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Blogs are Flip-Flop Interviews

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In the book Stop Hiring Losers, Minesh and Baxi devote an entire chapter to a list of interview questions employers should pose to job candidates. “Why are you leaving your current job?”, for example, is designed to identify past problems a candidate might carry over into a new job. On the positive side, that question can reveal the fact that the candidate sees the new position as an important forward career step.

When you think about it, blog posts are interviews, too. But, in the case of blogs, things are “flip-flopped”, because it’s the blog reader (the “candidate”) interviewing the business, rather than the other way around. At Say It For You, we teach content writers that searchers have some sort of need and are recruiting help!  Just as in a face-to-face interviews, those searchers read what you put out there in your blog posts and evaluate that content in light of their own needs.  Their scanning your blog is the equivalent of them interviewing your business to see if you’re a good fit for them.

Many of the questions Minesh and Baxi recommend that employers pose to job candidates are those blog readers are mentally posing to you when they are reading your content:

  • Why should we employ you rather than one of the other candidates?

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is a succinct, memorable message that identifies the unique benefits that are derived from using your product or service as opposed to a competitor’s. Your blog offers you the chance to constantly refine and improve your USP.

  • What would your co-workers say about you?

Testimonials and client anecdotes in your blog are ways of answering this question.

  • What contributed to the best working conditions you ever experienced?

Your blog posts should include stories about how you successful solved clients problems in the past, expressing the satisfaction you gained from helping customers overcome obstacles. Offer advice about how users can gain the greatest benefits from your product or service.

  • What is the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your career?

I teach freelance blog writers to include stories of their clients’ past mistakes and failures. Such stories have a humanizing effect, engaging readers and creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame not only adversity, but the effects of their own mistakes!

  • What are you most proud of on your resume?

Although at Say It For You, I remind owners and practitioners that blogging is not boasting, it’s good to offer “credentializing proof”, alluding in blog posts to your years of experience, weaving into the text mention of your degrees, quoting articles you’ve written – and even citing awards you’ve won. In addition, people tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who give back to their community.

When you think about it, blogs are nothing more than flip-flop interviews!

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Great Beginnings for Business Blogs

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“Set the hook with great beginnings,” Sharon Short teaches in Writer’s Digest. Standard pieces of advice include:

  • Immediately grab attention
  • Don’t start with description – especially weather!
  • Don’t jump right into dialogue or action

Take some pressure off yourself, Short advises writers – openings will emerge when the theme of the project becomes clearer, she says, noting that there are 5 characteristics of a great story beginning:

  1. Immediacy (readers need an immediate reason to care)
  2. Tone (light-hearted, wry. Comedic, serious, informational)
  3. Suspense (teasing readers’ curiosity)
  4. Specificity (provide context right away)
  5. Fair play (consistency of style as the piece progresses).

It is the five specific techniques that Sharon Short describes that I believe are especially applicable to business blog content writing:

1. Dialogue – We all love to eavesdrop just a little.
Any good narrative should contain some dialogue and sensory details. In blog case studies, incidents from the news, folklore, including actual quotes and dialogue makes the material more real for the reader.

2. Superlatives – Describe an event or item as the least, biggest, most, smallest, first or last.
Superlatives in headlines “sell”. “The most successful people”, “The happiest people”, “The most interesting people” – these are people we want to know more about. Readers enjoy discovering, learning, and challenging the details behind blanket assertions.

3. Thematic statement – State the premise or thesis of the entire book – what you are about to prove.
Putting a summary or conclusion at the beginning of a piece of writing certainly sounds like a strange thing to do, but the pow-opening-line idea I teach in corporate blogging training session focuses on that very sort of “descending” writing structure.

4. Voice – Hook readers’ empathy with a compelling voice, making each reader feel as if you’re in a conversation with her alone.
In your business blog, while viewers are reading, not hearing, the “voice”, it’s important to have “voice variety”. That can come from writing some of the content in I-you format, with other posts written in third person. If a company person or a customer is being interviewed, the can be written in the “voice” of the interviewee or that of the interviewer.

5. Surprise – Shock the reader, even in a small way.
Beginning with a startling statistic is certainly one tactic blog writers can use to bring a point to the forefront of readers’ minds, then illustrating that point with specific examples.

Set the hook to each blog post with a great beginning!

 

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Blogging to Get Remembered

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Brag Better: Master the Art of Fearless Self-Promotion
“You can always get attention by being the loudest in the room,” admits Meredith Fineman in her book Brag Better, but being loud while lacking strategy will do more harm than good. There are ways to get remembered, Fineman teaches, by describing your personal brand in ways that earn respect and recognition. True showmanship, she says, means showcasing what you’ve done in a way that feels fun and true to you.

Better bragging better begins with making a list of facts about yourself and your successes, Fineman teaches. Learn to be loud, proud, and strategic by:

  • Using super power words
  • Avoiding invisibility
  • Avoiding verbal qualifiers
  • Considering your audience

Brant Pindivic, author of the book The 3-Minute Rule, speaks about ways to consider your audience: “To succeed, you must be able to capture and hold your audience’s attention with only the quality and flow of your information,” The audience must be able to:

  1. conceptualize your idea
  2. contextualize it (understand how it will benefit them)
  3. actualize it (engage with interest)

One tip that Pinvidic offers to sales people is particularly worth noting by blog content writers: “It’s not just who you pitch to, it’s who they have to pitch to, that matters.” How will readers rationalize their decision to buy when speaking to others?

Better bragging is about shining a light on the work you’ve done, having confidence in yourself and your voice, and speaking up, Fineman stresses. At Say It For You, there are three models of business blog posts that we’ve found are particularly helpful in getting readers to remember the content and its provider:

1. Helpful how-to hints
Find complementary businesses or practices, asking those business owners or practitioners for tips they can offer for you to pass along to your readers. The best tips and hints, I added, are related to some a topic currently trending in the news and practical.

2. Personal stories
Research done by questioning Stanford University graduates showed that shows that graduates were more likely to remember commencement speakers who told stories. In one experiment, students were asked to give one-minute speeches that contained three statistics and one story. Only 5 percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63 percent remembered the stories.

3. Fascinating tidbits of information
When business owners or practitioners present little-known facts about their own business or profession, those tend to be remembered. If you notice a “factoid” circulating about your industry, a common misunderstanding by the public about the way things really work in your field, a little-known tidbit can reveal the truth behind the myth.

Learn to do better bragging in your blog!

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Introduce Referral Partners in Your Blog

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“By establishing yourself as a source of assistance, you train others to come to you with referral opportunities,” Chuck Gifford and Minesh Baxi advise in the book Network Your way to $100,000 and Beyond. “Learning to promote to those in your sphere of influence is hundreds of times better than buying from a referral partner. You must learn to talk about your referral partners often, asking questions to uncover leads.”

At Say It For You, I’ve always taught that reading competitors’ blog posts is a great form of market research for business owners launching their own blogging strategy.  Even repeating what established bloggers have said (of course in each case properly attributing the material to its source) forces “newbies” to think about what they might add to the discussion.

But, rather than merely summarizing what others are thinking, or ways competitors have chosen to handle problems, why not invite “thought competitors” to express their ideas on your blog site? That can be a way to use blog content to present conflicting views about a particular subject (your guest blogger’s view and your own), leading readers to think more deeply about a topic.

A guest blog post, of course, needn’t be about a controversial topic, but might serve as enrichment content for the host’s readers. A realtor might invite an interior designer to comment on “staging” a home for sale. An estate planning attorney might invite a long term care insurance agent to contribute content. “Guesting” can take the form of interviews or of actual content by the referral partners themselves.

“The most powerful phrase in marketing,” Gifford and Baxi assert is “I have a friend in that business. Would it be okay if I have them give you a call?” It’s interesting to note that the book was published in 2007, a year before Say It For You was started. Fourteen years later, it could be that one of the most powerful forms of referral marketing is introducing your referral partners to your audience of blog readers!

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Placement Smarts for Stores and Blogs

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Blog marketing and placement of goods in a grocery store have a lot in common, it seems.

Consumer psychologists have found that shoppers need a little time to get into the shopping mindset. That’s why you’ll often find magazines, books, and flowers near the front of the stores, to get shoppers into a more relaxed frame of mind, authors of The Big Book of Secrets explain. Then, since frequent customers who buy the same staples each week might ignore other items, stock is rotated frequently to lure shoppers to consider new items. Placement on shelves is super-important, because study after study has shown that items put at eye level are most frequently purchased. For that reason, smart merchandising involves placing the most expensive items on eye level shelves; suppliers may be charged extra for placing their goods at eye level,

Welcoming readers to the store or the blog
Just as shoppers arrive at the grocery store because they are interested in finding certain goods, online readers will have landed on your blog because they are interested in finding information on your topic and possibly making a purchase. Unlike the grocery shoppers described in the Big Book of Secrets (who know they’re in the right place, just need to be put into a more relaxed frame of mind), online searchers need immediate confirmation that they’ve come to the right place. To that end, according to blog mavens Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos, key words and phrases should be among the first words in your blog title and then reappear in your first lines of the post.

Staying at eye level
In comparison with putting grocery goods at shoppers’ eye level, eye-tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a page top to bottom and left to right, looking for information that matches what they typed into the search bar.

Putting the thesis and conclusion on the “end caps”
Grocery marketing studies have shown that placing items on end caps (the shelves at the outer end of each aisle), can boost sales by as much as a third. When it comes to blogging for business, I teach at Say It For You, the “end caps” of blog marketing are titles and closing lines. in helping high school and college students write effective essays, I often suggest they introduce their readers to both their topic and their thesis, doing both those things on the “end cap” where they’ll get the most attention. That way, I teach each the student writer, your readers will understand not only what issue will be under discussion, but towards “which side” of the argument you’re trying to steer your readers. In business blog writing, for the opening “end cap”, you may choose to present a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy, challenging statement. Later, on the “back end” of your blog “aisle”, your “pow” closing statement ties back to the opener, bringing your post full circle.

Checking out
In a grocery store, even shoppers who leave totally empty-handed must pass by the checkout counters. In blog marketing, the equivalent is an “enticing, well-written Call to Action, as written.com suggests.

Just as if your were managing a grocery store, use your placement smarts in blogging for business!

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