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Going for the No in Blogging for Business

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There are three kinds of yeses, Chris Voss teaches negotiators in the book Never Split the Difference. There’s commitment, confirmation, and counterfeit. People are most used to giving the counterfeit “yes” because they’ve been trapped by the confirmation “yes” so many times. The way to clinch a deal, Voss, believes, is by understanding the different meanings of “no”.

Negotiation, Voss teaches, means making it about other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust for a real conversation to begin. He reminds readers that “No” can have different meanings, including:

  • I am not yet ready to agree.
  • I do not understand.
  • I don’t think I can afford it.
  • I want something else.
  • I need more information.
  • I want to talk it over with someone else.Can the insights offered by Chris Voss be of use in content marketing through blogs? Definitely. In a guest post for my Say It For You blog, Karen Sullivan compared shopping to education. That’s particularly true when a buyer is searching for professional services, and wants to “interview” different providers, she explained. Sullivan asks buyers to respect the sales process; it’s dishonest to come to the sales process to get free consultative services.

Since blogging is part of “pull marketing”, the “negotiation” process is based on the “seller’s” skill in providing valuable, usable information, in essence anticipating all the possible “no” reactions, allowing readers to arrive at a “yes” in their own way and in their own time frame.

A second factor to consider is that blogging for business is an ongoing process, rather than a one-time event. With a blog, you can offer different kinds of information in different blog posts. If readers “are not yet ready to agree”, or need more information, you can convey the idea that there are different levels of involvement possible. They may share the blog post, subscribe to the blog, request a list or informational piece. You’re welcoming them to your website, yet ultimate decisions need not be made just yet. Make sure to provide plenty of valuable information for them to mull over, and perhaps “talk it over with someone else”.

To get to the “yes”, go for the “no” in blogging for business!

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The Magic of 3 in Blogging for Business

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Humanity has had a love-hate relationship with numbers from the earliest times, Ian Stewart writes in Britannica. Ancient Babylonians used numbers to predict eclipses; priests in ancient Egypt used them to predict the flooding of the Nile. Millions of otherwise rational people are terrified of the number 13. In Jewish culture, 18 represents good luck.

Over my years at Say It For You, I’ve come to consider the number 3 important when it comes to writing blog content.

3 elements of a blog post

  1. pictures and charts (the visual presentation of the blog
  2. the content itself (the facts and figures)
  3. the “voice”, the way the message comes across – first person vs. third-person reporting, humorous or serious, casual or formal

3-minute Shark Tank principle
From the time an entrepreneur is introduced to the time one of the sharks says “I’m out”, it is almost always three minutes, writes Brant Pinvidic in The 3-Minute Rule. If you can’t distill a sales presentation down to three minutes or less, the listeners will begin to make their decision without all the pertinent information. Given the very brief attention span of online readers, the essence of the message needs to come across in 3 seconds!

3-legged stool
In business blog posts I recommend a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business, a practice, or an organization.  Other aspects can be addressed in later posts. Offer three examples or details supporting the main idea of each post.

3 levels of involvement
While having a clear Call to Action is important in blog marketing, truth is, not every searcher is going to be ready to make a commitment. In your business blog, therefore, It makes sense to offer 3 different levels of involvement (subscribing to the blog, submitting a question, taking a survey, for example), and an ”ultimate decision does not need to be made now

3-pronged strategy
Working Mother magazine is an example of a 3-part plan of attack: Compliment-criticism-course correction. In discussing various “Mon” personality types, writer Katherine Bowers would compliment the “Drama Mama” or “Snowplow Mom”, suggesting ways in which that parenting strategy is great, followed be a critique – where that mothering style is off-track, then offering “course correction” options. Those same 3 prongs could be used in a blog focused on financial management, healthy living, pet care, or fashion.
https://www.workingmother.com/content/you-know-type-mom-parenting-styles

The rule of 3 in writing
The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that a trio of events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers. The audience of this form of text is also thereby more likely to remember the information conveyed because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.

How The Power of Three Can Make Your Communication Effective

When it comes to blogging for business, make sure to remember the Rule of 3!

 

 

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What Woodpeckers Know About Blogging for Business

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To hardworking, motivated people, diversification feels like the right thing do – enter a new market, apply for a job in a different area, start a new sport, observes Seth Godin in The Dip. “And yet,” the author continues, “the real success comes to those who obsess.” A woodpecker, he says, can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or – he can tap 20,000 times on the same tree and get dinner!

Translating woodpecking into blogging terms, Neil Patel admits that blogging isn’t for the faint at heart. One of the reasons that’s true is that “one thing Google isn’t shy about is that it rewards websites that publish regular, high-quality content that provides real value to users.”

At Say It For You, after years of being involved in all aspects of corporate blog writing and blogging training, one irony I’ve found is that business owners who “show up” with new content on their websites are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most blogs abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. Pity, because blogs are startlingly less costly than business print ads, “winning” with content, not cost, and with frequency, not size.

Not to strain a simile, healthcare professionals stress the importance of “regularity” for maintaining digestive health, exhorting us to shun sugar, processed food, alcohol and caffeine in favor of fiber. Harvard Health Letter advocates exercise, emphasizing that is must be regular.

“There’s always been a lot of debate about content quality vs. quantity and frequency in content marketing practitioner circles,” Brock Stechman writes in DivvyHQ. However, he (significantly) points out. It will be difficult to get traction with an inconsistent or slow publication schedule, and frequent, consistent publication is vital for success.

Research on several psychological phenomena supports the importance of frequency in advertising and marketing, Mark Zimmer of Zimmer Marketing explains:

  1. The mere-exposure effect – people show preference for that with which they are familiar.
  2. The frequency illusion – each time the customer is exposed to the message there ia sense of omnipresence.
  3. Information-gap theory – reader feels there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know.

How often should you blog? Blogtyrant.com admits the only correct answer is “It depends” on a number of factors, including your schedule, your topic, and your blog post length. You want your blog to be successful for years to come, but without burning yourself out.

The lesson woodpeckers offer to blog content marketers is consistent tapping!

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Blogging Benefits for Small Business Owners

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Are there any benefits of blogging for small business owners? Sure thing, says Lyfe Marketing. In fact, “Many companies now practice a strategy where consumers come to them for information rather than them pushing sales via outbound strategies to spread awareness about their products”. Importantly, blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%, Lyfe points out, naming no fewer than 11 specific benefits of blogging as experienced first hand by business owners, in each case naming a specific well-known company that uses blogging to its advantage:

  1. Trust: Show that you are an expert in your industry (Airbnb)
  2. Value- add (Etsy Marketplace)
  3. Higher ranking: Search Engine Optimization (Allstate and State Farm®)
  4. Building email lists (beauty blogs)
  5. Cultivate interest through demand generation (Apple)
  6. Lead conversion (Slack)
  7. Visibility (Tesla)
  8. Influencer marketing (Home Depot)
  9. Backlinks – other web pages link to your website (New York Times)
  10. Feedback (Trip Advisor)
  11. Stay ahead of competition (American Express)

“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy,” Marc Prosser, founder of Fit Small Business, writes in SCORE, “but many businesses launch one, not realizing that maintaining it is just as critical.” Prosser adds several items to Lyfe’s list of blogging benefits:

  • Informing customers about the good work you do (85% of customers like companies that give back to the community)
  • Promoting a positive employer brand so employees want to work there
  • Helping business partners grow

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I often remind business owners of a very simple explanation by Corey Eridon of Hubspot of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

As Shane McGeorge writes in CBO. “If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy,”

 

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Think Like a Buyer in Your Blog

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We’ve heard it before, but as blog content writers, we need to hear it again and again. It’s not about us or our clients – it’s about the buyers…

“When you’re selling a business, think like a buyer”, advised Keith Rand. At a recent meeting of our Circle Business Network group, Rand, who along with his son, specializes in making business transfers happen, quoted from two books: Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus and Think Like a Man. The common message, Rand explained, is this: achieving success in business means understanding – and focusing the conversation on – not what you have to offer, but what the other party is seeking. 

Financial advisor David Nienaber, CPA, CFP®  tells business owners to consider three things “as you plan for your next chapter”, including  identifying a professional team to effect the transfer, establishing tax consequences and  future cash flow, and judging the ramifications of a sale for family members.

 While Keith Rand would agree that sellers must carefully weigh all those factors prior to entering into a sale, his point is that during the negotiations themselves, the focus needs to be not on why the seller has decided to sell, but on what on what’s going on inside the buyer’s head as he or she pictures owning and running the business going forward. 

In fact, a “selling” mindset can actually hurt your marketing strategy, Liz O’Neill of Precision Marketing Group agrees. Many entrepreneurs and small business owners are stuck in the seling mindset, so caught up in their brand or industry, they forget that clients are indifferent to all that.

Your thinking is centered around who you are and what you do.  Meanwhile, the buyer starts with a problem that needs solving. In other words, O’Neill explains, when crafting  content for your web pages, “you need to divorce yourself from in-house terms, and begin to speak broadly,” not about precise offerings and skills you have.

In blogging for business, as business coach and Say It For You guest blogger Andrew Valley suggests, “Don’t tell them what you do.  Tell them what you do for them.” In fact, Valley says, “most people are interested in what you do only if it fits with what they need or want.”

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