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Valentine’s Day Inspires Loving Blog Content

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Valentine’s Day offers the perfect opportunity for business owners or practitioners to show the love by offering a customer appreciation giveaway, Seray Kesin advises in her drip.com blog. Misfit.com takes a different approach – “it’s all about the self love”. Rather than asking buyers to spoil their Valentine, the company reframes the day into one of self-love. Estee lauder uses free shipping to upsell during Valentine’s day, Kesin notes. Of course, she adds, certain kinds of products and services lend themselves to a Valentine theme; others require extra creativity, and Kesin cites a few examples::

  • an herb garden (“There’s hardly anything as satisfying as foraging for your own food and fixing a meal for two together….”
  • a heart-shaped package of meats from Man Crate
  • (Gal)entine’s Day, where ladies celebrate ladies

Wordstream.com offers some industry-specific Valentine’s Day promotional ideas:

  • Fitness centers can host a special class for couples.
  • Masseurs can run a couples massage class.
  • Restaurants can run a couples cooking class and add heart-shaped items to their menu.
  • Photographs can do half price quick sessions for couples.
  • Service-based business can offer deals for showing love to your carpet/ computer/car.
  • Panera took things to the extreme, offering to cater a wedding for couples who got engaged at one of their restaurants.
  • Meeting venues can host a free singles event.

    Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to send out a message that lets your existing customers know that: You appreciate their business. You wouldn’t have a business if it weren’t for them, Copyblogger’s Sonia Simons suggests. “Go on a bit of a rant about why you do what you do. Make it personal, and make it your own. It doesn’t need to be long or complex, but it should be from the heart,” she advises. Simons isn’t crazy about the idea of offering discounts (that can put you into the “bargain” category, when where you really want to be is the “valuable” category).

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Blogging to Offer a New Look

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The 2023 Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac offers “A New Look at Warren G Harding”, who, for decades, had been labeled by many historians as our worst president. During his 882 days in office, Harding had indeed made some bad choices. Several of his cabinet appointees took bribes; his extra-marital affairs were well-known. Reporters called him lazy and doubted his intelligence. However, now that presidential records from the early 1900s have been digitalized and available, author Veda Boyd Jones explains, “a more balanced view of President Warren G. Harding has emerged.”

Some of Harding’s notable accomplishments as president include:

  • creating the Veterans Bureau
  • creating the Bureau of the Budget
  • reducing the national deficit
  • appointing four Supreme Court justices, including William Howard Taft
  • putting in an 84-hour work week, including working lunches
  • being the first to visit Alaska , correctly predicting it would become a state

“No matter what size of business you have, you may be presented with a situation where you have to answer some undesired questions or clear up some misconceptions,” the Digital Echidna blog explains. ” While the Web can be your greatest enemy, it can also be your greatest ally. It affords you the opportunity to get your message out, immediately, without the need for a third-party distribution….  explain, apologize, and then lay out exactly what is being done to rectify the situation and ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Blogs are an ideal vehicle for damage control, we teach at Say It For You. By putting your own “spin” on reports about your company or practice, we teach at Say It For You, you can exercise control over the way the public perceives any negative developments concerning your business or practice. Of course, if you don’t blog frequently, you won’t attract negative comments, but neither will you attract the attention of search engines who deliver readers to your blog site.

Just as the authors of the 2023 Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac used updated information to counteract negative perceptions of former president warren G. Harding, your blog can offer a new look at a situation within your company or practice. Blog to offer readers a new look!

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Blogging to Explain Cultural Icons

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As I browsed through the magazine rack at my neighborhood CVS, two publications caught my attention: Star Wars: The Battle of Jedha and The Ultimate Guide to Avatar. Here were two examples, of gigantic cultural icons, I recognized, yet two subjects I know very little about. Realizing a need to “get with it”, I added both magazines to my shopping cart…

A cultural icon, Wikipedia explains, is a person or an artifact that is identified by members of a culture as representative of that culture. In writing, when we allude to an icon, the expectation is that our readers will understand the idea we’re trying to express, because they’ll recognize the expression. In fact, when content writers want to liven up a blog post, they might refer to a weakness as “an Achilles heel”, or describe a selfish person as “a Scrooge”, or refer to Alice in Wonderland when talking about going “down the rabbit hole”.

What was so appealing to me about the two publications about Star Wars and Avatar was that the publishers didn’t assume I understood those two cultural icons. Just the opposite – each was there to explain and clarify, so that I could feel “in on the secret”. Sure, at Say It For You, we suggest livening up business blog content using allusions. But, what if, as content writers, we’ve miscalculated our readers’ ability to recognize the allusions, with the danger being them finding our content frustrating rather than illuminating!

In fact, one way in which blog posts can be of use to searchers is helping them feel, empowered and informed, “caught up” on the significance and the meaning of certain events or expressions, things it appears “everybody knows”, but which they have somehow never really understood.

“We’re living in an age of entertainment extremism, where passionate fans go to ludicrous lengths to engage in hyperbolic talking points about their favorite film or franchise. It can be exhausting, wading through social media and hearing people make bold declarations not based on anything remotely resembling the truth,” flickeringmyth.com observes.” Most successful blockbuster franchises cross into other mediums spawning books and graphic novels that propel the myths forward.”

Because allusions make reference to something other than what is directly being discussed, explains yourdictionary.com, you may miss an allusion or fail to understand it if you do not know the underlying story, literary tale or other reference point. Why not use blog content writing to help empower visitors with a better understanding of the reference points they encounter?

My insight from the magazine rack? Blog to explain those cultural icons!

 

 

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Examining, Not Eating, Our Words

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“Every day, we eat our words,” Richard Lederer writes in the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Both our food and our language are peppered with salt,” he adds as an example. Before artificial refrigeration was invented, salt was the only way to preserve meat. Therefore: A portion of the wages paid to Roman soldiers was “salt money” with which to buy salt. The term was “salarium” (today we say “salary”). Other words derived from salt include salad, salsa, sausage, and salami. Good, plain people are called “salt of the earth”; a good worker is “worth his salt”.

Many of our words have to do with bread, Lederer explains. The term “companion” is derived from the Latin “com” (together) and “panis” (bread). We “break bread” with company. Wage earners are breadwinners. Cake is also an important root word, with the cakewalk being a 19th century dance meant to make fun of the rigidly stiff formal dancing of White plantation owners. Winners of dance contests were awarded a cake, possibly the origin of the expression to “take the cake”.

When it comes to language choices in blogging for business, I often recall the 1998 memorandum from President Bill Clinton: “The Federal Government’s writing must be in plain language. By using plan language, we send a clear message about what the government is doing, what it requires, and what services it offers. Plain language saves the Government and the private sector time, effort, and money.” Four specific characteristics of logically organized, easy-to-read documents,, Clinton said, include common, everyday words, “you” and other personal pronouns, the active voice, and short sentences. With “easy-to-read” a quality much to be desired in blog marketing, all four of these recommendations apply to blog posts.

“Examining” the terminology relating to your business or profession is a very good idea for business blogs. But, while helping readers “examine” the background of terms is a great way to stimulate interest, what we would not like to have to do is “eat our words”. Just how can content writers communicate an owner’s strong opinions without offending? “When you communicate a strong opinion, you automatically divide the audience into three parts: those who agree, those who disagree, and those who haven’t yet decided, crystalclearcomms.com admits. In a KRC Research survey asking whether CEOs have the responsibility to speak up about issues that are important to society, only 38% said yes..

At Say It For You, what I’ve learned over the years of creating blog content for dozens and dozens of clients in different industries and professions is that, in order to turn clients and customers “on”, we must incorporate one important ingredient – opinion. Taking a stance, I’ve found, clarified what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.

The trick is to examine words, express our own opinions in words, but avoid using words to mock others. After all, we want to enjoy reading words, hearing words, and using words, not “eating” them!

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Starting the Year with Same-New, Same-New Blog Posts

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One concern I hear a lot from business owners or professional practitioners is that sooner or later, they’ll have depleted their supply of ideas for blog posts. “What else is left to say?” is the common thread in the questions I’m so often asked. Well, won’t we? (Run out of new ideas, that is.) But, wait! Isn’t that precisely what business blogging is, continually approaching the same core topics from different angles?

Smart blog marketers know there are many subsets of every target market group; not every message will work for every person, and online searchers need to know we’re thinking of them as individuals.

“If you’ve told the story before, explain why you’re repeating it now,” Elizabeth Bernstein advises in the Life & Arts section of the Wall Street Journal. There may not be the need to repeat stories, but there is a need to be alert for anecdotes about customers, employees, or friends who are doing interesting things or overcoming obstacles. Real-people stories of you, your people, and the people you serve are always a good idea.

Just like the recurring musical phrases that connect the different movements of a symphony, business blog posts are centered around key themes. As you continue to write about your industry, your products, and your services, you’ll naturally find yourself repeating some key ideas, adding more detail, opinion, and story around each.

In writing for business, as blog content writers soon learn, the variety comes from the e.g.s and the i.e.s, meaning all the details you fill in around these central “leitmotifs” . Different examples of ways the company’s products can be helpful, along with examples of how the company helped solved various problems.  It’s these stories and examples that lend variety to the blog, even though all the anecdotes reinforce the same few core ideas.

Start your year with “same-new” blog posts!

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