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A Blog Content Writer’s Basic Tools

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“Whether you’re drafting a lengthy company report or sending a short email to colleagues, it’s vital to get it right,” cautions Tony Rossiter in Effective Business Writing in Easy Steps. What is Rossiter’s definition of “getting it right”?

  • Being clear and concise
  • Writing in a style that’s acceptable to your readers.

A business writer’s basic tools include, Rossiter says:

  • Plain English
  • Vocabulary
  • Spelling
  • Punctuation
  • Grammar
  • Preparing and checking the presentation

In this week’s Say It For You blog posts, I’ll share some important tips from Rossiter’s book that blog content writers might find especially useful.

  • Reading aloud: “If you’re not quite sure whether or not a sentence of a longer piece of writing works – whether it’s clear, concise, and readily understandable – read it aloud.” Some of your phrases and sentences might not be as clear as you thought they were when you first wrote them, Rossiter explains.
  • “Look for the overall purpose – have you done what you set out to do?” Conveying that overall purpose can be especially challenging when a business owner or practitioner is using a business blogging service provider.  On the other hand, the very exercise of thinking through the themes and the ideas for the blog helps train the business owner or practitioner to articulate those same things when they’re talking to their customers!
  • “Put it away for a day or two, then look at it again.” My years as a developmental editor, plus my work tutoring in the Ivy Tech Community College language lab have taught me how hard it is for us to catch our own errors.  After all, I teach blog writers, we’re focused on the ideas we’re trying to convey.Using writers’ basic tools to convey a unique marketing message – that’s the supreme challenge for us business blog content writers!

 

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Wouldn’t You Do It Every Single Blog?

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“If you knew something as easy as adding images to your blog posts would increase your readers, Orange Megaphonesubscribers, followers, and leads, wouldn’t you do it every single time?” asks Neil Patel of HubSpot.com.

We live in an age of visual culture, observes Jeff Bullas.  In fact, Bullas points out, 10% of photos taken by humankind took place in the last 12 months, and photos are becoming “the universal language”!

Bullas lists a number of rather startling statistics to demonstrate the reason images and photos need to be part of any business’ marketing tactics:

  • Articles with images get 94% more total views.
  • 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results.
  • In an online store, customers think the quality of a product’s image is more important than product-specific information and even more important than ratings and reviews.

Images need to have a purpose, though, as Neil Patel observes, and not be there merely as decoration or “filler”.  Purposes include:

  • Emphasizing a point
  • Explaining a concept
  • Showing personality

I teach content writers that, even though the words you use to tell the story are the most important part of blogging for business, visuals add interest and evoke emotion.  Personally, I like “clip art”. Why? These commercial images aren’t original to my client’s business or practice and they don’t depict the actual products or the customers or colleagues of that business or practice. But what clip art does accomplish, I find, is capturing a concept, helping express the main idea that is articulated in the post.

When it comes to writing headlines, Neil Patel advises, focus on the 4 U’s: unique, ultra-specific, useful, or urgent. At Say It For You, we try to use images the same way, selecting one for each post that gives readers an idea of what to expect in the post. Wouldn’t you do that every single time?  You bet!

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The Sincerest Form of Blog Flattery?

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Choosing Between Right or Wrong“They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Yet on the Internet, some people take this type of compliment way too far,” says Nick Schaferhoff of torquemag.io, referring to plagiarism of blog content.

“Building on the work of others is good.  Stealing from them is not,” says Michelle Lindblom of wiredimpact.com.  Of course you want to offer quality information your readers can’t find elsewhere, she acknowledges, and coming up with totally original information is not the only way to do that.  So what can you do to build on the work of others without stealing their words? Lindblom offers a number of tips for blog content writers who want to curate content in a professional and ethical way:

  • Take Your Time. Give yourself enough time to research, write, and rewrite blog content.
  • Read multiple sources and combine the information into content that is original.
  • Link liberally to the original authors’ work.
  • Paraphrase, putting the ideas into your own words.

Actually, I think well-done blog posts need to do a lot more than simply avoiding the sin of plagiarism.  In training newbie business blog writers, I explain that in business blog posts, as compared to brochures, ads, or even the company website, it’s easier to communicate the unique personality and core beliefs of the business owners.  Over time, in fact a business blog becomes the “voice” of the corporate culture, whether the “corporation” (or partnership or LLC) consists of one person or many. That means that, no matter how valuable the “other people’s wisdom” you choose to share in your blog, you absolutely need to put you(or the business owner’s or the professional practitioner’s unique slant on it.

If blog content writers properly attribute content to its source, their “imitation” may be welcomed as a sincere form of flattery by the original content writers, and the information may be useful and therefore welcomed by readers as well. But assuming the purpose of blog marketing is to gain friends and customers, it’s only when blogging for business reveals your unique slant or philosophy within your field that readers will feel they know who you are, not merely what you do.

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Cutting Blog Words Down to Size

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L National Geographic Kids collects quirky, fun facts, and this week’s Say It For You blog posts are based on some of these.

I’ll bet you didn’t know this one: There is a hill in New Zealand named Raumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakotanatahu. (Really?)

That’s enough to inspire hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (fear of long words) in any business blog content writer, I’d say, certainly enough to bring on didaskaleinophobia (fear of going to school – or at least of participating in the class spelling bee).

“Should you use long words?” asks Emphasis. The answer: “Writing guides generally agree that short words are preferable. Many take their cue from traditional authorities such as the Fowler brothers, who on page one of their influential The King’s English (1906) told readers:  ‘Prefer the short word to the long.’  In fact, advises Emphasis, “using unnecessarily fancy phrasing is a reliable way to alienate readers. It makes prose puffed-up and heavy, so that reading it becomes a chore instead of a pleasure.”

Bloggers, believe it! There is actually a government department devoted to spreading the use of shorter, plainer language. Yes, really! Their web address is called plainlanguage.gov! The introductory paragraph sounds is if it was composed by someone with a sense of humor combined with realism: “Vocabulary choice is an important part of communicating clearly. While there is no problem with being expressive, most federal writing has no place for literary flair. People do not curl up in front of the first with a nice federal regulation to have a relaxing read.“

Now that I’ve discovered this website, I plan forevermore to train corporate blog writers to use the example given in the PL Guidelines section:

Poor: There is no escaping the fact that it is considered very important to note that a number of various available applicable studies ipso facto have generally identified the fact that additional appropriate nocturnal employment could usually keep juvenile adolescents off thoroughfares during the night hours, including but not limited to the time prior to midnight on weeknights and/or 2 a.m. on weekends.

Good: More night jobs would keep youths off the streets.

 

Think about it: How can you say more with less in your business blog?

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Blogging the “Real Truth” About Your Business

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Is coffee good or bad for you? Turns out the answer is quite complicated, as Jenn Wood explains in Mental Floss coffee potMagazine.

“Excessive coffee consumption can lead to anxiety, depression, and frequency of psychophysiological disorders,” stated the journal article “Advances on Alcohol & Substance in 1984. Yet, by 2015. a study reported in “Heart” showed that “moderate coffee consumption was associated with a lower prevalence of subclinical coronary athereosclerosis.”

“Individuals with a genetic variation associated with slower caffeine metabolism appear to have an increased risk of non-fatal heart attacks with higher amounts of coffee intake,” warned the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006. Yet, by 2011, the Archives of Internal Medicine was reporting that “the risk of depression was 20 percent lower among women who drank four or more cups of coffee.”

“In the last decade alone, scientists have published hundreds of papers attributing both harms and health benefits to coffee,” observes Christie Aschwanden in slate.com. There’s one problem with all the studies, she says – they are observation, finding associations without establishing causality.

Helping readers sort truth from myth is one important use for business blogs.  In the natural order of business, many of misunderstandings about a product or service present themselves, and shining the light of day on misinformation shines light on your own expertise in your field.

Even when (as is the case with the ongoing good/bad coffee debate, there is no final answer, blog content writers can summarize the different schools of thought and recap the research that is being done in the field. That in itself can go a long way towards making your blog a “go-to” place for readers seeking information relating to your industry or profession.

Is blogging good or bad for you and your readers?  No complications there – the answer is a resounding yes.  Even where there really is no one “real truth”, it’s helpful to discuss what we know so far and how your business or practice is using the information that is available as of today.

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