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Every Blog Post Should Have Two Winners

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Dilbert

“My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser,” says Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (the implication seems to be that one of the parties on the phone is being talked into buying something or doing something that benefits only the other. A second Adams quote reveals a similarly negative viewpoint: “There’s a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities.  I call that the Weasel Zone and it’s where most of life happens.”

Cynics, I imagine, would see blogging for business in the same light – a thinly disguised attempt to attract online readers who must be persuaded to buy “stuff”. At Say It For You, though, we try to come at blogging from a totally different direction and with a win-win attitude.

In the early stages of creating a new blog, the blog content writer and the client (the business owner) are trying to strike precisely the right “tone” for the blog.  I’ve discovered one very interesting thing in the course of dealing with different content writers in Indianapolis and with the client businesses they serve.  Whenever there’s a “disconnect” between the two parties, it’s almost always about how “sales-ey” the blog should or should not be.

Generally speaking, as I often stress when I offer corporate blogging training, blog posts are not ads, and there should never be a hard-sell or boastful tone to the content.  When asked to provide business blogging help, I explain that blogs are closer in nature to informative “advertorials”, positioning the company or practitioner as helpful, well-experienced, and knowledgeable.

Primarily, the blog post has to add value. Not just a promise of value if the reader converts to a buyer, but value right then and there in terms of information, skill enhancement, or a new way of looking at the topic. The best blog posts are never about yourself, your company, your services, or your products, but about why you see things the way you do.

Does every phone conversation have a loser? I don’t know, but what I do know is this: Every blog post should have two winners – the business owner (or professional practitioner) and the online reader!

 

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Blog About How You See Wildlife or Whatever, Not About What You Sell

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Two penguins Gentoo.

A Canon commercial on the back cover of an old issue of National Geographic reminded me of a piece of blogging advice that will never grow old: The best blog posts are never about yourself, your company, your services, or your products, but about why you see things the way that you do.

There are many newer examples of this Canon campaign, but the one I came across was from the December 2012 issue. The photo featured a penguin couple, and the opening line of text consisted of two words: “Teamwork works”.  By dividing responsibilities, male and female royal penguins give their young the best start in life, I learned.

  1. The parents alternate two week shifts in incubating the egg.
  2. Once the egg hatches, the mail does guard duty while the female forages for food.
  3. After about 20 days, the chick joins a crèche, free both parents to bring meals home.

The problem: The food sources on which the penguins depend are becoming uncertain due to the effects of climate change.

Anticipating readers’ question “Why is a camera company telling me all this?” the authors go on to explain: “Raising awareness of endangered species is just one of the ways we at Canon are taking action for the good of the planet we call home.”

The “advertorial” ends with a Call to Action: Visit canon.com/environment to learn more.

This Canon campaign is a wonderful example for blog content writers. When I offer corporate blogging training sessions, I try to make sure, especially when it comes to corporate blog writing  “newbies”, that they understand the importance of conveying business owners’ core beliefs through their blogs.

Why is that such an important element in creating effective content? In general, blogging can help achieve quite a number of goals:

  • Building good will
  • Staying in touch with existing customers and clients
  • Defining
  • Announcing changes in products and services
  • Controlling damage when it comes to negative PR or complaints
  • Recruiting employeesOf all these goals served by writing for business, though, the most important might be ”humanizing”.  Existing customers need their trust reinforced. Online searchers need to come away with the impression they will be dealing with real, likeable people, not just with ”a company”.

    Blog about how you see wildlife – or whatever – not about what you sell!

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In Blogging for Business, Get Rid of Worthless Words

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“Let’s be honest: Nobody likes flab, especially when it comes to content,” says Julia McCoy of the Content Marketing Institute.”Icky, flabby, worthless words” are distracting and alienating to readers, McCoy adds.

Since, as business blog content writers, the last thing we want to do is alienate readers, I thought McCoy’s  worthless word list was worth a careful look.

In order to. Simply deleting this phrase makes any statement clearer.

Really.  If something is “really” big, just how big is it? Readers respond better to text that gets more granular in its measurements.

Believe (or think). People are more interested in the facts and hard information than in vague thoughts, McCoy opines. Actually, I don’t fully agree.. A point I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions – whether you’re blogging for a business, for a professional practice, or for a nonprofit organization, you’ve need to express an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. (You may not need to use the words “believe” or “think”.)

A lot.  Too vague. Use percentages, pounds, solid units of measurement.

Always (or never). Neither extreme is likely to be true, McCoy points out. Opt for “few” or “rare” on the low end, “most” or “many” on the high end.

Stuff. Not descriptive or specific, McCoy points out.

Just. Unless you mean “fair”, remove the word “just”, which adds nothing to the meaning of your sentence.

Literally. Whether used correctly (to mean “exactly) or incorrectly, the word is superfluous.

So. This little word doesn’t do much. Delete it without affecting the sentence’s meaning.

Often. Replace this flabby word with a descriptive term such as “five times a week”, McCoy advises.

Get rid of the blog flab by getting rid of useless words!

 

 

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Blog What Should Have Been in the Box

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what-should-have-been-in-the-box

Talk about an “I-wish-I-had-thought-of-that” concept! I absolutely love the name O’Reilly Media® gave its series of manuals by David Pogue: “The Missing Manual® – the Book that Should Have Been in the Box”. The now-120 book series covers tech for amateurs topics such as iPhone use, Quickbooks, Windows10, Photos for Mac – an almost exhaustive list of how –to guides.

Precisely such a “how to” concept can be invaluable for us blog content writers.  Why? Our biggest challenge is providing valuable information to readers while avoiding any hint of “hard sell”. Offering tips and helpful hints to consumers (stuff that may not have occurred to them but which helps them get the most out of the products and services they own or might purchase) may well strike the perfect note.

So what if you’re trying to promote a business or practice but don’t consider yourself an “expert” on all aspects of your field? In a recent issue of AARP magazine, I found an article that uses a “kill-two-birds-with-one-stone” approach to offering helpful hints.  I think that approach could work really well in blogging to promote a business or professional practice.

The AARP article is titled “Great ways to save: tips from 20 experts that can save you thousands of dollars.”  Wow! That gets readers’ attention – useful information coming to them not from any sponsor or vendor, but from twenty experts.  What’s more, the authors have done all the work, collecting all this wisdom and serving it up for readers’ convenience. How would you as a business owner or practitioner use this strategy? Aggregate!

Aggregate? How? Find complementary businesses or practices and ask the owners for tips they can offer your readers (or simply cite their blogs, giving them credit for the ideas). Carpet cleaners can share information from allergists, pet care professionals and realtors. Restaurant owners can offer information gathered from etiquette advisors or food stores. Whatever the products and services, readers will be interested in information that helps them gain maximum advantage from buying and using them.

Blog what should have been in the box!

 

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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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