Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

Ari Hest gets it – blogging, I mean.  Unlike me, though, Hest doesn’t blog for a living; he’s  a singer and songwriter (see www.arihest.com) who’s taken on the discipline of releasing a new tune every seven days. Apparently Ari understands one of the cardinal rules for successful business blogging, namely frequency.  He explains why, in his former position with Columbia Records, he couldn’t have done this “52” project.  “At Columbia”, he relates, “everything needs to filter through a lot of different hands. Now I just finish the song in my apartment and get it online.  It’s a lot simpler, and I’m the boss.” 

As a professional ghost blogger, I couldn’t have come up with a better description of the advantages of communicating with your clients and customers through business blogs.  In Blogs – Between Crafted And Cranked Out, I explained that blogs, unlike brochures, client newsletters, online magazines, and websites, are short and concise, more casual and conversational than other marketing pieces.  That’s what makes it so feasible to use blogs to achieve the frequency that’s needed to win online search engine rankings – there aren’t a whole lot of steps to the process.  In fact, once my business owner clients and I have spent some upfront time working out the best tone and format for the blog posts, the process is –  well, it’s a song to carry out!

Hest’s using audience online voting to select the songs that’ll make up his next studio album.  With business blogs, online browsers can provide feedback, too.  They post comments, ask questions, and request regular “feeds” to their own websites or email.  The most important form of feedback for a business blog, of course, is when the potential customers vote with their dollars, clicking through from the blog to the business’ website and becoming buyers of the product or service.

In an interview with Indianapolis Star ,Ari  Hest gave readers an insight into his new way of handling those songs that don’t end up in his album.  When he worked for Columbia, he said, he’d keep those songs on his hard drive and never use them.  “This year”, he said, “I didn’t really want to be in the position of holding things back.”  Exactly the same logic applies to blogging.  Because blogs are short and conversational, over a period of months, the business owners can express everything they want to tell their audiences about their special knowledge, insights, products, and services. There’s no need to hold anything back – it just doesn’t all go in the same piece!  Instead, the blog posts provide a steady stream of “sound bites” – little bits of different, interesting, and informative content for searchers to read, little clues that they’ve come to the right place to find what they need.

“Branding” – we hear a lot of this popular marketing term, don’t we?  Business owners put a whole lot of their time and money into creating a brand name, complete with a logo and other graphics, sometimes adding a motto or slogan.  As a professional ghost blogger, I’m considered part of a company’s marketing team, and so I’m always looking for ways to help reinforce each business client’s brand.

The other day, though, in Speaker magazine, I read an article about branding that put things into a whole new perspective.  The writer was telling professional speakers that a brand is really much more than a name and graphics.  The brand, she was saying, is the business owner (the professional speaker, in this case).  A brand, she added, is not something you create; it’s something you discover! You live your brand by discovering your core values and skills, was the main idea of the article.

The thought occurred to me that, if building a brand for a speaker is done through the process of thinking through the message in each speech, the same process is true for a business owner who’s blogging.  It’s the old idea of not really knowing a subject well until you’ve gone through the process of teaching it to someone else. In Use Blogs To Capture Concepts, I explained how I work with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for the blogs I’m going to ghostwrite.  I start by challenging the owner of the business or professional practice with the following question: “If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what you sell, what you know, and what you do, what would those words be?”

In other words, whether the business owner him or herself is doing the writing, or whether they’re collaborating with a professional ghost blogger partner like me, the very process of deciding what to put in the blog is one of self-discovery.  A business blog, then, doesn’t just keep repeating and emphasizing a brand; the creating of each blog post is part of the process of inventing and reinventing the business brand.  The Speaker Magazine article was “spot on” – your brand ‘R You in your blog.