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Saint Patrick’s Blue Blog Content Writing

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Okay, so you wore that green tie or green jacket on St. Patty’s day and had yourself a good time, but now, almost two weeks later, I think you might be ready for the truth. Several truths, actually. Since at Say It For You, I teach that mythbusting is one very legitimate and important function of blog writing, I want to pass along a few super-busts straight out of one of my favorite sources – Mental Floss magazine.

For starters, St. Patrick wasn’t Irish. (He did introduce Christianity to Ireland back in the year 432, but the man himself was born in Scotland or Wales.) His real name wasn’t even Patrick – it was Maewyn (he changed it to Patricius after becoming a priest.) What’s more, though we’ve come to associate Kelly green with the holiday, the saint’s official color was St. Patricks blue. (The color green was linked to St. Patrick’s Day only later, during the late-18th century Irish independence movement.) Perhaps the most startling “bust” has to do with the fact that St. Patrick’s Day started out as a dry holiday; up until the 1970s, pubs were closed on that national holiday!

So, what’s the point of all this? Well, mythbusting can be used to counteract counterproductive thinking, and I’m a firm believer that a big function of business blogs is doing just that. In the normal course of doing business, you’ve undoubtedly found, misunderstandings about your product or service 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!) By myth-busting, 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. Business owners and professional practitioners can use their blogs to showcase their own expertise without “showing up” their readers’ lack of it.

‘Course you’re still going to wear green, not blue, next March, but at least that decision will be based on the facts!

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Of-the-People Blogging Content Writing

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Brand positioning is still important, but ensuring you have the right people to deliver on your brand is, too, Advisa leadership consultant Mandy Haskett points out in a recent Indianapolis Business Journal article. All the ping pong tables in the world won’t be enough to keep people working in roles that don’t align with their own inherent motivating needs, Haskett cautions, talking about talent optimization, which is matching the “job personality” with that of the employee performing that job.

Scott Greggory of Forbes calls it “highlighting your humanity to help your brand stand out”. “If your company sells a certain brand of tires, cell phones, or frozen pizza, you are literally no different from every other establishment that sells the same item,” Greggory says. What differentiates your company and builds loyalty is only a more human experience, he asserts.

Every business class studies the “4 Ps of marketing”: product, price, place, and promotion. As a blog marketing professional, I like what marsdd.com had to say about changing the 4 Ps to four Cs, butting the customer’s interests ahead of those of the marketer:

  1. Customer solutions (not products)
  2. Customer cost (not price)
  3. Convenience (not place)
  4. Communication (not promotion)

Brian Tracy (one of my longtime heroes back from my National Speakers Association days) has it right, adding a seventh P to his marketing list. “The final P of the marketing mix is people. Develop the habit of thinking in terms of the people inside and outside of your business who are responsible for every element of your sales, marketing strategies, and activities.” Tracy says. “It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs and businesspeople will work extremely hard to think through every element of the marketing strategy and the marketing mix, and then pay little attention to the fact that every single decision and policy has to be carried out by a specific person, in a specific way. “

In Creating Buzz With Blogs, veteran business technology consultant Ted Demopoulos explains, “Blogs create buzz because people will feel like they know you, and people like to do business with people they know.”  After more than ten years of writing content for business owners and professional practitioners, I’m absolutely convinced that’s true. People shop for products and services, but when all is said and done, they buy with their hearts. What that means is that the best blogs give readers into a company’s core beliefs, and help readers meet the people inside that company. And, while blogging can help achieve quite a number of goals, including:

  • building good will
  • staying in touch with existing customers and clients
  • announcing changes in products and services
  • controlling damage done by negative PR or by complaints
  • recruiting employees,

the most important function of your blog is expressing your brand in terms of the people behind it!

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The Pros and Cons in Backyard Business Blogging

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“The Pros and Cons of Backyard Livestock”, by Jack Savage (the piece appears in the 2019 Old Farmer’s Almanac) illustrates how serious stuff can be presented in a wickedly funny way. And, while not every business blog content writer could pull off the humor, that “Pros and Cons” format is very workable as a template for informational blog posts. Savage offers his advice in five sections: chickens, horses, goats, pigs, and cows. For each, the author gives some background information:

Chickens – the world has 3x as many of them as humans.
Pros: eggs
Cons: keeping them safe from foxes, coyotes, and weasels
.
Horses – you’ll be feeding your horse, but your horse will not be feeding you, and the horse will have final say over who rides whom.
Pros: You can ride a horse
Cons: Writing checks to the hay guy, the vet, the tack shop, the truck-and-trailer dealership.

Goats are highly social, curious, interactive, and smart ruminants (chew their cud).
Pros: Hilarious
Cons: Feet and horns have to be trimmed, you’ll need to keep milking.

Pigs are cute when they’re young, not as filthy as their reputation suggests, and put on weight fast.
Pros: Bacon, ham, sausage, port roast (and did we mention bacon?)
Cons: Destructive, sunburn easily, butchering is serious business

Cows (also ruminants) make you feel like a real farmer and are a lot easier to handle than elephants.
Pros: Unadulterated milk and cheese
Cons: Find a large animal vet, and give him all your money.

In training business blog content writers, I call the technique Savage is using here “templating”. When you have several pieces of information to impart, I explain, consider ways to “unify” them under one umbrella or list category. In fact, at Say It For You, I’m always on the lookout for different “templates”, not in the sense of platform graphics, but in terms of formats for presenting information about any business or professional practice. The format lends variety to the different posts, and also helps readers organize their own thoughts on the subject. Brandon Royal, author of The Little Red Writing Book, calls them “floor plans”. In a chronological structure, the writer discusses the earliest events first, then moves forward in time. In an evaluative structure (which is what Jack Savage used), you discuss the pros and cons of a concept. If a presentation is structured, it will be useful to the reader; otherwise, it will be confusing and of little value.

What if your products and services are nothing to joke about? Jack Savage obviously isn’t enamored of the idea of becoming a backyard livestock farmer – his hilariously amusing remarks are hardly designed to “sell” readers on embracing that kind of new enterprise. But just because your company is serious, doesn’t mean all marketing has to be,” Jason Miller of Social Media Examiner counters. Humor is a hook, grabbing the audience’s attention, as well as an icebreaker, but it’s important to focus the humor around a problem your company can solve.

If Jack Savage were a blog content writer for an animal feed company, could he have fairly presented the drawbacks and challenges, while still encouraging readers to explore animal farming?

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Learning from Leonardo in Blogging for Business

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“Learning from Leonardo”, Walter Isaacson’s article in Time: The Science of Creativity, could serve as a checklist for blog content writers.  DaVinci’s work holds lessons for all of us, the author says; even if we can’t match DaVinci’s talents, we can try to be more like him. How can that apply to creating innovative and captivating blog content?

Be curious, relentlessly curious about everything around you.
I have a theory about human curiosity that I think tests out in corporate blogging:  Our curiosity is at its most intense when it concerns testing our own limits. Yes, readers like juicy gossip tidbits about sports and movie stars. Yes, readers have interest in how stuff works in the world and how things came to be. And, yes, (as I always stress in corporate blogging training sessions), by definition of their having found your blog, readers have an interest in your field. But (or so my theory goes, anyway), readers are most curious about themselves, how they “work” and the limits of their own knowledge and their own physical capabilities. I believe that’s why readers find arcane pieces of information and “quizzes” so hard to resist .

Observe, starting with the details.
Examples and details are the very things people remember long after reading a piece. Corporate websites provide basic information about a company’s products or a professional’s services, but the business blog content is there to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to that information by filling in the finer details. Ask yourself what you want readers to know about your topic for that post and think of three details for each idea, Quick Study advises students.

Go down rabbit holes. (Leonardo “drilled down for the pure joy of geeking out,” Isaacon says.)
I find seeming “useless” tidbits of information highly useful when it comes to blog content writing. It’s interesting when business owners or practitioners present little-known facts about their own business or profession. History tidbits, for example, engage readers’ curiosity, evoking an “I didn’t know that!” response.

Respect facts.  “Be fearless about changing your mind based on new information.”
Whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. People are looking for more than information – they need perspective. On the other hand, nothing is more compelling than honesty. If the business owner or practitioner’s perspective has evolved, that change of mind should be powerfully clarified in the blog content.

Avoid silos.  At presentations, Isaacson relates, Steve Job would use one slide depicting the intersection between two roads: Liberal Arts and Technology, Isaacson notes. Besides coming across as more credible, when business owners or professional practitioners stay up to date in their own fields, they are in a better position to spot threats and opportunities early on. If readers can see evidence in your content of, not only your expertise, but your openness to insights gained from experts in other fields, that broadens their own understanding along with their trust in you!

In striving for authenticity and creativity, we blog content writers have a lot to learn from Leonardo DaVinci!

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Powerful Paragraphs and Sentences in Blogging for Business

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“Construct your paragraphs with a good eye as well as a good mind,” advises Richard Anderson in Powerful Writing Skills.  What does that mean? Consider how the paragraph looks on the page – would it be more appealing to the eye to divide it into two paragraphs?

Anderson’s reasoning includes the following considerations:

  • Enormous blocks of print implant an image of difficulty in readers’ minds.
  • Bunches of short paragraphs can be distracting.

The compromise: vary the length of your paragraphs without making the breaks seem forced. Generally speaking, Anderson points out, “the shorter the paragraphs and the fewer the number of ideas contained in them, the easier they are to read.

In writing good sentences, be yourself, using clear, honest, natural words on paper, Anderson tells writers. He recommends writers choose:

  • nouns over adjectives
  • verbs over adverbs
  • plain verbs over fancy ones
  • specific words over general ones
  • short sentences over long ones
  • personal over non-personal

But, if all your sentences are approximately the same length, Anderson warns, you’re putting    your reader to sleep; vary the length as a subtle way to keep readers awake.

Another way to bore readers is using clichés (overused phrases). They numb readers’ senses, he warns, and they are often too general and vague. “Allow the meaning of your message to choose your words rather than the other way around,” Anderson suggests.

Strunk and White sum up the concept in their own book, The Elements of Style: For the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts, a sentence should contain no unnecessary words.

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