Posts

The Long and the Short of it When it COmes to Content

/0 Comments/in , /by

“The best content is the right length, includes keywords, and is relevant to the reader”, Intuit Mailchimp explains. You want your blog posts to engage readers and improve SEO, and the length of your posts is an important metric.

Fill with no fillers.
As a content creator at Say It For You, I particularly appreciated Mailchimp’s observation about length: “There’s a lot to learn about some topics, but others are simple and straightforward…Some blog posts need to be short and sweet… The moment you feel like you’re adding filler content, you should start trimming down your blog post to the important parts.”

Having composed blog posts (as both a ghost writer and under my own name) numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to fix on any rule about length other than “It depends!” I like to remind writers of what Albert Einstein said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Compose to fit.
Factors to consider in deciding the length of a post, MailChimp reminds marketers, include:

  • the target audience’s sophistication and prior knowledge of the subject
  • the purpose of each blog post
  • the complexity of the topic itself
  • the frequency of posting
  • the actual metrics of past postings (how much time have your readers been spending on the site?)

Position the owner or practitioner as a Subject Matter Expert.
Establishing trust and credibility by offering usable information and insights is not directly related to length. Once readers feel assured that you know your stuff and that you care about offering good information and good service, they might be ready to take action before they even read all the way into the blog post!

Consider SEO.
“Search engines tend to prefer longer content, so go with longer content if you’re trying to improve your search engine rankings,” Intuit Mailchimp advises.. The “golden” blog post length, according to WIXblog, is actually 2,300 – 2,500 words: Articles of this length, the authors state, are “typically thorough and educational, and therefore have a much higher chance of ranking on search engines.”

When it comes to length of blog posts, the long and short of it might simply be “it depends!”

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Are Errors Affecting the Effect of Your Content?

/0 Comments/in , /by

 

“Six seconds is all it takes to catch a customer’s attention upon opening up your internet portal. Imagine if in that first six seconds, the first thing she notices are the spelling errors!” the Coggno Training Company cautions. When more than a thousand London social media users were surveyed, 42% of them reported that they would not buy goods and services from a business with misspellings in their ads.

“First impressions make or break a business,” JMK MarComm stresses,” and your written content is often the first impression potential customer have of your brand.”  “Quality grammar leads to quality writing,” Bryn Greenlhalgh, states in the Marriott Student Review at Brigham Young University.

As a content marketer at Say It For You, my favorite recommendation to both business owners and the content writers they hire to bring their message to customers is this: Marketing content in social media posts and blogs can be less formal  than website content, but they should never be sloppy. Unlike your sixth grade teacher, internet searchers won’t “correct your paper”. They may very well navigate away from your blog and find somewhere else to go!

In both romance and  content,, trouble often arises in “pairs”, such as the words “affect” and effect” which I used in the title of this post  Two other pairs I find are often confused  are  “who” and “that” (“Who” always refers to a person; “that”refers to a thing.) and “between” and “among” (“between” refers to the space or difference between two things or people, while: “among” refers to the difference among three or more things or people).

Sure, there’s always spell check software and now AI-generated content, but sometimes, the best remedy for bloopers is a “day away” from creating the content, so you can “see it with a fresh eye”. 

Don’t allow errors in  your content to affect the effect it has in winning over readers!

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Rolling a Picasso in Your Content

/0 Comments/in /by

 

“Roll a Picasso” is an art game developed by Emily Glass for use in an art or art history classroom, but it it makes for a fun exercise for groups of any age. Each roll of a die relates to a printed key, directing the “artist” to draw the head, the left ear, the nose, the mouth, by copying the shape on the chart. The different combinations of the 24 shapes make for a high degree of variety in the finished product. It’s interesting that, just days after posting “Telling Your Business Story Through a Brand New Lens”, I was introduced to this visual proof of how, by creatively combining – and recombining – a finite number of elements, we can continue producing engaging marketing content.….,

In corporate content marketing training sessions, I teach that effective blog posts are centered around key themes, just like the recurring musical phrases that connect the different movements of a symphony.  As you continue to write about your industry, your products, and your services, we tell business and practice owners, you’ll naturally find yourself repeating some key ideas – in fact, that’s exactly what you should be doing, we explain, to keep the content focused and targeted while still offering variety.

  1. It’s important to stress that blog and social media posts tend to be most effective when they focus on just one idea. A content writer might go about:

    – busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing

– offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service

– describing an unusual application for a product

– describing one common problem their service helps solve

– updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession

– offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Each post is similar to one “roll of the dice”, with the long-term effect being your “Picasso” work of art!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Losses Do Have Something to Tell You: Keep Telling!

/0 Comments/in , /by

Losing is the main thing that happens in contests,” Rosalie Knecht wryly observes In Poets and Writers Magazine. Most people who apply for a job don’t get it, most dates are not great dates, and thousands of fresh losers are minted each year by the Oscars, the Grammys, and the Emmys. It’s important to learn how to lose, she thinks.  In fact, in the social sciences, she knows, there is a whole field of inquiry called resilience studies, which examines the question of how people carry their losses and burdens.  “A loss is just a win that happened to someone else,” the author observes, “It has nothing to tell you,” she reassured writers who fall into despondency when their submissions are rejected or downright ignored by editors and publishers.

Long-term, unrelenting resiliency is the secret of success for content marketers. While remaining alert to the relative success of certain articles, case studies, and blog posts is instructive in creating new content, throwing in the towel before success has had a chance to develop is the single biggest reason for failure in content marketing. Truth is, when I started Say It For You seventeen years ago, I knew that, while my own considerable experience in writing newspaper columns was going to be an asset for blogging, the main key to success was going to be simply staying on task. Now, after years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that  while consistency and frequency are such  rare phenomema, success depends on “keeping on keeping on”. 

Unlike Knecht’s message to writers about “losses having nothing to tell you”, I believe those early “losses” have a lot to tell us about our content marketing efforts – we need to keep on listening, researching, reading around, and “telling our story”!.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Self-Help Titles Teach Variety

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

Browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble, I came across an entire three-shelf section of self help books. The variety of titles was astounding, perfect examples of how a single topic can be approached in a plethora of ways:. Here are just a few of the titles:

  • Already Enough
  • Wild Calm
  • Yay All Day
  • Wander the Stars
  • Slow Down, Take a Nap
  • What’s Behind the Blue Door
  • You Meet You
  • Always Change a Losing Game
  • The Other Significant Others
  • Atomic Habits

When it comes to content marketing, all the titles show above could be classified as “Huhs?”, meaning that each needs a subtitle to make clear what the book is actually about. “Oh!” titles, we teach at Say It For You, are self-explanatory, and from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint, make a direct connection to the query readers type into their search bar.

For either straightforward or “Huh?-Oh!” titles of blog posts, one way to engage readers is using the sound of the words themselves, repeating vowel sounds (assonance) or consonant sounds (alliteration), so that searchers use their sense of hearing along with the visual.

Just as titles “grabbed” me as a bookstore browser, it’s important to have “ringing” in blog post titles, we teach. Titles matter in two ways:

  1. For search – keywords and phrases help search engines make the match between online searchers’ needs and what your business or professional practice has to offer.
  2. For engagement – after you’ve been “found”, you’ve gotta “get read”! (Of course, no clever title can substitute for well-written, relevant content that provides valuable information to the readers.)

But when blog content writers try being too clever, too general, or too cliched, that’s not good, either, Authormedia points out in “Top 5 Blog Title Mistakes Authors Make” The overriding criterion is whether you can deliver on your headline promise in the body of the post.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail