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Blogs and Book Reviews – Brothers Under the Skin

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Book Label Concept
There are 6 Must Have Steps to writing a book review, writes Francesca of the Sway Group:

  1. Introduce the subject, scope, and type of book.
  2. Briefly summarize the content.
  3. Include graphics (be aware of copyrights).
  4. Provide your reactions to the book.
  5. Provide links.
  6. Be honest about your review, passing along a recommendation to your audience.

In a way, I’ve often reflected, what we do when we write business blog content offering information and opinion is comparable to a book review. “Sometimes you will need to include background to enable readers to place the book into a specific context,” says Francesca under #1 step of reviewing the book. “For example,” she says, “you might want to describe the general problem the book addresses and how it provides solutions.”

Online visitors are “test-reading” your company or practice through reading your blog posts. They want to see whether you understand their problems and can quickly and effectively help solve those.

Provide your reactions to the book, Francesca advises. “Your” is the operative word here in terms of blog content writing, I’d say. A review is more than a mere summary. Whether you’re blogging for a business, for a professional practice, or for a nonprofit organization, you’ve got to have an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. In other words, blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations; you can’t just “aggregate” other people’s stuff and make that be your entire blog presence.

Provide links, Francesca cautions reviewers. In your own work, I teach blog content writers, you can “curate” – gather and present – information from many sources that you believe will be relevant and helpful to your readers. How do you give credit to the sources of your information? The blogging equivalent of citations in academic writing  is links.  So even if you’re putting your own unique twist on the topic, give your readers links to websites from which you got some of your original information or news.

All 6 of the Sway Group’s steps to writing a book review are perfectly appropriate in business blog content writing.  Blogs and book reviews must be brothers under the skin!

 

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The Power of “When” in Blog Marketing

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the-power-of-when

It’s not only what you do, but when, Michael Breus explains in his new book The Power of When. There’s a best time for each of us to eat lunch, ask for a raise, write a novel, and take our meds, depending on our individual “chronotype”, Breus teaches.

Circadian biology in humans is a rather new field of study, but the concept of good timing can be traced back to the Bible. Surely you remember this passage from Ecclesiastes: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:  a time to be born and a time to die…”.

Does timing matter when it comes to marketing your business or practice using blog writing? It certainly does, maintains Melissa Albano-Davis of Grapevine Marketing. In positioning your business to take advantage of timely marketing opportunities, Albano-Davis says, “the key is to be ready and able to move on a dime”.

“If you’re not paying attention to the trends as they occur, you’re going to miss the boat…tune into major events and the types of programming that is most popular with your audience.” You can take advantage of:

  • obvious events, such as the presidential debates and Superbowl
  • events happening within your own community
  • things that affect everyone in your area, such as the weather
    topics trending on Twitter

Consumers are more inclined to do certain things on certain days of the week, and if you can understand those habits relevant to your business, you can make sure your marketing campaign hits when the consumer is in the right frame of mind to act, suggests Chloe He in business2community.

Ms. He offers a couple of valuable timing hints having to do with weekends:

  • Social media is quieter on the weekend.  Even though fewer people check their accounts, those who do are more active than they might be during the week, more likely to read articles.
  • Weekends are about DIY

When it comes to the science of blog timing, the main thing people think about is when to publish a post, but that’s not the only timing consideration, Kissmetrics points out. You must also consider the timing of:

  • How often you publish
  • When to promote the posts
  • When to repurpose the content

As blog content writers, we would do well to heed the reminder which authors from Ecclesiastes to Michael Breus so aptly offer –  it’s not only what we do, but when!

 

 

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Shrinking Blog Paragraphs Like a Strip of Bacon

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Fried bacon strips“When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon, I know I’m on the right track,” says Peter DeVries, American author and novelist known for his satiric wit. Paragraphs, says Richard Anderson in Powerful Writing Skills, are like rest stops, giving our eyes and minds a break before going on to the next matter.

Minimalism in blogging, I think, includes making posts readable and easier to look at, and short paragraphs are part of that. In fact, short paragraphs are part of the formula I teach newbie Indianapolis blog writers:

  • Choose one main idea as the focus for each blog post.  I call that the Power of One. (More to add? Save it for future posts.)
  • Compose an opening sentence that’s a “grabber”, so that readers just have to find out what you meant.
  • Explain, clarify, illustrate, discuss your one main point, using a few short paragraphs.
  • Issue your parting “shot”, a snappy exit line that sums up the thought you want your readers to remember. This one tip, I’ve found, can be of enormous business blogging help.

Paragraphs do not all need to be the same size, Anderson stresses.  In fact, they can be as short as one sentence or even one word. But each paragraph, with the exception of the opening one, needs to be tied in some way to the one that came before it, and each should begin and end with important pieces of information. “You don’t need to sum up what you’ve said before going on to the next paragraph; use a transition that makes the reader want to hurry on to that next paragraph,” he advises.

It’s interesting that Richard Anderson tells writers to use only indented paragraphs. “Our eyes have been trained to recognize each new indented paragraph as a chunk of new information to process”.  (In formatting business blog posts, I prefer to use block paragraphs, with the spacing between the paragraphs signaling that a new chunk of information is being presented.)

But whether you choose indented paragraphs or space-separated block format, Anderson’s next piece of advice is very valid, and perhaps particularly valid for online content: “Enormous blocks of print implant the image of a difficult subject in your readers’ minds….Generally speaking, the shorter the paragraphs and the fewer the number of ideas contained in them, the easier they are to read.”

 

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Bacteria Help Put Blog Content in Perspective

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bacteria Biomass is what scientists use when there’s no way to do an exact count, Bill Chapell explained in an NPR radio broadcast five years ago, referring to the “fact” that The Day We Hit 7 Billion (October 31, 2011), was actually impossible to prove; it is impossible to count all the world’s people alive at any particular moment.  So, he says, the experts estimate by calculating biomass. Biomass is determined, Chapel patiently explains, by multiplying an estimated population by its members’ average weight.

Fascinating stuff, but what does biomass have to do with blog content writing? Wait…wait…wait for it – it’s all a matter of perspective. Get a load of these comparative biomass numbers:

  • Whales – 20 million tons
  • Chickens – 40 million tons
  • Sheep – 65 million tons
  • PEOPLE – 350 million tons
  • Termites – 445 million tons
  • Cattle – 520 million tons
  • Fish – 800 million tons
  • Ants – 3,000 million tons
  • BACTERIA – 1,000,000 million tons (yes, you read it here!)

When Chapell was interviewing researchers at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C. about biomass, one researcher had this to say: “Of course, within each human there are animals.  So, our own parasites outnumber us!”

We business bloggers are, in a very real way, interpreters. Effective blog posts, I teach, must go from information-dispensing to offering perspective.  Before a reader even has time to ask “So what?” we need to be ready with an answer that makes sense in terms with which readers are familiar. I call it blogging new knowledge on things readers already know.

The typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give 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 give readers a deeper perspective with which to process the information. The facts, those raw ingredients of corporate blogging for business, need to be “translated” into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action – in readers.
Remember the bacteria, and put your blog content in perspective for readers!

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Are You Suffering Your Blog Action or Performing It?

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For Or Against Signpost Showing Pros And Cons

“What is passive voice and why are we often told to avoid it?” novelist and Writer’s Workshop Senior Editor Emma Darwin asks her students. Here’s Darwin’s simple explanation:

  • When the action of the sentence is being performed by the subject of the sentence, it’s in active voice.
  • When the action is being done to the subject of the sentence by someone or something else, the sentence is in passive voice.

In general, explains Brandon Royal in The Little Red Writing Book, the active voice is preferred, because it is:

  1. more action oriented
  2. more direct
  3. less verbose, cutting down on the number of needed words.

Since one of the very purposes of business blog writing is to showcase the accomplishments of the business owners, as a general rule we bloggers need to focus on “staying active” in our content using sentences that have energy and directness.

Is there ever a time when the passive voice would be the most effective way to write? Yes, when the performer of the action is unknown or unimportant, Royal explains. “The world’s largest pearl was discovered in the Philipines in 1934.” (The discovery is important, but the discoverer is unknown.).

Let’s practice…

Choose two pieces of information about your business or practice. First, select on where you or one of your employees performed a special service. Write an active voice sentence about that.

Then, choose a fact that is important or interesting for your readers to learn about but which does not highlight any particular person. Write a passive voice sentence about that.

Here are my two examples from the blogging world: (Can you tell which is which?)

“6.7 million people blog on blogging sites and 12 million people blog via social networks.”

“Today blogging is used widely by businesses as part of their marketing strategy.”

Are you suffering your blog action, or performing it?

 

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