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Are You Putting Red Lipstick on Your Blog?

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This week’s Say It For You blog posts feature more helpful advice based on Brant Pinvidic’s powerful little book The 3-Minute Rule….

“Brant, are you putting on red lipstick?” TV producer and sales coach Brant Pinvidic remembers his mom (herself president of a global organization). asking him whenever she sensed he had been emphasizing presentation over substance in his work.

“Your pitch is a path of information to follow,” Pinvidic cautions, and it’s vital to let that information take the lead. Too much emphasis on style and personality muddies the message. You don’t want to pull your audience out of the story and remind them they’re being sold to, he adds.

It’s true that readers’ first impressions are design-related, as some British researchers found when analyzing online health sites. Those researchers found that readers judged a website by its design, print size, look and feel, and use of color. Simple and familiar page design was the best received. Great design gets people to trust the source and to stick around, writes Peep Laja of the CXL optimization Agency. As Neil Patel points out in hubspot.com, articles with images get 94% ore total views than those without images.

So how does that relate to Brant Pinvidic’s mother’s advice about the lipstick? “When my mom sees me trying to spice up elements of a presentation to overshadow the lack of clarity, “he explains, that’s when she cautions me to get the information and the story at its highest level first, and only then add a little flair.

Keep in mind, Neil Patel writes in Hubspot.com, your blog is a reflection of your company. If there are any issues with the blog, it impacts how people view your product. It’s important that any statistic you state can be verified. Many blog posts will link right to the statistic and the source. Accuracy builds trust with readers.

Leave readers with questions, Patel adds. This doesn’t mean to have an incomplete post, but rather to include questions that make readers reflect on how they can implement the knowledge you provided. When possible, add a story to your blog post. It will make it more engaging and may also help the reader

What Mrs. Pinvidic is reminding her son – and what we teach blog content writers at Say It For You –  is that the meat comes first, then the sauce. The core content of the program – the article, the blog post – comes first, the “showmanship” second.
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Blogs That Go WHAC

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Write less,” advises Seth Godin in the preface to his book The Dip. Now Brant Pindvidic, in his book The 3-Minute Rule, tells us to “say less to get more from any pitch or presentation”.

At Say It For You, I teach the principle of “reading around”, emphasizing the point that business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing. Even after almost a decade and a half creating blog content for business owners and practitioners, I feel the need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my clients offer. But now, both these business authors are making the case for less, not more, when it comes to sales pitches, speeches, and blog posts.

It seems this “reading around” habit of mine has presented me with a dilemma: Godin’s and Pinvidic’s advice to write and say less seems to fly in the face of the latest trend towards long-form blog posts with a word count numbering in the thousands.

Brant Pinvidic’s advice is based on the science of approach motivation. “Every time you make a pitch, presentation, or proposal to try to influence anyone to do anything, your audience’s first impression will be fully formed in less than three minutes”. And it’s not that we’re all dumbed-down, he says, but that people today focus more intensely and efficiently, he explains. The WHAC outline helps organize the key information you need to impart – and dictates the order in which you present that information:

W – What is it? (What is your offer?)
H – How does it work?) work? (Why are the elements of your offer and why are they valuable or
Important?)
A– Are you sure? (This is a fact or figure that backs up your information and establishes
potential.)
C – Can you do it? (Your ability to execute and deliver.

In the first two stages, the W and the H, the audience will conceptualize. In the A stage, they will contextualize, judging whether your offer is true real, and right. In the C stage, the audience will be asking whether this could actually happen in the way being described.

Transferring this model to the arena of blog marketing, I’d suggest that the WHAC sequence could be employed over a series of blog posts rather than using it all in one. One concept I emphasize in corporate blogging training sessions is that blog posts can stay smaller and lighter in scale than the more permanent content on the corporate website or the content in white papers. What helps the separate posts fit together into an ongoing business blog marketing strategy are the blog “leitmotifs” or themes.

Whether Godin’s “Write less” advice is suited for us blog content writers remains a matter of debate. On the other hand, “Read more” continues to be a requirement for imparting bog posts with WHAC!

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In Blog Marketing, Write Less??

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“This book is really short,” writes Seth Godin in the acknowledgments section of The Dip. This is something he’s learned from his readers, he says – Write less. “Seth Godin,” the book jacket explains, is one of the most popular business bloggers in the world. “While Godin doesn’t claim to have all the answers, he will teach you to ask the right questions”.

So, from a blog content standpoint, is “writing less” a good idea? Maybe not, according to these three sources, writes Jasmine Gordon of lean-labs.com.

  • Medium – The ideal length of a blog post is seven minutes or 1,600 words.
  • SERPIQ – Top three Google results are between 2,350 and 2,500 words.
  • Neil Patel – Posts of at least 1,500 words earn the best SEO and social sharing results.

On the other hand, Gordon points out:

  • Data from Write Practice indicates that posts of 275 words are best for eliciting comments.
  • While visual media is not technically part of the word count, it’s an aspect of length,, because it takes time to consume.
  • Some topics don’t need 3,000 words to be covered adequately.
  • If you’re blogging multiple times a week, you can afford shorter, engagement-driven posts.

At Say It For You, we tend to agree with the checklist Jasmine Gordon offers. We blog content writers will know we’re done with a particular post IF:

  1. we’ve covered the topic in depth
  2. we’ve offered more value than the competition
  3. we’ve incorporated high-quality visuals
  4. we’ve verified our research and facts

What’s more, Gordon says, if your name is Seth Godin (to whose book, The Dip, I referred in Tuesday’s blog post), all bets are off (Godin’s posts, God bless him, are often 75-500 words long).

“Opinions have always differed on the optimal size for a blog post,” I wrote just a little over a year ago. Having composed blog posts (as both a Say It For You ghost writer and under my own name) now numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to decide on the best length for each post.

From Chip and Dan Heath’s book The Power of Moments, I learned about a phenomenon called “duration neglect”. The basic concept is that when people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length, rating it based on the best or worst moment in that experience. I suspect that principle holds true when readers are experiencing a blog post. They are going to remember only two things – the best part and the ending.

The long-form/short-form debate will no doubt continue for decades to come, but my own instinct is to stick to a central idea for each blog post, then “say it until it’s said”. Along the “write less” theme, Seth Godin once offered a piece on the length of business meetings, in which he observed “Understand that not all problems are the same, so why are your meetings?”

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In Blog Marketing, It’s Not Okay to Quit

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“It’s okay to quit sometimes,” observes Seth Godin in his book the Dip, and, he assures readers, quitters do win. But quitting doesn’t mean giving up and abandoning your long-term strategy, only quitting the tactics that aren’t working. In fact, Godin admits, most people do quit. Problem is, he observes, they don’t quit successfully or at the right time.

Blogging is a perfect example, I realized, reviewing this powerful little book, of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. The strategy itself is well-proven and documented, and many business owners and professional practitioners embark on blog marketing in recognition of its power to generate interest in their products and services. It’s the tactics, the week-after-week work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing…blog posts. Those abandoned blogs belong to those who don’t recognize what Seth Godin describes as the “extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most”.

It’s not that blog marketing is an unproven strategy…

“Content is still king, and it is the fresh, customized, customer-centric content that gets the attention. Those that create more of it will certainly see positive returns for their efforts. Content marketing generates at least three times more leads than conventional marketing techniques,” says Digital.com. People love engaging with businesses in particular, and they tend to look positively on a company that releases custom content…Over the long run, you can expect 87% more inbound links, compared to companies who don’t blog at all.”

“Know for a fact that Google and other search engines tend to give more weight and SEO boosts to websites that update their content regularly over those that aren’t so frequent. “ BlogPanda explains. “The more you blog regularly about your product, business or industry, the more it increases your search keywords which further helps your website rank better for those keywords on Google and other search engines.”

Amazing, but true: In the face of all these compelling reports demonstrating the value of blog marketing, Caslon Analytics tells us that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month!, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average blog, Caslon remarks ruefully, “has the lifespan of a fruitfly”. No lack of starts, though: blogtyrant.com reports that there are over 1.7 billion websites on the internet today, and more than 600 million of those have blogs.

“A blog usually starts with a bang,” observes Antonio Canciano of technicalblogging.com. Then life gets in the way, postnig becomes less frequent and ore sporadic until the blogger pretty much gives up on their site entirely. That’s the usual path to blog despair, Canciano says. However, blogging is a river, not a lake, he cautions, and the constant stream of new content is what gives blogging its edge over other forms of content publishing.

Sure, it may be okay to quite sometimes, as Seth Godin observes, but not if you’re after those extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to keep posting blogs!.

 

 

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To Be Interesting, Think Broad

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“Many people and most organizations narrowly define what’s relevant and interesting to their followers. They mistakenly assume that their followers want to read about only a narrow band of subjects,” Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzgerald point out in The Art of Social Media.

As examples of how posts can be “broadened”, Kawasaki suggests that a restaurant chain might include news about atomic particles that help solve wine fraud, while an airline might offer news about drive-in theaters or mindful travel photography. It’s not that you don’t want to promote yourself and your own business to followers, the author explains; it’s that sharing interesting stuff and broadening by “catalyzing more interaction,” you earn the right to promote yourself!

As part of blogging training at Say It For You, I do often recommend including interesting information on topics only indirectly related to your specific business or profession (or, if you’re a freelance blog content writer, related to the client’s business or profession). If you’ve unearthed tidbits of information most readers wouldn’t be likely to know, so much the better. I agree with Kawasaki that even if some tidbits of information are not “actionable”, if they are intrinsically interesting, it’s worth including them simply to add fun and variety to your content.

But broadening the scope of information you offer in a business blog needn’t be only for the sake of adding fun to your content. Little known and trending news stories can be offered to readers with some very specific “ulterior motives” on the part of the business owner or practitioner, such as:

  • clarifying the way your business or practice works
  • demonstrating the many uses of your products
  • reinforcing the importance of a widespread problem
  • explaining why your business practices are designed to prevent that particular problem
  • busting a common myth

Online searchers who’ve arrived at your blog post definitely need assurance they’ve come to the right place. But now they’re here, you’ll have a better chance of engaging their interest by “going broad”!

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