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Can Nature Journaling Help Your Content Writing?

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“As you begin to explore a regular nature journaling practice, your skills will improve…You’ll aspire to write with more clarity, draw with more accurateness and learn about the flora, fauna, and natural phenomena that you’re observing,” Christine Elder tells kids and teens.

Nature journaling can help your writing in general, Marie Bengston asserts in Writer’s Digest.  “We need to conjure our written world with evocative, multi-sensory detail that immediately resonates with our reader,” she suggests.

For us creators of marketing content (our topic may or may not be related to nature), I think Bengston’s Three Prompts will prove particularly helpful: 

  1. I notice that…..
  2. I wonder if…..
  3. It reminds me of….:

I notice that… it’s essential for blog content writers to focus on a target audience, showing readers you’ve “noticed” them and have taken note of their unique preferences and needs.

I wonder if…In content marketing, the goal is to induce “wonder” in searchers who found their way to your site. Your post should have served up just enough food for thought to make them wonder if, after all, there are even more ways in which what you have to offer is exactly what they have to have! 

It reminds me of…In writing for business, the variety comes from the details you fill in around the central themes. Different examples of ways the company or practitioner helped solve various unusual problems in the past help reinforce the core advantages being offered.

  For content marketers, “journaling” might take the form of an “idea folder”. This could be an actual paper folder which we stuff with newspaper and magazine clippings, a notebook kept in a purse or pocket, or a digital file on a phone or tablet. Since at Say It For You, we train freelance content writers to “learn around”, the material they save up in that folder can help them keep track of what they notice, what they wonder, and what those tidbits call to mind.

Could getting into a journaling habit help your content writing?

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Who Will Taste This Almanac Tidbit?

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“Have you ever wondered what “sugar plums” were? Like every child used to hearing about sugar plums in “The Night Before Christmas” poem, the author of Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac thought sugar plums were fruit.  He was wrong, he later learned. In England in the 1600s, sugar plums were confit candies with a core of nuts or dried fruit encased in layers of crystallized sugar. To make the comfit, a seed or nut would be placed in the center of a pan, with sugar is layered around it. Depending on the size of the candies, a batch could take up to a week to complete. Subsequently, sugar plums were a cherished luxury back in the 18th and 19th centuries, Readelysian.com explains…

I find seemingly inconsequential tidbits of information like this highly useful when it comes to content marketing. Tidbits, I explain to clients and to writers, can be used to describe your unusual way of doing business, or to explain why one of the services you provide is particularly effective in solving a problem. The time and care that went into producing the sugar plums can be compared to the complex processes that go into producing your own products. The image of a “solid core” can be used as a metaphor for solid business practices and ethical standards upheld in your own company.

 

Content writers need never run out of ideas if they keep a file of interesting tidbits of general information on hand, and including interesting tidbits of information in corporate marketing blogs can help::

  • educate blog readers
  • debunk myths
  • showcase the business owners’ expertise
  • demonstrate business owners’ perspective

There’s another purpose tidbits can serve – softening. One of my favorite business books is Geoffrey James’  Business Without the Bullsh*t . The author showcases 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.  Well, including interesting tidbits softens the effect of the strong opinions the business owner or practitioner might express in the content of the post, while at the same time helping to explain the reasoning behind those opinions.

Readers will savor those “sugar plum” tidbits in your content..

 

 

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Showing Ideas Instead of Telling Facts

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“Great stories show ideas instead of telling you facts,” storytelling expert Karen Eber explains. We live in a story world, she says, with stories providing ways to:

  •  differentiate yourself
  •  build connection and trust
  •  create new thinking
  •  bring meaning to data
  •  influence decision-making

The “tools” we can use to accomplish these goals include the three story elements of character, conflict, and connection, the author adds.

Working “against” us as storytellers, she cautions, is the fact that most of what is read is easily forgotten, citing the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, a visual representation produced by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus of the way learned information fades over time. In fact, he discovered, the biggest drop in retention happens soon after learning.

For us storytellers and content marketers, the encouraging note is in the “how” – the same set of information can be made more or less memorable, Ebbinghaus discovered, depending on how well it’s communicated in the first place.

Two important elements important in improving retention are time and repetition, Olivia McGarry points out in the LearnUpon Blog. “Spaced learning is considered one of the best methods for combating the learning curve.” Varying the content format using visuals, storytelling, and gamification, helps enormously, making sure learners know that completing the training will help ease their “pain points” and solve problems.

McGarry suggests that, when students share knowledge with each other, that goes a long way towards improving retention of the material. In that vein, at Say It For You, I advise content writers to periodically compose entire blog posts around questions posed by readers.

As content marketers, with the ultimate goal of influencing decision-making, we must help clients differentiate themselves, build connection and trust, create new thinking, and bring meaning to data, always remembering to show ideas rather than merely telling facts.

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The Content Marketing Challenge is Always the Same

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00:00:08 seconds is all you’ve got, Paul Hellman points out in his book You’ve Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World, referring to the precipitous drop in the average attention span,
The challenge, Hellman acknowledges, is always the same:
  • Getting heard
  • Getting remembered
  • Getting results
.For sellers and speakers, Hellman recommends three main messaging strategies:
  1. Focus – design a strong message
  2. Variety – make routine information come alive
  3. Presence: convey confidence and command attention
Whether you have an exciting new product to pitch, an inspired speech to give, or an important email to send, Hellman advises, start with your conclusion, tell how you got there, then repeat the conclusion.
In a sense, focus is the point in content writing, particularly in blog posts. At Say It For You, we firmly believe in the Power of One, which means one message per post, with a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business, geared towards one narrowly defined target audience. For readers who might want more in-depth information, provide a link to another source or landing page (or simply tell readers to watch for further information in your next post.
Still, as Marcia Hoeck of copyblogger.com emphasizes, “no matter how brilliant your ideas are, you can’t offer them to your prospect unless you’ve made her look in your direction first.” As content writers, our “bait” consists of article titles. These may or may not consist of “keyword phrases” designed to win search, but may be curiosity-stimulating “starters”, such as the ones I took from a news magazine:
                      Finding…  Could…Things just… The impossible…The hidden…Who is…
One very practical and specific piece of advice in Hellman’s book is this: Avoid lists longer than three items.  Being partial to bullet points myself (they help keep both readers and writers “on track”), I recalled that according to the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, the recommended maximum number of bullet points is five.
In content marketing, our ultimate challenge truly does remain the same – getting readers to take a desired next step. 
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The Best Way To Make It Personal

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“All the time I’m preparing my outlines,” John Maxwell teaches public speakers in his book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, “I’m asking myself three questions:

  1. How can I make it special?
  2. How can I make it personal?
  3. How can I make it practical?

The best way to “make it personal,” Maxwell advises, is “to pair what they do know with what they don’t know.” The first part involves “know-your-audience” preparation, the author cautions: the organizational culture of the group, their personal experiences, even their national origin..The “what they don’t know” part describes the insights you’re communicating about that already acquired knowledge.

Maxwell’s advising speakers, but in creating marketing content, the very same principles apply. The secret is knowing what your particular target audience already knows and how they (not the average person, but specifically “they*) will be likely to react or feel about your approach to the subject at hand.

For example, while you may point out that your product or service can do something your competitors can’t, that particular “advantage” may or may not be what your target readers are likely to value. For example, even if your readers are money-motivated, are they cost-conscious or might they prize luxury and exclusivity?  Yes, while building content, it’s important to consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but where those target readers “hang out”, what they read and watch, and what they’re saying on social media.

“Chunking refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information,” explains e-learning coach Connie Malamed. “The reason the brain needs this assistance is because working memory, which is where we manipulate information, holds a limited amount of information at one time.”  Again, pairing information with which your audience is already familiar, then adding a different “spin” or new way to consider – and make use of – that information, offers a “pathway” for communication between the content creator and the consumers of that content.

 

Part of content marketing’s inherent challenge is that the information offered needs to be highly relevant to readers’ search queries.  How can we sustain content writing over long periods of time, yet avoid dishing up same-old, same-old? Maxwell’s two-part “make it personal” secret is the operative one:

  • Establish common ground, confirming to readers they’ve come to the right place to find the products, services, and information they need, and that the people in this company or practice are knowledgeable and passionate.
  • Offer lesser-known information, adding a layer of “new” to themes you covered in former posts, or perhaps a new insight you’ve gained about that existing information.

 

 

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