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Highlight the Team in Your Business Blogs

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“Highlighting your team is a great way to bring your readers behind the scenes and let them see the team camaraderie. This kind of transparency builds trust with your readers,” says Any Porterfield in socialmediaexaminer.  “Your team can help you keep things informal, fun and relatable,” she adds.

Since I work as a professional ghost blogger, I’ve obviously needed to abandon most of my generational bias towards long, individually composed business letters and long phone conversations and come into the world of electronic marketing tools.  But there’s a reason  I gravitated towards composing blogs rather than website copy.  In a way, blogs are the humanizing factor in the online communications family. The blogs are where you meet the people running the business or professional practice.

One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we are interpreters, translating clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, one reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting” is that I believe people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

“Getting down and human” in business blogs is so important that it becomes a good idea for a business owner and professional to actually write about past mistakes and struggles. After all, it’s much easier to connect to someone who has been where you are.

It’s interesting – blogging is an essential customer acquisition tool in our increasingly web-based world, but very few business owners can spare the time to post relevant, new material with enough consistency and frequency to have much of an effect. As blog content writers, our Say It for You team is providing that service, which seems like a contradiction to the idea of the readers meeting the actual team of employees who are providing the product or service..

Not really. Even if your hired gun “ghost blogger” is doing the writing, employees themselves can provide anecdotes and information, and different blog posts can feature different employees and owners.

Humanizing the blog by bringing readers behind the scenes helps keep your company or professional practice relatable. The old saw still applies: People want to do business with people!

 

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Blogs Must Optimize for Users, Not Search Engines

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“No longer should SEOs optimize web content just for search engines,” cautions The 2016 Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to SEO, “They must focus on optimizing for consumers. SEO success is achieved when consumers find a brand’s content to be relevant, top quality, and valuable.”

Thinking of search only around traditional search engines, the Guide author Relevance adds, is too limiting, because nowadays, social platforms are being used to answer questions, solve problems, and entertain.

In fact, a true content contribution solves customer problems in three ways:

  • by educating
  • by informing
  • by entertaining

I agree, and, as a blog content writer and trainer, I have something to say about each one of these elements.

Educating
One big goal of the writing we do for our business owner and professional practitioner clients is positioning them as experts in the eyes of their clients and of online searchers. But, in order to be positioned as an expert, you can never stop educating yourself in your area. Only after you’ve done that will you be equipped to, in your blog, discuss topics of interest and newsworthy developments in your industry, showing your level of knowledge on each topic while remaining relevant and current.

Informing
There’s one big difference about presenting material in blog posts versus other media. Once I’ve posted content on this Say It For You blog, for example, it can remain on the Internet forever.  Past blog posts don’t disappear; the content remains on the site in reverse chronological order. And what that means is that blog content writers need to include material that is evergreen, information that can continue to have relevance even months and years later.

Entertaining
Ideal blog content includes material that makes people laugh and then makes them think. While good blog posts can and should be entertaining, most online searchers are not pursuing a recreational activity, but instead are on a fact-finding mission. You can hook them with humor, but the material you serve up in your posts needs to be not only valuable, but actionable.

SEO, Relevance concludes, was once all about building off-page links.  Today, brands need to first create valuable content to contribute to their industry space. Blogs, simply put, must optimize for users, not search engines!

 

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Myths Have Pulling Power in Blogs

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Mythbusting is used in many fields to counteract what researchers suspect might be counterproductive thinking, and I’m a firm believer that myth debunking is a great use for corporate blogs.

I was reminded of this the other day by a USA Today article, listing – and then busting – some common myths about airline food:

  • Myth:  All airplane meals are frozen and reheated hours later.
  • Facts:  Salads and sandwiches are often included in airplane meals. even when food is cooked and then chilled, the “sous vide” method is used, with each ingredient sealed in airtight plastic bags and cooked slowly.

In the normal course of doing business, you’ve undoubtedly found, misunderstandings about your product or surface might surface in the form of customer questions and comments.  (It’s even worse when those myths and misunderstandings don’t surface, but still have the power to interrupt the selling process!)

That’s why the de-bunking function of business blog writing is so important. It’s owners’ way of taking up arms against a sea of customers’ unfounded fears and biases.  Blog content writing can “clear the air”, replacing factoids with facts, so that buyers can see their way to making decisions.

Myth-busting is also a tactic content writers can use to grab online visitors’ attention. The technique is not without risk, because customers don’t like to be proven wrong or feel stupid.  The trick is to engage interest, but not in “Gotcha!” fashion.

In other words, business owners and professional practitioners can use their blogs to showcase their own expertise without “showing up” their readers’ lack of it.

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Don’t Shorten – Tighten!

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“Long-form content is alive and well in an era of mobile content consumption,” says Neil Patel in “How to Write Content That Engages Mobile Readers”. Longer content is still appropriate, Patel explains, but, “instead of shortening your content, tighten your writing.”

As a blog content writer and trainer, I particularly appreciated Patel’s next statement: “Those focusing too much on mobile usability are giving short shrift to mobile copywriting. Content marketers must understand how to create content that mobile readers will love.”

And what sort of content is that? For starters, Patel explains, some of the old rules that apply to desktop reading just don’t work when it comes to mobile device readers.  Four pieces of outdated advice, he explains, include:

1.   The Golden Triangle (readers’ attention starts at the up left and goes down and to the right). This no longer applies in the era of mobile readers – there’s not enough screen real estate for horizontal sweeps and vertical movement, Patel points out. On mobile, viewers look primarily at the center of the screen.

2.   Users’ eyes are drawn to images over text. This rule is not valid for mobile. Don’t take up precious screen space with images that don’t advance your point.

3.   Users have shorter attention spans on mobile – write less. This counsel is wrong, Patel states. Longer content is still appropriate. Instead of shortening your content, tighten your writing. For mobile content, concise writing is essential, but the necessity has more to do with the screen size than the user’s attention span.

4.   Five sentences make for a good paragraph. Five sentences “turn into a wall of text on mobile, Patel explains.

Mobile readers still read articles. But the mobile revolution requires a reorientation to the art of writing.

The takeaway? Don’t write less. Write better!

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My Mother Was a Sneaker

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sneakersBlogs are not ads, as I am careful to emphasize in corporate blogging training sessions. That’s not to say, though, that we blog content writers can’t learn a lot from ad writers.

I love the Samuel Hubbard.com ad for men’s dress shoes, for example. “My mother was a sneaker. My father was a dress shoe. … I can’t help it. I was born this way.  Insanely comfortable and ready for a day in the office.”

You shouldn’t try to give searchers information about everything you have to offer, all in one blog post.  With each post, stress just one major aspect of your company or practice, I teach. On the other hand, you want your blog to stand out, to be unusually interesting, so that readers will want to stay awhile and maybe even move on to your business’ website.

And when you put two things together that don’t seem to match – that can be a good technique to capture people’s interest. Having the shoe “talk” to the reader, and suggesting that a comfortable shoe is the “offspring” of sneaker and a dress shoe is just different enough to startle and engage.

The “nucleus” around which business blog posts are formed is their topic, the expertise and products that business offers. The key words and phrases around that topic are what bring readers to the blog posts. But, even though the overall topic is the same, there is endless variety that can be used to make each blog post special. The technique used by Samuel Hubbard Shoes is metaphor – making an unusual comparison – in this case between parents and shoes.

If you place a ripe banana next to a green tomato, the tomato will ripen, too, explains Brian McMahon in Mental Floss Magazine. Interesting facts such as this can always be of business blogging help, but that advice comes with two provisos:

Your reason for including the fact in your post must be apparent early on in the blog post, and the new information should relate to something with which readers are already familiar.

What “different” metaphor or comparison can you include in your blog that catches readers’ attention but still stays true to your message?

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