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People-to-People Blogging for Business

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Skimming through my now-pretty-extensive collection of business books, I came across Hollywood producer Peter Guber’s book Tell to Win.  Guber thinks storytelling is a professional discipline, and in the book he examines the way people use stories to do business.

As a professional blog content creator and trainer in corporate writing, I think that what Guber calls a “purposeful story” describes a perfect vehicle for blogging. Guber himself ties storytelling to salesmanship, saying that the goal of your story must be to show what’s in it for the listeners (readers, in the case of blogs) – the audience must win.

While marketing blogs should be designed to “win search” (from an SEO standpoint), once the searchers have arrived, what needs winning is their hearts, and that is precisely what content writers can achieve best through storytelling.

Tim Nudd of Adweek.com agrees.  “The more compelling, clever, insightful or entertaining the stories are, the better your chance of engaging the viewer and delivering a memorable brand message,” he states.

So where do those compelling, insightful, and entertaining stories come from? Start with the business owners. Why did you choose to do what you do? What are you most passionate about in delivering your service to customers and clients?  What are you trying to add to or change about your industry?  Your customers have stories. What problems did they have that you helped solve? What funny things happened to them, to their kids, to their pets that relate to your product or service?

“It’s so simple, it’s embarrassing,” Peter Fuber says.  “You, the storyteller, must first know what your own intention is and then be transparent about it to establish trust.” People shop for product, sure.  But – and this is as true today as ever, Guber points out – people want to do business with people!

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Citations – Good News in Blogging, Confusing in Spelling, Bad News in Driving

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“The triple whammy of homophones ‘cite’, ‘site’, and ‘sight’ has the potential to create a great deal of confusion,” the editors of The Book of Random Oddities explain. To cite, they go on to explain, means to “quote someone, or someone’s work, as a authoritative source to support an argument.” The word “cite”, the book’s authors add, is a verb derived from the Latin “citare”, which means to summon or to put into motion. (In contrast, a building sits on a site, and our vision is our sight.). Of course, the verb “cite” can also refer to issuing a court summons or parking ticket.

My college students are taught to use citations and reference pages to show where they got their information.  That way, the students avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to the original authors of that material. .  In your blogs, you use citation as well, giving credit to the sources of your information.  Even if you’re putting your own unique twist on the topic, link to websites from which you got some of your original information or news.

Since, as a business blog content writer, my ”arena” is the World Wide Web, I can’t help but be awed by the fact that the internet has become the largest repository of information in human history.  Trillions of words are added to it daily, and literally anyone with access to a computer or cell phone can add content to the mix at any time.

But the fact is, people read blogs to get information and we, as content providers need to provide that information with honesty and respect towards readers – and towards the original creators of any materials we use to support the points we want to make. 

Looking at citation from a whole other vantage point, author Neil Patel advises citing your own older blog posts (as I’ve done in the paragraph above). “Millions of posts are written, then seen by a few people and then essentially discarded into the blog post graveyard,” Patel laments. In fact, Patel considers old blog posts more valuable than new ones, with the majority of his traffic each month going to old posts.

Citations may be confusing, given the homonym “site” and traffic ticket terminology, but in blogging – citations represent good practice and good news!

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Translation Blogging Can Translate Into Transactions

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A couple of years ago, in an online discussion about a blog listing “150 weird words that only architects use”, (including “pastiche”, “ergonomy”, “charette”, “regionalis”, and “materiality”), there were two schools of thought:

  • Pro:   Architecture has its own language, not unlike other professions.  Not everything needs to be diluted to the lowest common denominator.
  • Con:  Architects are not contributing to public discourse by using language incomprehensible to a layman.  If you cannot explain your work simply, you simply don’t understand your work.

Rather than debating the use of “insider” vocabulary, Vogue Magazine takes a different tack – share the “secrets” with customers, letting them feel “in the know” – and in the mood to buy! Plucking “terminology that you can find all over the catwalks – season in, season out”, the Vogue Glossary “teaches” prospects to be “mavens” who know “neats” from “knife-pleats” and “vents” from “yokes”.

As a wordsmith for business blog content, I can’t help liking that Vogue approach. As Nick Sebastian points out in ListVerse.com, “Every trade has its own technical terms and common phrases that are used for the sake of convenience.”  In certain industries, Sebastian remarks,  the words are all English, but “they are used in a way that turns a daily job into a private club.”

  • In the world of TV and film production, the last shot of the day is known as the “martini shot”.
  • At old-fashioned diners, the waitress will call your order of pancakes with maple syrup, a side of sausage, and coffee a “stack of Vermont with zeppelins and a cup of mud”.
  • In the army, “geardos” spend time maintaining expensive gear.
  • Appliance makers talk of CFC-free refrigerators, where the insulating foam are free of chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants.
  • Movers offer accessorial services (packing, unpacking, piano stair carries)

In blogging for business, I’ve found, gearing your language towards a target audience, using terms that mark familiarity with the subject, adds an air of “coziness”, a “ we’re-in-this-thing-together” tone. Uh…maybe. what if a reader happened NOT to be familiar with the term you used? That reader might actually be “turned off” by the unpleasant feeling of not being in the know about some elementary information tidbit that everyone else apparently understands!

In terms of business blogging help, using the “lingo” and terminology of our field of expertise can demonstrate we’re current and at the top of our game – so long as we’re not leaving anyone out. Translate! Letting readers in on the “secret words” can translate into transactions!

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Have Attitudes Changed About Price Point Blogging?

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Awhile back, I began one of my Say It For You blog posts by quoting a remark by Marcus Sheridan of social media examiner.com, something he’d written, back in 2012.“Many business websites fail to address the subject of pricing,” Sheridan had observed. “Instead of addressing the number-one consumer question up front, they decided to wait until the initial phone contact, or worse, the first sales appointment in the home. But, although this “hidden approach” may have worked in marketing five or ten years ago, today’s consumer don’t like their core questions to be left unanswered.”

I wonder – has thinking on the subject of publishing prices on websites and in blogs changed since then? Even Sheridan admitted that there might be factors that dictate – and change – the ultimate pricing any consumer would pay.  Because of this, he suggested that “It’s best to offer ranges, not definitive numbers, allowing potential clients to get a feel for the cost and know if they’re at least in the ballpark.”

Karen Greenstreet, writing in Forbes in 2014, offered reasons you should – and reasons you shouldn’t – put pricing on your website or in your blog.  You want the chance to establish rapport before discussion pricing, she acknowledges, and you certainly want to stay away from “tire-kicker”, price-shopping prospects.  On the other hand, Greenstreet pointed out, many customers will not do business with a company that is not forthcoming about pricing and fees.

A 2017 article by Trevor Current deals with the question – should photographers provide pricing on their websites? Current begins by recounting reasons many photographers continue to avoid giving price information:

  • I offer a custom service, not a commodity.
  • I need to evaluate the client’s needs before naming a price.
  • I want to be able to negotiate with the client.
  • I want to be able to adjust with the market.

Current “gets” all that, but still comes down firmly on the side of putting prices on the website, because:

  1. Buyers are very busy in today’s world. Consumers want information now!
  2. Without seeing prices, consumers may assume they can’t afford your services and move on to other sites that have prices listed.

From my point of view as a corporate blogging trainer, the topic of “price point blogging” fits in nicely with the overall concept of putting information into perspective for clients. The typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate; the better ones give visitors at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers.

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?”  Pricing is one of those sets of facts that must be put out there in order for you to be able to put those facts into perspective.

 

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What Blog Title Phrasing Doubles Your Click-through Rates?

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Researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway were out to determine what factors make certain headlines drive more click-throughs than others. They performed two experiments, one using Twitter, the other using popular Norwegian auction and shopping website FINN.Putting aside possible cultural differences among readers in different countries, the major takeaways from the study were these:

  • Question headlines are more effective than statement (declarative) headlines.
  • Question headlines that reference the reader (you, your, etc.) are most effective.

Kevan Lee agrees about the importance of “you” words. In “How to Write the Perfect Headline: The Top Words Used in Viral Headlines”, he discusses headline analysis based on twenty-four different websites. Question headlines referencing the reader were the most effective, with “you” and “your” both making the top-20 word list. Question words “what”, “which”, and “when” were all important, while “why” appealed to the ‘curiosity gap”.

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 like this,” Lee explains. There’s also a certain level of authority when you say “the most”.  At the same time, that phrase taps into readers’ argumentative side – does the superlative really ring true? “How to” posts promise a certain level of education, Lee continues, and valuable subject matter will generate clicks.

Whether in magazines or blogs, there are two types of titles, I’ve noticed. The “Huh?” titles need subtitles to make clear what the article is about, and the “Oh!” titles are self explanatory. The“Huh?s” startle and arouse curiosity; The “Oh!” subtitle then clarifies what the focus of the piece will be.

As a business blog content writer, I love the tongue-in-cheek remark by  Thomas Umstattd in “Top 5 Blog Title Mistakes Authors Make”.  In school, he says, your teacher probably taught you that the purpose of a title was to describe your writing.  That’s wrong, he says.  The purpose of a title is to tell readers why they should bother to read your writing!

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