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My Mother Was a Sneaker

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sneakersBlogs are not ads, as I am careful to emphasize in corporate blogging training sessions. That’s not to say, though, that we blog content writers can’t learn a lot from ad writers.

I love the Samuel Hubbard.com ad for men’s dress shoes, for example. “My mother was a sneaker. My father was a dress shoe. … I can’t help it. I was born this way.  Insanely comfortable and ready for a day in the office.”

You shouldn’t try to give searchers information about everything you have to offer, all in one blog post.  With each post, stress just one major aspect of your company or practice, I teach. On the other hand, you want your blog to stand out, to be unusually interesting, so that readers will want to stay awhile and maybe even move on to your business’ website.

And when you put two things together that don’t seem to match – that can be a good technique to capture people’s interest. Having the shoe “talk” to the reader, and suggesting that a comfortable shoe is the “offspring” of sneaker and a dress shoe is just different enough to startle and engage.

The “nucleus” around which business blog posts are formed is their topic, the expertise and products that business offers. The key words and phrases around that topic are what bring readers to the blog posts. But, even though the overall topic is the same, there is endless variety that can be used to make each blog post special. The technique used by Samuel Hubbard Shoes is metaphor – making an unusual comparison – in this case between parents and shoes.

If you place a ripe banana next to a green tomato, the tomato will ripen, too, explains Brian McMahon in Mental Floss Magazine. Interesting facts such as this can always be of business blogging help, but that advice comes with two provisos:

Your reason for including the fact in your post must be apparent early on in the blog post, and the new information should relate to something with which readers are already familiar.

What “different” metaphor or comparison can you include in your blog that catches readers’ attention but still stays true to your message?

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Tips on Business Writing for Bloggers – Part A

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Writing Tips and tricks B

As a business blog content writer, I found Susan Adams’ “Ten Tips on Business Writing”, offered in Forbes Magazine, almost made to order for bloggers.  Five of the tips have to do with word choice and ideas (I’ve added my own thoughts in italics):

Start by writing short, declarative sentences.
Short sentences have what I call “pow!” and are easily shared on social media sites. Focused content, I teach in corporate blogging training sessions, keeps readers’ attention on the message. That doesn’t mean every sentence needs to be short, because variety is important, too.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or any kind of jargon if you can think of an English equivalent.
Jargon, in general, is a handle-with-care writing technique, all the more so in corporate blogging, where readers are impatient to find the information they need without any navigational or terminology hassle.

Make your point and move on. If your big idea isn’t in the first paragraph, put it there. If you can’t find it, rewrite.
A blog post might consist of a few dozen sentences, but no line is as important as that opener. Beginning with a startling statistic is certainly one tactic blog writers can use to demonstrate to online readers that business owners and practitioners are familiar with the reader’s problem and know how to deal with it.
 
Be specific. Instead of mentioning “the current situation,” explain exactly what the situation is.
Be specific in terms of both location and services. Each potential customer needs to find value “where they are”, both geographically and in terms of their unique needs.

Whenever possible, use active instead of passive verbs. Active verbs help to energize your prose.
Using the passive voice hides the identity of the person who performed the action. But, because the very purpose of the blog content is to showcase the accomplishments of the business and products and services it brings to customers, using the active voice makes sense in corporate blog writing.

Would your latest blog post pass the Five-Point Word Choice test?

 

 

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Another Year, Not Just Another Blog

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2016 Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Everybody, it seems, has advice about how to make your blog better than ever in 2016. John Egan, writing in the Huffington Post, sort of sums it up in two words: “Aim high”, by which he means never sacrificing quality merely to achieve quantity.

BlogTyrant makes some predictions about blogging SEO in 2016 centered around speed, because “even a second or two of lag can cost your business thousands of dollars”. Learning “how to shrink stuff” – photos, images, graphics, etc. can save loading time. Blogtyrant predicts that guest posting will still be one of the “absolute best ways to get your name out there and grow traffic.”

As a checklist for themselves, blog content writers might wish to use the judging criteria for the UK Blog Awards 2016, which include the following five aspects of a blog:

  • Design
  • Style
  • Content
  • Marketing
  • Usability

“Determine why you are blogging,” advises Maisha Walker of Inc.com. Walker outlines the four reasons a website exists to aid a business, and suggests ways to measure success for each goal:

  • build a brand (what awareness studies will you do?)
  • generate leads (How many phone calls or emails to you want to get from your blog?)
  • generate direct sales (How many readers and page views will it take?)
  • generate advertising revenue (How much do you hope to make? How many readers and page views do you need to do that?)

“Your previous years’ outreach can clue you into what balance will work best. Take stock of what you did the past year: What was a home run? What was moderately successful? What underperformed? And what were the reasons for your content’s success or failure?” Amanda Hicken of prnewswire.com advises.

Then, looking towards the coming year, Hicken says, go through the holidays, seasonal events, and conferences that impact not just your industry, but also the industries related to your target audience. Uncover other newsworthy topics and trends by using a monitoring tool. But, she cautions, “don’t fall into the trap of operating on autopilot”.

How will you approach blogging in the new year?

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Blogging Assumption-Free

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Follow the Guidelines sign isolated on white backgroundI’ve been doing some heavy thinking about assumptions, and it’s Daniel Herndon’s fault.

“Assumptions can be good or bad, but either way they inform our beliefs and opinions,” Herndon says. Assumptions inform the decisions we make, and often they can be productive, he admits. But what about when our assumptions are counterproductive? he asks. (That’s precisely the question I haven’t been able to stop turning over in my mind ever since his thought-provoking newsletter hit my inbox.)

What if our assumptions are keeping us from doing something great? (Read these examples from the Herndon post– you won’t be able to get them out of your mind, either!)

  • What if your parents are not always right?
  • What if you don’t have to change your oil every 3000 miles?
  • What if you don’t have to go to college to get a good job?
  • What if some things don’t ‘happen for a reason’?

I’ve been “translating” this assumption-challenging attitude into my own field of blog content writing.  “What if all those rules we were taught at all those webinars and seminars and ebooks and “15 things” lists are actually stopping us from writing truly great content?” is what I’ve been asking myself.

  • What if blog readers don’t have as short an attention span as we thought?
  • What if they don’t all read at a sixth grade level?
  • What if you don’t need to keep the content “above the fold”?
  • What if searching Google AdWords isn’t the best starting point for creating posts?
  • What if being almost obnoxiously opinionated on issues in your field is just fine?
  • What if you went ahead and gave away all your how-to “secrets” in your blog and your readers still wanted you to provide services for them?
  • What if keeping below 65 characters wasn’t the most important thing about writing a title for a blog post?

What if you had your ideal prospect sitting right in front of you, and you were going to take three minutes to teach him one thing he needs to know how to do? What if you were going to take three minutes to share with her a valuable insight, or express and explain your point of view on a controversy that’s in the news?  No blogging platform, no SEO, just talking.

Now sit down and do something great. Write your blog post directly to that one man or woman.  Assume they’re going to read it – every word.

Next time you’re getting ready to write copy for a blog post, ask yourself Daniel Herndon’s question: “What if what you believe and take for granted is actually a false assumption?”

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Accentuate the Negative?

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“Eliminate the negative an’ latch on to the affirmative” was Johnny Mercer’s musical advice back in 1945.dog food Playing to one’s strengths has, in fact, been a popular fad in management development circles. As a blog content writer, though, sometimes I wonder.

The latest issue of Modern Dog magazine features eight article titles on its cover:

  • How Not to Train Your Puppy
  • Gift ideas galore
  • Big Dogs and their Puppy Counterparts
  • Winter Survival Tips
  • Great Gear
  • I’m Adoptable
  • Find a New Best Friend
  • Why is My Dog Staring at Me?

Guess which one attracted my attention the most – Yeah, gotta admit… it was the negative one telling me how NOT to train my puppy. And guess what? It’s not just me.  People are drawn to articles with negative titles, my friend and fellow blogger Lorraine Ball pointed out a year ago. Posts with negative titles stand out in a blog roll, on a Twitter feed or LinkedIn page, and the negative posts are more likely to be shared, retweeted and read.

What’s with us? Well, “edgy language draws attention”, Lorraine explains. (Lorraine’s title “Why Your Blog Titles Suck” is a bit too edgy for me, but I get the idea. I do.) Fact is, I would’ve picked “Why is My Dog Staring at Me?” before “How to Train Your Puppy”.  It was that How-NOT-to that drew my attention.

But that doesn’t jibe at all with Rich Brook’s advice on socialmediaexaminer: “The how-to is the most powerful of all the blogging archetpyes.”  Your prospects and customers have a problem and you can help them solve it by creating a step-by-step post that walks them through a solution, he says. That may be true, counters Lorraine Ball, but fear of failure is core to who we are as people, and it’s hard to resist reading material about how to avoid it.

Could it be that accentuating the negative, and only then latching on to the affirmative is the best advice for us business blog content writers?

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