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Ways-To-Take-Charge Blogging for Business

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Gain control concept.

 

The article “15 Ways to Take Charge of Your Care”, cover story of December’s AARP Bulletin, is a very fine example for blog content writers.  Why?

  • It uses a numbered list, offering 15 detailed tips for saving time and money on healthcare. As Maria Konnikova remarks in the New Yorker Magazine, “Lists spatially organize information, helping create an easy reading experience.” Back in 2011, psychologists Messner and Wanke concluded that we feel better when the amount of conscious work we have to do in order to process information is reduced. We are drawn to a list intuitively, Konnikova points out, and we process it more efficiently. From all indications, I teach business blog content writers, Google loves bulleted lists, too.
  • The information in the article was specifically chosen because the topic is of interest for target readers (seniors, in the case of AARP). “Briefly,” says Jim Connolly of Jim’s Marketing Blog, “here’s how content marketing works: You build and market a website and stock it with free information that has real value to your prospective clients.”
  • The advice is highly specific, including filling prescriptions at a preferred pharmacy within your insurance network and finding out precisely which generic dosages and forms qualify for the $4 big box store and supermarket discount price. In blogging for business, every tip should be helpful in converting online searchers into customers or clients. That means content writers must invest the effort to understand customers’ needs before making the “pitch”.
  • The entire thrust of the article is empowerment for the consumer, rather than promoting the interests of the sponsoring company. Business blogs should be closer to advertorials than to ads. We content writers must satisfy prospects’ need to control the situation, going right to the heart of any possible customer fears or concerns and addressing negative assumption questions (before they’ve been asked!).

Offer information in your business blog that offers ways for readers to take charge!

 

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Using News Tidbits to Blog About Aging

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Serenading His SweetieWhen he was almost 76, Mandela was elected president of South Africa in the first election that was open to all races in that country’s history. On his 80th birthday he married his third wife, Graca Machel.

In 1979, at age 69, Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work.

The first edition of Roget’s Thesaurus was published when Roget was 73, and he oversaw every update until he died at age 90.

At the age of 89, Doris Haddock began walking the 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. to raise awareness for the issue of campaign finance reform.

Grandma Moses, a woman who didn’t begin to paint until the age of 76, turned out more than a thousand paintings over the next 25 years.

(Source: How Stuff Works)

In corporate blogging training sessions, I often recommend including interesting tidbits of information on topics related to your business (or, if you’re a freelance blog content writer, tidbits related to the client’s business).

Today, there are many businesses and practices that serve the aging members of our population. Any of the interesting stories of senior accomplishments mentioned above could serve as “triggers” to discuss the importance of staying mentally and physically active in one’s later years.  Who might use this material as good blog marketing fodder? For starters….

  • a  Long Term Care insurance company
  • a geriatric medical practitioner
  • a senior residence facility
  • a spa
  • a home healthcare agency
  • an estate planning attorney

(Don’t be afraid to get creative. The Mandela story might be used to promote wedding services for seniors and 50th wedding anniversary party catering, while Doris Haddock’s trek might be the subject of a blog for gym stair-stepping equipment!)

Blog writers need never run out of ideas if they keep a file of interesting tidbits of general information on hand.  And blogging about aging – that will never get old!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Creating Community Through Blog Conversations

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Purple pink Community puzzle“You create community by having conversations with people who are excited about the same thing as you are,” says Elizabeth Gerber, associate professor of design at Northwestern University.  Gerber is one of many scholars exploring what really compels people to give to other people online through crowdfunding. As much as crowdfunding is a modern economic phenomenon, writes Elizabeth Kelsay in Psychology Today, it’s also a social and psychological one, fueled by fundamental human impulses.

As business blog content writers, we have reason, I think, to be intensely interested in this research on the crowdfunding phenomenon. Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, believes the secret is that giving online appeals to the essential need to feel like part of a group.

Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School studied nearly 7,000 articles in The New York Times to determine what was special about those on the most-emailed list. He found that an article was more likely to become viral the more positive it was. When we share information, we create an energy exchange, Berger says, that amplifies our own pleasure.

Kevan Lee of bufferapp.com says we measure blog traffic by digging into analytics, but don’t pay enough attention to the immeasurable elements of blogging which cannot be quantified. Instead of tracking how many “views”, “likes”, and “clicks”, Lee says, we should be asking whether the content:

  • is so good you’d bring a coworker over to see it
  • you’d email it to a friend
  • the reader will learn something new

“The only people in a community are those that believe they are, not those that have a completed a registration in 30 seconds,” observes Richard Millington in MOZ. Increasing a sense of community means adding an explicit, shared goal to the group. Increasing a sense of community means asking individuals what skills and experiences they can contribute to the group, Milligan says.

How is that best done? Ask a question for your readers at the end of posts, suggests blogger Melyssa Griffin. Add a poll or reader survey and share the responses, she says.

In a way, as bloggers, we start out ahead of the game; the readers who found their way to our blog are, by definition, excited about the same thing as we are.  Now it’s up to us to foster that sense of community.

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Not-So-Palatable Blog Topics

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non-palatable
“Fury or eternal apathy. These are the two feelings you’ll evoke from your reader if you dare dip your foot on these not-so-palatable topics,” writes Eunice David of Adhere. And what are those terrible taboo topics when it comes to blog content writing for business?

  • political topics
  • religious talk
  • highly contentious topics
  • redundant topics
  • capitalizing on tragic events
  • self-promotional posts

Let’s talk a bit about that political topic taboo thing. “Choosing a politically charged topic for your business blog pretty much equates to planting a virtual time bomb,” says David. “Your business blog would be a sitting duck for pundits who won’t hesitate to fire back and dent your credibility.” But taking a stance, I’ve found, is what gives a blog post some “zip”. And after all, doesn’t being a thought leader involve stating your own thoughts on the matter under discussion?

Sure it does. Whether it’s business-to-business or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use owners’ opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. But where politics is not directly related to the business or practice, I agree that it’s best not to dip your foot – or your content – into the political arena.

In essence, the same guideline applies when it comes to religion. Assuming your target audience is not a particular religious community, nor is the product or service you’re marketing to them religious in nature, it’s best to stay focused on the topic at hand.

In terms of capitalizing on tragic events, AT&T’s attempt to capitalize on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (encouraging social media audiences to take pictures on their phones of the scarred New York city skyline) turned out to be a disaster, points out mic.com. “There is no useful connection between remembering a tragedy and shilling their product.”

Ford did a better job using a tragedy, mic.com adds, by posting a respectful thank you to the first responders of the Boston Bombing, without mentioning any Ford products.

Blatant self-promotion doesn’t work any better for blogs than it would at a party. Blogs are advertorials, if anything, and that means finding the right balance between story and sale. Sure, when people go online to search for information and click on different blogs or on different websites, they’re aware of the fact that the providers of the information are out to do business.  But as long as the material is valuable and relevant for the searchers, they’re perfectly fine with knowing there’s someone who wants them for a client or customer.  The secret of successful business blogging, I found, is just that – not coming on too strong, staying in “softly, softly” mode.

Since, in writing business blog content, you’re out to elicit neither fury nor apathy, a healthy respect for the negative power of non-palatable topics is in order.

 

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Using Your Business Blog to Stop the Salience Effect

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book-the-art-of-thinking-clearly

 

Often, eye-catching details have the power to render us blind, which is how author Rolf Dobelli, in his book The Art of Thinking Clearly, explains the salience effect. Dobelli’s entire book is devoted to cognitive biases, simple errors we all make in our day-to-day thinking, and the author’s hope is that by knowing what those are and how to spot them, we can make better decisions.

As blog content writers, of course, we’re in the business of helping people make decisions, hopefully decisions that will turn out to be good for them as well as good business for the business owners and professional practitioners who are offering products and services for sale.

One phenomenon that Dobelli “spends ink” explaining is the salience effect. What is salience? “A prominent feature, a stand-out attribute, a particularity, something that catches your eye“. The salience effect describes the fact that outstanding features receive more attention than they deserve, it influences the way people interpret the past and imagine the future.

Say a book with an unusual fire-engine red jacket makes  the best seller list.  It’s easy to attribute the success of the book to its cover, but you might be very wrong. If two men rob a bank happen to be immigrants, we fall into the trap of concluding that immigrants are responsible for the majority of bank robberies.

Myth-busting is a tactic blog content writers can use to grab online visitors’ attention.  I explain to newbie content writers in Indianapolis that citing statistics to disprove popular myths gives business owners the chance to showcase their own knowledge and expertise.

One caution is in order: since one of the purposes of any marketing blog is to attract potential customers, it would be a tactical mistake for freelance blog writers to imply they’re out to prove online visitors mistaken, unwitting victims of the salience effect.  Business owners can use corporate blog writing as a way to dispense information and address misinformation.

Using your business blog to stop the salience effect shows clear thinking!

 

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