparency" issues to how many keyword phrases belong in any one blog post.  In 2008, for three long weeks, my blog was "knocked down" from its spot at the top of Page One of Google by all the back-and-forth speculation about whether rapper Kanye West was using a ghost blogger.  Rather than ignoring the controversy, I needed to "weigh in", which I did. 

From my point of view, I wrote, all the excitement was "proof" that blogging works to drive traffic and interest (no matter who writes the blogs)!

"Read around" – read other people’s blogs and articles, so you can be aware of controversies in your field.  Then – blog, so readers know where you stand and why. Controversy can be a blogger’s best friend!

 

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“Learning Around” For Your Blog – Part Two

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This week, my Say It For You blog posts are all about picking up ideas from everywhere and everything to keep your business blog full of fresh, interesting content.

Visiting an indoor golf training center, I learned about a teaching system called "Straight Line Golf".  (Traditional golf instruction focuses on correcting players’ individual weaknesses; Straight Line takes all players through the same teaching track, and focuses on getting the ball straight to its target.)

No, I hadn’t come to the golf center to blog or to do business, but (listening with my "third ear") I picked up a "signal" that this straight line training holds a valuable lesson for business bloggers. For us, the "line" begins when someone browses the Web searching for information about a product or service related to what our company offers.  The search engine brings the visitor in a straight line to our blog.  The blog, in turn, leads in a straight line to the website, and then to our "Contact Us" page or shopping cart.

That means everything about your online marketing needs to be consistent with everything else, with your blog’s engaging content and keyword phrases being the conduit for the "match".

I got another "third ear" idea from an unlikely source that resulted in What’s on Your Blog Bumper?.. Stopped in traffic one day, I saw a personalized license plate on the car ahead of me saying "Celebrate the Arts.". Now, there’s not much room on a license plate for a lot of words, and the driver of the car behind doesn’t have much time to read the plate.  The "lesson" here, though, is that, for just a moment, that plate was bringing the topic of the arts to the top of my mind.

Blog posts, I realized, need to do just that.  Your potential customer is scanning various websites and blogs and yours comes up.  If something in your blog post is "right on" for that reader, your company will be, at least for a little while, "top of mind" for that reader.

Can a license plate help you explain what you sell, what you know, or what services you provide?  Point being, you don’t ever have to run out of ideas for blog posts if you keep on , looking, listening, and "learning around"!

 

 

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“Learning Around” For Your Blog – Part 1

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One quality that make for a great ghost blogger is a "third ear", I always say.  That’s because a ghost uses that extra "ear" to hear not only what the business owner client wants to say, but to pick up on that owner’s unique style and business beliefs (the things that often aren’t expressed in words).

When I think more about it, though, all bloggers need to do more of that third-ear type listening.  Time to write is scarce for business owners.  We know that.  Many lack the discipline to keep up the blogging frequency needed to win search.  There’s something else, though, that I hear from many business owners and managers – they’ve run out of ideas!  A month or two into blogging for their business, the glaring question is, "So, what else is there to blog about?" 

Read around, learn around, is my advice as a blogging trainer.  Ideas are all over the place, all of the time, in fact, but you’ve got to "hear" and make the connection. This week, I’m going to devote my Say It For You blog posts to "signals" you can pick up of Other People’s Wisdom (O.P.W.).  You can share OPW to help visitors to your blog understand what it is that you do, what you sell, and what your business is really all about.

Take feature stories, for example.  You know, those interesting spots you hear on radio or TV or read about in magazines. Ask yourself: "Could I use that story to explain…..?":

Back in 2008, I read in Newsweek about a New York City building that was being turned into an interactive keyboard by wiring an antique organ to various spots around the place. Rock singer/artist David Byrne said he was tired of people going to concerts as passive consumers "waiting to be filled with music" emanating from a stage.  "Playing the Building", by contrast, he explained, would come to life only when the public participated.

I "heard" that story with my "third ear", and realized I could use it to demonstrate the interactive nature of blogs, which are available for acting and interacting between businesses and their customers. 

Could this story make a point about the way YOU do business?



 

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Your Blog IS “In Other Words”!

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As a business blogging trainer, one concern I hear a lot from business owners is that they’ll run out of things to say in their blog posts.  Many can think of a fairly long list of things they want to share about their products, their professional services, their customer service standards, and their overall fix on their industry or profession.  But, looking at their business blog from the front end, most can’t even imagine what they’ll have to say two weeks from the start date of their blog, much less two or three years into the future!

Dr. Orison Swett Marden, father of the self-help movement in America, has some relevant advice: "Go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will see farther."

I found a very practical tip in an article by Steve Merchant in The Mind, in which Merchant explains the difference between two common abbreviated Latin terms, e.g. and i.e.. Both can be used to help keep blog post ideas flowing. E.g. stands for exempli gratia (for example), while i.e. stands for id est (that is), Merchant explains. 

Effective blog posts are centered around key themes. As we each continue to write about our industry, our products, and our services, we’ll naturally find ourselves repeating some key ideas – in fact, that’s exactly what we should be doing to keep our blogs focused and targeted. The variety will come from the e.g. and the i.e’s.

It’s the different examples we use – of ways our company’s products can be helpful or the ways problems are solved using our services – that lend variety to our blog posts, even though those posts may be centered around the same few central ideas. We can incorporate unusual comparisons and illustrations to help explain our subject or to debunk myths. Continuing to write on the same topic, using different e.g’s allows us bloggers for business to continually present interesting and engaging material to engage online readers.

The i.e.’s work in much the same way.  As bloggers for business, we say some of the same things over time, but we use other words to lend variety to our blog posts. And, since our blog is our teaching tool, we must remember that "students" learn differently. One online visitor might prefer a detailed listing of features and benefits of our products and services, while another might become more engaged by a testimonial or a tie-in with the news.

Our websites typically contain the main facts about our business –  who we are, what we do, and how we help solve problems. The blog posts are variations on those basic themes. 

In other words, what allows us bloggers to keep going as far as we can see, and then, when we get there, to go even further, IS the fact that blogs are "in other words"!

 

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Blogging To The Rule of Three

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Blogging is modern marketing at its best, but bloggers can take advantage of an ancient method of solving proportions called the Rule of Three. 

Basically, the Rule of Three is used when you know three numbers and are out to find a fourth.  Remember those high school algebra problems we used to have to solve:

If ten men can dig a trench in four days, how long will it take seven men to dig a similar trench?

For readers for whom high school is but a distant memory, the process goes like this:

A:C = D:X

A (the ten men) is to C (the four days) as D (the seven men) is to X (the unknown number of days)

So why am I talking about the Rule of Three in my Say It For You blog about blogging?  Since a core purpose of business blogging is to engage readers, you as the business owner want online visitors to your blog to mentally put themselves in the D slot.  In other words, as you’re describing how your product or service solved clients’ problems, the reaction you’d like to elicit in blog readers is sighs of relief that they’ve found you – you can now solve their problems!

  • If, with the AirFlow Breeze, homeowners were able to set the thermostat two degrees higher in summer and still enjoy cool rooms while saving money, I can save even more money!
  • If Classic Cleaners was able to restore a fifty-year old senior skirt, restoring MY twenty-year old dress should be simple!
  • If that executive who dripped sweat out of fear of public speaking could learn to make presentations to the media, Jean Palmer-Heck can help me overcome my fear of speaking!

In other words, while your blog might offer the story of one or two favorable outcomes of using your product or service, readers will realize you understand their problems and are used to dealing with their issues.  The readers will have put themselves in the D slot! And, because by their very nature, blogs are constantly adding new content, the likelihood of readers associating their situation with the problems and solutions described in your blog posts will be multiplied by the Power of Three!


 

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