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Use Titles to Accentuate the Point, Not Make It

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This week’s Say It For You blog posts feature more helpful advice based on Brant Pinvidic’s powerful little book The 3-Minute Rule….

You need bullet points to accentuate the point, not make it for you, observes TV producer and sales coach Brant Pinvidic. You don’t need full sentences, either, he says – the slides function as “Post-it” notes. Even Robert Gaskins, co-creator of Power Point itself, says the technology was never intended for show an entire proposal, just a quick summary.

From a blog marketing point of view, there are several similarities between blog titles and individual bullet points in a Power Point presentation. Titles matter a lot in blogs for search: key words and phrases help search engines make the match between online searchers’ needs and what your business or practice has to offer. Equally important, once your post has been “served up” by the search engine, the reader needs to be encouraged to click on the link in order to read the content. True to Pindivic’s advice, if the title gives away too much of the content, readers wouldn’t need to progress to the content itself!

In terms of using bullet points in blog posts themselves, it seems content writers either love or absolutely abhor those little dots. From what I’ve been told, search engines like bullet points – a lot. Myself, I like bulleting for breaking down complicated information into digestible form. I try to follow the Reuters Handbook of Journalism guidelines for using bullet points, using no fewer than two and no more than five at a time, and keeping them in active voice and present tense.

Going back to blog titles, in a very real sense, a blog post title represents a promise. Of course, since business blogs should resemble advertorials more than ads, the title is “promising” the reader a benefit in exchange for progressing to the next step. If you click on this title ( the implication is), it will lead to you obtaining some desirable result – more savings, more actionable knowledge more confidence, more beauty, more health, more job security, more safety more peer approval, more wealth…..Alternately, the implied promise might relate to reducing an undesirable effect – pain illness, hassle, dirt, risk, fear, harassment, debt….

The skill, of course, lies in Brant Pinvidic’s caution to do all that in a title that somehow manages to accentuate the point without serving it up – prematurely – with all the trimmings.

To me, one aspect of blog marketing is that blogs – beginning with their titles – have to convey a feeling of getting closer to the actual human beings running the business or practice, closer than the feeling readers might get from brochures, billboards, or even websites. If the blog post title can somehow accentuate that concept – it will be a winner.

 

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Blogs That Go WHAC

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Write less,” advises Seth Godin in the preface to his book The Dip. Now Brant Pindvidic, in his book The 3-Minute Rule, tells us to “say less to get more from any pitch or presentation”.

At Say It For You, I teach the principle of “reading around”, emphasizing the point that business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing. Even after almost a decade and a half creating blog content for business owners and practitioners, I feel the need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my clients offer. But now, both these business authors are making the case for less, not more, when it comes to sales pitches, speeches, and blog posts.

It seems this “reading around” habit of mine has presented me with a dilemma: Godin’s and Pinvidic’s advice to write and say less seems to fly in the face of the latest trend towards long-form blog posts with a word count numbering in the thousands.

Brant Pinvidic’s advice is based on the science of approach motivation. “Every time you make a pitch, presentation, or proposal to try to influence anyone to do anything, your audience’s first impression will be fully formed in less than three minutes”. And it’s not that we’re all dumbed-down, he says, but that people today focus more intensely and efficiently, he explains. The WHAC outline helps organize the key information you need to impart – and dictates the order in which you present that information:

W – What is it? (What is your offer?)
H – How does it work?) work? (Why are the elements of your offer and why are they valuable or
Important?)
A– Are you sure? (This is a fact or figure that backs up your information and establishes
potential.)
C – Can you do it? (Your ability to execute and deliver.

In the first two stages, the W and the H, the audience will conceptualize. In the A stage, they will contextualize, judging whether your offer is true real, and right. In the C stage, the audience will be asking whether this could actually happen in the way being described.

Transferring this model to the arena of blog marketing, I’d suggest that the WHAC sequence could be employed over a series of blog posts rather than using it all in one. One concept I emphasize in corporate blogging training sessions is that blog posts can stay smaller and lighter in scale than the more permanent content on the corporate website or the content in white papers. What helps the separate posts fit together into an ongoing business blog marketing strategy are the blog “leitmotifs” or themes.

Whether Godin’s “Write less” advice is suited for us blog content writers remains a matter of debate. On the other hand, “Read more” continues to be a requirement for imparting bog posts with WHAC!

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In Blog Marketing, It’s Not Okay to Quit

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“It’s okay to quit sometimes,” observes Seth Godin in his book the Dip, and, he assures readers, quitters do win. But quitting doesn’t mean giving up and abandoning your long-term strategy, only quitting the tactics that aren’t working. In fact, Godin admits, most people do quit. Problem is, he observes, they don’t quit successfully or at the right time.

Blogging is a perfect example, I realized, reviewing this powerful little book, of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. The strategy itself is well-proven and documented, and many business owners and professional practitioners embark on blog marketing in recognition of its power to generate interest in their products and services. It’s the tactics, the week-after-week work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing…blog posts. Those abandoned blogs belong to those who don’t recognize what Seth Godin describes as the “extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most”.

It’s not that blog marketing is an unproven strategy…

“Content is still king, and it is the fresh, customized, customer-centric content that gets the attention. Those that create more of it will certainly see positive returns for their efforts. Content marketing generates at least three times more leads than conventional marketing techniques,” says Digital.com. People love engaging with businesses in particular, and they tend to look positively on a company that releases custom content…Over the long run, you can expect 87% more inbound links, compared to companies who don’t blog at all.”

“Know for a fact that Google and other search engines tend to give more weight and SEO boosts to websites that update their content regularly over those that aren’t so frequent. “ BlogPanda explains. “The more you blog regularly about your product, business or industry, the more it increases your search keywords which further helps your website rank better for those keywords on Google and other search engines.”

Amazing, but true: In the face of all these compelling reports demonstrating the value of blog marketing, Caslon Analytics tells us that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month!, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average blog, Caslon remarks ruefully, “has the lifespan of a fruitfly”. No lack of starts, though: blogtyrant.com reports that there are over 1.7 billion websites on the internet today, and more than 600 million of those have blogs.

“A blog usually starts with a bang,” observes Antonio Canciano of technicalblogging.com. Then life gets in the way, postnig becomes less frequent and ore sporadic until the blogger pretty much gives up on their site entirely. That’s the usual path to blog despair, Canciano says. However, blogging is a river, not a lake, he cautions, and the constant stream of new content is what gives blogging its edge over other forms of content publishing.

Sure, it may be okay to quite sometimes, as Seth Godin observes, but not if you’re after those extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to keep posting blogs!.

 

 

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In Blogging for Business, Answer the Question: “Compared to What?”

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Always “reading around” for background materials for this Say It For You blog, I learned two different startling statistics about the travel industry. First, at a recent networking meeting, I heard from presenter Gloria Thomas of Eight Streams Wealth that travel represents $9.25 trillion worth of business here in the U.S. Then from reading Tourism Review News, I learned that tourism has generated 20% of total world employment since 2013. Conclusion: Travel is a big, big deal.

Same message, just in different words? Yes and no.

Both presentations offered attention-commanding statistics. From Tourism Review, I learned that, in a single year, there are 1.4 billion international arrivals registered across the globe and that fully 20% of the jobs generated worldwide between 2025-2019 were in travel and tourism.

What lent Gloria Thomas’ presentation extra “oomph”, in my opinion, was the “compared to what?” element. That $9.25 trillion in U.S. travel business? Our oil & gas industry generates $330 billion. Our auto industry? $500 billion. Hollywood? A “mere” $300 billion.

It’s been a long-held belief of mine: nothing speaks quite as loud as numbers, which is why, in teaching how to create content for blog posts, I stress the power of using statistics. Real numbers dispel false impressions people have about an industry and can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem before you set about showing how you help solve that problem. From a customer acquisition standpoint, statistics relate to the theory of social proof – humans are more willing to do something other people are already doing.

The thing about numbers, though, is they’re tricky. Statistics are a valuable form of information, to be sure, and, as my friend Gloria proved, answering the “compared to what?” question invests those statistics with more power. But in blog marketing, I’ve come to realize, there’s even more needed. For every statistic about the company or about one of its products or services, even with the addition of comparisons, the content writers needs to address every reader’s unspoken question – So, is that good for me (compared to what I am doing or using now)?

Bottom line: The raw ingredients of blogging for business need to be “converted” into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action. In describing your products, your services, your business credo, don’t forget to answer the question: Compared to what??

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All I Want for the Holidays is Blogging

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You can hardly refer to gift-giving as a modern custom. In primitive cavemen culture, the giving of gifts was fairly common, the Popcorn for the People website explains. During the Egyptian era, gifts were given to pharaohs; in Roman times people would present each other with good luck gifts. In the Medieval age, gifts were used to show allegiance in times of war. “Today, gift giving is still part of our everyday culture…’, the authors continue.

That sentence might be an understatement, because gift giving is so much a part of our winter season these days – Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanza – all involve the custom of giving gifts. Since blog content writing is all about learning new things, I learned even more about today’s gift giving customs in different countries and cultures:

  • Shin Buddhists celebrate Bodhi Day in December with candles and gifts.
  • In India, gifts of cash should be given in odd numbers (1 signifies a new beginning…)
  • Chinese people give one another gifts of red envelopes filled with money.
  • In Thailand, gifts in sets of nine are considered lucky.
  • In Egypt, it’s traditional to wrap gifts twice in different-colored paper.

Gifts for Bloggers
Surfing the web, I even found a blog about gifts for bloggers. The author suggested editorial planners, notebooks, laptop stands, photo subscriptions, blogging courses and books, even housecleaning services (so the blog content writer can use dusting and mopping time creating content). ….”

Actually, you needn’t send me any of those gifts, and here’s the reason why not:: One of my very favorite songs of the season, is Mariah Carey’s All I want for Christmas is You.

I don’t want a lot for Christmas
There is just one thing I need
I don’t care about the presents
Underneath the Christmas tree
I just want you for my own
More than you could ever know
Make my wish come true
All I want for Christmas is you

Although my family celebrates Chanukah, that Christmas song perfectly expresses my own feelings when it comes to blog content writing… This career is a gift in itself, with new things to learn every day, and the chance to constantly experiment with new ways to use words. All I want for the holidays….is blogging!

 

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