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Taking a Tip from the Texas Anti-Littering Campaign

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Mental Floss March April 2016

“Slogans are powerful marketing tools that can motivate customers to support your brand,” says Dustin Betonio of Tripwire Magazine, citing examples of highly successful word combinations:

  • Harley-Davidson – “American by birth. Rebel by choice.
  • Walmart – “Save Money, Live Better”
  • McDonalds – “I’m lovin it.”
  • Hallmark – “When you care enough to send the very best.”
  • Nike – “Just Do It”
  • Kentucky Fried Chickin – “Finger lickin good”

Like slogans, blog titles can serve as powerful marketing tools. In fact, as blog content writers, one big challenge we face is selecting the best title for each of our blog posts. One very good example is the billboard the Texas Department of Transportation used as the centerpiece of their highly successful anti-littering campaign:

Don’t Mess With Texas – Up to $1000 fine for littering!

 

What are some of the elements in this billboard that blog content writers can use in titles?

Alliteration and assonance
Those are literary devices that help make sentences more memorable because of repeated sounds. “mess” and “Texas” are not a perfect sound match, but the “ess” and “tex” sounds are close enough.

Numbers
Having the billboard read “Up to one thousand dollar fine” wouldn’t have packed nearly the punch of the $1,000 in digits.

Strong language
Strong phrases (and quite frankly, negative ones) have more of an effect in titles.

Definitive
In composing business blogs, we need to keep several goals in mind.  We want to write engaging titles,  we want to include keyword phrases to help with search, we want to be short and to the point, and  we want to use power words.  The overriding goal, though, in composing a title has to be making promises  we are going to be able to keep in the body of the blog post itself.

Don’t mess with business blog post titles – make them strong and definitive!

 

 

 

 

 

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Blogging From a Top-Floor Hotel Room

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People often assume he shoots his beautiful images with a drone or that he creates them on a computer, but that’s not it at all, says Virtuoso travel photog Gray Malin. What you see in the magazine is the result of him going up in a helicopter and leaning out the side to find timeless imagery. The idea of shooting from above came to Malin, he says, when he was somewhere in a hotel with a birdseye view of a giant swimming pool filled with people and realized he could create tableaus of beachgoers and beaches from a new and different perspective.

Perspective is everything when it comes to business blog content. Whether a business owner is composing his/her own blog posts or collaborating with a professional content writer, it’s simply not enough to provide even very potentially valuable information to online searchers.  Think of the facts – about the business, the services, and the products offered  – as raw ingredients which must be “translated”. For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?”  

Many business owners and practitioners make use of statistics in their blog posts, and that’s a good thing for a couple of reasons:

  • Numbers help debunk myths and dispel false impressions relating to your field or product.
  • Numbers help demonstrate the extent of the problem your business or practice helps solve.

But statistics, too, need to be put into perspective for readers. Before a reader even has time to ask “So what?” we need to be ready with an answer that makes sense in terms with which readers are familiar. I call it blogging new knowledge on things readers already know.

Photographer Gray Malin understood that content (in his case pictorial) offered to readers must “own” a unique perspective. There’s certainly no lack of content in either print or online media, and no lack of experts (at least purported experts) in the travel field or any other. Malin understood that he needed to go beyond presenting photos and offer a unique perspective.

In fact, what Gray Malin says of his top-floor style of travelogues is a great example for business blog content writing: “It all goes into creating something that’s unique to that location, but still universally appealing.”

 

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Your Blog Has Three Jobs: Solve. Excite. Speak

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Frong Prince lipstick

“Things aren’t always what they seem. Sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince!” Those rather unoriginal observations are attributed to Poppy King, founder of Lipstick Queen, the company that gets heads turning with Frog Prince, “a remarkable lilypad green lipstick that transforms lips into a pretty rosebud pink”.

I’m not exactly into the green lipstick thing, but I do absolutely love the statement I heard Poppy make during an Evine TV promotion:

“Every company,“ Poppy said, “has three jobs to do:

  • Solve the problem.
  • Excite the imagination.
  • Speak the truth.”

As profound a statement as I believe I’ve ever heard in a sales pitch, Poppy’s words certainly apply to the work we do as business blog content writers.

Solve the problem.
People are online searching for answers to their problems and solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  If your business consistently posts content offering valuable information and advice, those people are going to find you and  at least some will want to become your customers..

Excite the imagination.
Readers came online searching for information, products, or services, and they are not going to take the time to read the full text of your blog post without assurance that they’ve come to the right place and that this will be a short, fast, exciting read. Use the title to establish a “hook” to excite visitors’ imagination.

Speak the truth.
Myth debunking is a great use for corporate blog content. That’s because in the natural course of doing business, misunderstandings about a product or service often surface in the form of customer questions and comments.

Your blog has three jobs:  Solve. Excite. Speak.

 

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It’s All in the Game for Your Business Blog

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Carnival Game with Ducks“There’s a unique recipe that goes into coming out ahead in just about anything,” Jessanne Collins writes in Mental Floss, “an enigmatic equation of skill, technique, calculation, probability, chance, and all kinds of other immeasurable factors.” Collins examines competitions ranging from carnival games to spelling bees and Texas Hold “Em poker, concluding that the perfect formula for winning is uncrackable.

Despite the myriad of words devoted to blogging advice, the secret code for blogging success is probably uncrackable as well. Still, I can’t help thinking, the equation for business blog content writing contains all same basic elements Collins found in poker playing and carnival games:

Skill
“The vast majority of content online is poorly written,” laments Kevin Muldoon of elegantthemes.com. While anyone who can use the Internet can technically write a blog post, all content is not created equal, he observes.

“The best writers are also keen readers,” advises wordstream.com., adding that content writers must expand their horizons to more challenging material than they typically read, paying special attention to sentence structure, word choice, and flow.

Technique
Great blog posts begin with planning, and that means creating outlines, doing research using authoritative resources, fact-checking, creating good headlines, editing, using images, and inserting humor judiciously, wordstream.com continues.

Calculation
“In our site reviews we often see that a site’s category / tag structure is completely unmanaged,” reports Joost de Valk in Yoast. When used correctly a good “taxonomy” system can boost your blog’s SEO; when used incorrectly, he says, “it’ll break things”. Using analytical tools is the blogger’s way of calculating which tactics are most likely to succeed.

Chance
“Until you’ve had a chance to build up a target audience, you’re dealing with assumptions and educated guesses based on your first-hand experience and anecdotal evidence,” says Peep Laja of conversionxl.com.  After you learn more about the market, you can pivot, changing direction to fit the facts.

Just as with carnivals, spelling bees, and Texas Hold “Em poker, with corporate blog writing, it’s all in the game!

 

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Framing Your Business Blog

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The Art of Thinking Clearly

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it,” says Rolf Dobelli in “The Art of Thinking Clearly.” If a message is communicated in different ways, it will also be received in different ways, Dobelli asserts. When researchers presented a group of people with a choice between two kinds of meats:

  • 99 percent fat free
  • 1 percent fat

respondents ranked the first as healthier, even though they are the same!

Wordsmithing is an important element in blog content authoring, because we have the power to use word choices to put the emphasis on specific elements of a product or a service.

Today’s consumer is used to having marketers use the technique of glossing, which is a deceptive sort of framing. The typical online searcher, therefore, is leery of hype and unrealistic claims.

That’s precisely why, Velocity Partners claims, honesty in content marketing has such “insane power”, and why they advise “Take your weakest points and put them in the spotlight”. The principle behind the tactic: managing expectations so you can slightly exceed them.

Velocity Partners offers eight reasons you should consider using insane honesty in your blog:

  1. It’s surprising because it’s so rare.
  2. It’s charming.
  3. We like people who make fun of themselves more than we like braggarts.
  4. It alienates the people who were never going to do business with you anyway.
  5. It attracts your ideal prospects.
  6. It builds trust.
  7. It signals confidence.
  8. It focuses you on battles you can win.

For us business blog content writers, it’s important to remember that every choice of words we make involves framing. Question is – will we use glossing to put an artificial shine on the weak aspects of the business or practice we’re writing about – or will we choose the insane honesty route?

 

 

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