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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
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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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Take an Occam’s Razor to Your Blog Content

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Simplicity Score

 

Medieval philosopher William of Occam taught a logical problem-solving principle which came to be known as Occam’s Razor (forerunner of KISS – keep it simple, stupid). The concept:  simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones.

As blog content writers, we ought to get Occam’s message, learning to apply a “razor” to our own creations. “All writers should do a bit of counting words and sentences and revise their writing for the sake of their readers,” writes Nirmaldasan, explaining the Simplicity Score of business writing.
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The Simplicity Score is based on the idea that the average sentence length is the best indicator of text difficulty, and it is measured by the number of complete sentences is a sample of 35 words.  The SS may vary on a five-point scale, with 0 being very hard, and 4+ being very easy. If our writing measures up to this standard, in ten sentences there will be about 170 words.

In her blog post The Wild and Crazy Guide to Writing Sentences, Michele Russell posits that at the heart of the craft of blogging is one very basic ability: writing good sentences. Imagine your sentences as links in a chain, Russell advises. “The stronger you can make each one, and the more tightly you can connect it to the ones on either side, the more powerful your writing will be.”

The WordPress Readability Analysis measures both sentence length and paragraph length, while the Flesch reading-ease test is based on the ratio of total words to total sentences, plus total syllables to total words.

Too much counting and measuring? Not really, William Strunk says in The Elements of Style. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts,” Strunk explains.

While the Occam’s Razor Simplicity Score can help us keep our blog writing simple, we must also keep it interesting, Michele Russell reminds us. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of making most of your sentences similar in length, but the steady rhythm can lull readers to sleep. Use short sentences, Russell suggests, to “add a percussive bite” and keep your audience on its toes.  You use the longer ones to explain things in more detail. Varying the rhythm keeps readers guessing, she says.

It seems we blog content writers must learn to count sentences, words, and even syllables, but to avoid becoming formulaic, we need to do it in “syncopated time”!

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Serving Up Incredible Information in Your Business Blog

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For years now, as a blog content writing trainer, I’ve been preaching the use of seemingly “useless” tidbits of information to spice up business blogs, engaging readers’ curiosity, and evoking an “I didn’t know that!” response.
Tidbits can be used to:

  • describe your way of doing business
  • clarify the way one of your products works
  • explain why one of the services you provide is particularly effective in solving a problem.

While one goal of any marketing blog is to help your business “get found”, once that’s happened, the goal changes to helping the online readers get comfortable with the way you do business. Blog content writing is the perfect vehicle for conveying a corporate message starting with a piece of trivia.

Owners of a grocery store or a food delivery service company, for example, might include trivia about food spoilage in their blog, highlighting their own food safety procedures.

Myth: Food should be defrosted on the kitchen counter.
Truth: When a whole chicken, is left to defrost on the kitchen counter, the surface will defrost first, allowing bacteria to multiply while the inside is still frozen.

 Owners of a health food store might blog about a widespread misunderstanding about spinach, highlighting the body’s need for iron and other nutrients.

Myth: Spinach is a superior source of iron, with ten times the iron content of other green leafy veggies.
Truth: Despite Popeye’s claims, the oxalic acid in spinach prevents the body from absorbing more than 90 percent of the vegetable’s iron.

A realtor’s blog might discuss the perception that a 30-year mortgage is the least expensive option.

Myth: The longer the payment period, the cheaper the payments will be.
Truth: You could end up paying more during the life of the loan if you pick the 30-year option instead of the 15-year mortgage. 

Common myths surround every business and profession.  If you notice a “factoid” circulating about your industry, a common misunderstanding by the public about the way things really work in your field, you can use a little-known tidbit of information that reveals the truth behind the myth.

Serve up “incredibly” credible information in the form of mythbusting tidbits in your blog.

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