Posts

Sharing Wisdom from the Greats in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

How did Chrysler, which not too long before had needed government-backed loans in order to survive, transform itself into a partner coveted by Daimler (the gold standard of European car makers), becoming the most profitable car company in the world? In his book Guts, Robert A. Lutz, Chrysler’s product-development genius answers these questions and many, many more.

For us blog content writers, there are several valuable lessons to be gleaned from this book by a business “great”:

The power of being personal:
Lutz lists his own credentials in the following order: parent, citizen, taxpayer, employer, alumnus. Guts is about Lutz himself as much as it is about his company, and that’s precisely what lends power to the narrative.

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.  That’s the reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture, but even more so, when they relate emotionally to the people bringing them the message.

  • The power of recounting past struggles
    The very name of Lutz’s book, Guts, speaks to past struggles, to hardships overcome. At Say It For You, I recommend including some How-I-Did-It posts in the blog marketing plan. There are several reasons that sharing secrets and failures helps readers relate to a business or practice:

    True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice.

  • Stories of struggles and failures can be used as a means to an end, using the special expertise and insights you’ve gained towards solving readers’ problems.
  • Blogs also have a damage control function.  When customer complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with publicly (there’s nothing more public than the Internet!), that gives the “apology” – and the remediation – a lot more weight in the eyes of readers.

    Does it help to share wisdom from leaders in your own industry or profession in your blog?
    When you link to someone else’s accomplishments or remarks on a subject you’re covering, that can have two important positive effects: reinforcing a point you want to make and showing you’re in touch with trends in your own field. Obviously, as with all tools and tactics, “re-gifting” content needs to be handled with restraint.

To me, though, the biggest advantage of sharing others’ wisdom in your own content, is that you’re showing that you’re excited by the insights you’ve gained, and you want your readers to benefit as well.

Sharing wisdom? Go ahead, I say. We can never have too much inspiration.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

The Magic of 3 in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

 

Humanity has had a love-hate relationship with numbers from the earliest times, Ian Stewart writes in Britannica. Ancient Babylonians used numbers to predict eclipses; priests in ancient Egypt used them to predict the flooding of the Nile. Millions of otherwise rational people are terrified of the number 13. In Jewish culture, 18 represents good luck.

Over my years at Say It For You, I’ve come to consider the number 3 important when it comes to writing blog content.

3 elements of a blog post

  1. pictures and charts (the visual presentation of the blog
  2. the content itself (the facts and figures)
  3. the “voice”, the way the message comes across – first person vs. third-person reporting, humorous or serious, casual or formal

3-minute Shark Tank principle
From the time an entrepreneur is introduced to the time one of the sharks says “I’m out”, it is almost always three minutes, writes Brant Pinvidic in The 3-Minute Rule. If you can’t distill a sales presentation down to three minutes or less, the listeners will begin to make their decision without all the pertinent information. Given the very brief attention span of online readers, the essence of the message needs to come across in 3 seconds!

3-legged stool
In business blog posts I recommend a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business, a practice, or an organization.  Other aspects can be addressed in later posts. Offer three examples or details supporting the main idea of each post.

3 levels of involvement
While having a clear Call to Action is important in blog marketing, truth is, not every searcher is going to be ready to make a commitment. In your business blog, therefore, It makes sense to offer 3 different levels of involvement (subscribing to the blog, submitting a question, taking a survey, for example), and an ”ultimate decision does not need to be made now

3-pronged strategy
Working Mother magazine is an example of a 3-part plan of attack: Compliment-criticism-course correction. In discussing various “Mon” personality types, writer Katherine Bowers would compliment the “Drama Mama” or “Snowplow Mom”, suggesting ways in which that parenting strategy is great, followed be a critique – where that mothering style is off-track, then offering “course correction” options. Those same 3 prongs could be used in a blog focused on financial management, healthy living, pet care, or fashion.
https://www.workingmother.com/content/you-know-type-mom-parenting-styles

The rule of 3 in writing
The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that a trio of events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers. The audience of this form of text is also thereby more likely to remember the information conveyed because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.

How The Power of Three Can Make Your Communication Effective

When it comes to blogging for business, make sure to remember the Rule of 3!

 

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Blogging to Offer – and Change – Opinions

/0 Comments/in , /by

When online readers find a blog, one question they need answered is “Who lives here?” Providing information about products and services may be the popular way to write corporate blog posts, but in terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes opinion, we’ve learned at Say It For You.

Whether you’re blogging to promote a business, a professional practice, or a nonprofit organization, you’ve gotta have an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. In other words, blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations; you can’t just “aggregate” other people’s stuff and make that be your entire blog presence.

The Earth Day issue of the Indianapolis Star included an article by Jacqueline Cutler that represents a collection of different people’s opinions on the topic of environmental threats. Eight different people were interviewed, with each asked to name what they considered to be the most pressing threat and then to describe one specific change individuals could make in their daily lives that could help make a positive difference.

Photographer Joel Sartore, for example, names climate change as the biggest threat, and recommends including native plants in our landscaping. Brian Skerry of National Geographic Explorer is concerned about plastic waste in the oceans, and recommends switching to metal water bottles. Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Choctaw tribal chief says we should look at our children and at our aging parents, and “just start caring” about the impact waste and warning have on their lives.

Very thought-provoking article, yet from a blog marketing standpoint, there’s a piece missing, I couldn’t help thinking. Cutler has done a fine job “aggregating” the statements of others, without presenting her own opinion. But, in marketing a business, practice, or organization, we absolutely must make clear “who lives here”.

In “Ten tips to write an opinion piece people read”, A. Stone advises starting with an attention-grabbing opening line that cuts to the heart of your key message, evoking an emotion or curiosity.  It can be a strong fact, statement or even the beginning of an anecdote that has audience connection, he explains. “The first line is the display-window for all the goodies you have inside,” Stone explains. In opinion piece posts, the, the opener should at least hint at the “slant”.

We must be influencers, I advise clients and blog content writers alike. Whether intended for business-to-business or business to consumer,, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Blogging Benefits for Small Business Owners

/0 Comments/in /by


Are there any benefits of blogging for small business owners? Sure thing, says Lyfe Marketing. In fact, “Many companies now practice a strategy where consumers come to them for information rather than them pushing sales via outbound strategies to spread awareness about their products”. Importantly, blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%, Lyfe points out, naming no fewer than 11 specific benefits of blogging as experienced first hand by business owners, in each case naming a specific well-known company that uses blogging to its advantage:

  1. Trust: Show that you are an expert in your industry (Airbnb)
  2. Value- add (Etsy Marketplace)
  3. Higher ranking: Search Engine Optimization (Allstate and State Farm®)
  4. Building email lists (beauty blogs)
  5. Cultivate interest through demand generation (Apple)
  6. Lead conversion (Slack)
  7. Visibility (Tesla)
  8. Influencer marketing (Home Depot)
  9. Backlinks – other web pages link to your website (New York Times)
  10. Feedback (Trip Advisor)
  11. Stay ahead of competition (American Express)

“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy,” Marc Prosser, founder of Fit Small Business, writes in SCORE, “but many businesses launch one, not realizing that maintaining it is just as critical.” Prosser adds several items to Lyfe’s list of blogging benefits:

  • Informing customers about the good work you do (85% of customers like companies that give back to the community)
  • Promoting a positive employer brand so employees want to work there
  • Helping business partners grow

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I often remind business owners of a very simple explanation by Corey Eridon of Hubspot of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

As Shane McGeorge writes in CBO. “If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy,”

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Reify Your Blog Posts

/0 Comments/in , , /by


There are concepts that exist in a purely abstract way, and, in blog content marketing, we have to, as hackernoon.com puts it, “find ways to explain those concepts so that they make sense to as many people as possible”. In fact, as we’ve come to realize at sayitforyou.net, blogging itself is a way of reifying complex information.

To reify is to make something abstract more concrete or real. Sociology textbooks define ‘reification” (which literally means to “turn into things”) as “the process of coming to believe that humanly created social forms are natural, universal, and absolute things”. In the two sayings “You can’t fool Mother Nature” and “fighting for justice”, Nature and Justice, both abstract concepts, are treated as real people, even though we know they’re not, There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, authors Chevette Alston and Lesley Chapel explain in study.com, because reification can turn language abstractions into tangible understanding.

“Concepts like happiness and intelligence and personality are called constructs. We cannot see them directly. They are labels, concepts, literally constructions in our heads. By giving such complex processes a label, we can discuss them, psywww.com explains.

Not everyone agrees that reification is beneficial. “When we assume that a concrete, tangible thing has the quality of abstract concepts, when the thing-in-itself is forgotten and the thing-as-thought-of is mistaken for the thing itself, that can be dangerous, Biznewske.com explains. For example, assuming that someone is an expert simply because they have a degree is a reification fallacy. Assuming that a boxed product such as cereal is a symbol of health and nutrition is a fallacy. Reifying an idea such as “male privilege” means taking it as true when it might or might not be true.

Hacker.com, though, “gets it”. The essential challenge we blog content writers face, they understand, is explaining abstract concepts in the right way, because doing that makes the difference between business success and business failure. Readability is a critical aspect of online writing, in which we business bloggers are out to retain the clients and customers we serve and to bring in new ones.

The products and services we’re writing about can’t be amazing in the abstract, which is why reifying blog content can be just what’s needed to make it engaging and real..

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail