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Blog a Time Traveler’s Guide to Your Business

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RIn ancient Greece, I learned by reading the “Time Travelers Guide to Table Manners” in Mental Floss Magazine, napkins hadn’t been invented yet, so you wiped your greasy hands with a piece of bread, then threw the bread on the floor for the dogs. In ancient Rome, by contrast, people ate with their hands, but always kept their pinkie and ring fingers clean.

Fascinating tidbits of information such as these can help content writers come up with ideas for business blogs. I can see the two specific examples above being used in a vet’s blog, a blog about pet food, a blog about keeping different kinds of floors clean, even a blog about pinkie rings. Trivia can be turned into idea triggers to help practitioners and business owners blog about the products they sell, about their skills and particular beliefs.

Today, though, I want to focus on using the time traveler template in business blog content. What’s the purpose of talking about the way things used to be done in a particular industry or profession?

  • Business owners and practitioners come across as knowledgeable and committed.
  • Readers (read potential buyers) are moved to take advantage of all the new technology and expertise now available to them.
  • The “I never knew that!” response is how readers become engaged by the information.

Blogging about the history of your own (or your client’s) company can have a humanizing effect. Learning how any business owner or professional practitioner overcame adversity tens to  engender feelings of empathy and admiration.

But even reaching back to the history of  the entire industry or profession is a valuable technique when writing about any type of business or practice. That’s because, in every industry and every profession, things are not the same as they used to be.  Helping readers understand how to get the maximum benefit out of today’s version of products and services is the point.

What can you include in a time traveler’s guide to YOUR industry or profession?

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Say It For You Magazine Challenge Revived – Part 2

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This week I’m offering a challenge to all SIFY readers to come up with blog post ideas out of a single magazine of their choice. Choose articles that trigger ideas for you to blog about your business or practice – what you sell, what you know, what you believe, and what you know how to do. I’m using one of my favorite sources of interesting information:  Mental Floss.  (If you’ve never been exposed to this bi-monthly publication, I highly recommend you try it – you’ll be hooked for sure!)Mental Floss magazine-cover-copy

In this month’s issue of Mental Floss, for example, there’s a whole page of interesting historical tidbits about seating. Did you know, for example, that:

  • Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair back in 1775, by adding rollers from window sash pulleys to make a spinning seat. (The Declaration of Independence was signed by Jefferson while sitting in that chair!)
  • William McKinney designed a chair for the White House by having persons of varying sized sit in snowbanks, then transferring the curves left behind to the drawing board.
  • President Kennedy had such a bad back, his doctor prescribed a rocking chair.  Kennedy gifted rocking chairs to other heads of state to his valet, and the chair became popular.
  • Before the 16th century, churches had no seats. By the early 1800s, some British parishes installed pews and then rented them out.

In this case, seating is the topic “thread” that unifies all the tidbits from different periods of history. This is very much like the “letimotifs” used in blog content writing. In corporate blogging 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.
What blog writers might use this particular set of facts about seating as a jumping-off point to discuss their business or practice?  The obvious answers are furniture stores and home decorators. But how about a chiropractor (using the material about rocking chairs for Kennedy)? On the question of renting out the pews, I can see that tying in with a discussion about renting versus owning (life insurance agents? Realtors?).

I know just how challenging it can be to sustain the discipline and “the faith” needed for long term business blogging success. Ideas for blog posts, on the other hand? That’s the easy part.  Just pick up a popular magazine– and learn!

 

 

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Say It For You Magazine Challenge Revived

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Mental FlossThe magazine challenge concept was born in the Minneapolis airport back in 2008.  To pass the time during an unexpected two-hour layover between flights, I challenged myself to find at least a week’s worth of ideas for the Say It For You blog in a single magazine issue.

Out of that experience came a challenge to all SIFY readers to come up with blog post ideas out of a single magazine of their choice, selecting articles that trigger ideas about their business or practice – what they sell, what they know, what they believe, and what they know how to do.

Now, eight years later, I’m issuing the challenge again. If you do corporate blogging for business, send me a link to at least one blog post you wrote triggered by a magazine article.  Or, if you’re not blogging, go ahead and email me a paragraph or two about your business as relates to a magazine article and I’ll publish it here.

The magazine I’m going to use this week is Mental Floss.  (If you’ve never been exposed to this bi-monthly publication, you ought to try it – one of the most fun, interesting reads around!). The May 2015 issue has a great two page spread on “The Secret Origin of 7 Extremely Important Actions”.

One of those actions is the “selfie”, which of course we think of as being part of our own era of cell phones. Julie Winterbottom explains that the practice of taking one’s own picture actually goes back more than 150 years. Just months after Louis Daguerre, one of the fathers of photography, had announced his invention, he pointed the lens of the newfangled camera at himself. Of course, as Winterbottom points out, he needed to hold really, really still – exposures for early cameras took up to 15 minutes!

As a business blogging trainer, I think this insight into the history of the selfie could be used for just about any type of business or practice. That’s because, in every industry and every profession, things are not the same as they used to be.  Write about those changes. Help readers understand how to get the maximum benefit out of today’s version of the products and services you offer. Share thoughts you have about your work, thoughts triggered by looking at the past, but about things that are relevant today.

What is there about your business, like the selfie, is much, much better today than it used to be?

 

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Inductive and Deductive Blogging for Business

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“The most common forms of mathematical reasoning are inductive and deductive reasoning,” explain the authors of Studying for LMathematics. “You use inductive reasoning any time you come up with a general rule from a pattern.  Deductive reasoning is when you apply a general rule to a specific case.”

As business blog content writers, we’re engaged in helping readers reason their way to doing business with the business owners and professional practitioners who’ve hired us to tell their story. It’s not that there’s a lack of information sources; if anything, there’s an absolute glut of data available to online searcher! What readers need from us, then, is not more information, but help in reasoning through all that information so that problem-solving choices can be made.

OK, so let’s go back to the mathematics tutorial book and the two sorts of reasoning.

Deductive:
You are reasoning deductively when you show that a rule isn’t true for all cases, which is called “proof by counter example”. As a blog writer, start with a commonly held assumption relating to your industry or profession, and come up with a counter example.

Inductive:
With inductive reasoning, you arrive at a formula that demonstrates a general pattern between different tactics and different aspects of an idea.

Paul Lawrence in earlytorise.com suggests using Triggering Deductive Reasoning to persuade clients to buy your products, get employees to take on unpleasant projects, or get your children to do their chores. You do that, explains Lawrence, by making statements that lead the other person to reach, on his own, the conclusion you want him to come to, then reinforcing that conclusion..
All advertisements aim at persuasion, points out Stan Mack of Demand Media. If an ad uses inductive reason, the implied conclusion isn’t necessarily true (think of an ad featuring a sweaty athlete chugging a thirst-quenching beverage). As blog writers, we would make as strong an argument as possibly through visual demonstrations, word descriptions, and customer testimonials to create the illusion that the product or service you’re promoting is the best option. We can inject urgency through one-time sales, or use fear (of getting old, having one’s credit stolen, etc.).

Alternately, we can use statistics to prove logically that we can satisfy the reader’s needs.  With deductive reasoning, if our assumptions are true, the conclusions we draw must be true as well.

Help your blog readers reason their way to saying “Yes!”

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Wish-List-With-Walls Blogging for Business

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Wish List“Basically, we’re a wish list with walls” is Silver in the City jewelry boutique’s self-description in its Nuvo ad.

Great line! For the few seconds it takes for the reader to figure out the meaning of that statement, it forces engagement. As a business blogging trainer, one of the points I often stress is one I learned from my speaker friend Dick Wolfsie.

In order for a joke to be funny, explains Wolfsie, the person listening to the joke or reading the joke has to figure things out!  The laughter is the reward that the listener or reader gives himself for having figured out what the punch line is really saying.

Blogs are like that, too.  As a content writer, you post new, relevant material online, offering valuable information about your field of expertise.  But for the blog to generate engagement, it takes two.  In fact, that’s precisely how business blogging works.  People go online and use search engines to find information.  That individual, just like the person who gets a joke, rewards himself with the information you’ve provided.  The reader “gets it” and moves on to your website for more, or posts a comment.  Either way, two are now in the game.

That “wish-list-with-walls” line would be perfect as a “pow” closing line for a business blog post. Work on crafting a closing line that forces readers to “put it all together”.

 

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