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Blogging Starts and Grows Because of Trust

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“In business, we need our customers and potential customers to trust us….otherwise they simply won’t want to invest time and resources into us and our business,” Safarz Ali writes in the Business Influencer. How do you prove that you are trustworthy? Ali suggests the biggest three ways:

1. Show, don’t tell. Live up to your promises and use client case studies to prove it.
At Say it for You, we emphasize that case studies chronicle a customer or client who had a problem or need, taking readers through the various stages of using the product or service to solve that problem.

2. Practice honest communication, brushing no issues under the rug.
Problems with customer service are going to arise, but those very situations offer you an opportunity to shine by making things right. Empower Then use writing for business as one excellent vehicle to tell about your own mistakes and the way you offer outstanding customer service by making things right.

3. Prove you know your customers.
Your blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than your business can be all things to everybody.  The blog must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who will want to do business with you.  Everything about your blog should be tailor-made for that customer  – the words you use, how technical you get and how sophisticated your approach..

The top five best communication traits of a successful leader, Rebecca Weintraub and Stan Lowes think, are these:

1. walking the talk
The typical online searcher is leery of hype and unrealistic claims, and honesty in content writing has power.

2. authenticity (understand yourself first)
To demonstrate that you’re unique, you need to explain what you care about and what it’s like to work with you.

3. embracing a communication culture
Use your blog to demonstrate your full engagement and concern for your customer’s welfare, and allow real-time feedback from your target audience.

4. storytelling
You have to have a point, conveying the reason you’re sharing the story.

5. listening
When I’m ghost-blogging for a business, I need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, on what’s in the news, and about what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my client sells and what it does for its clients.

Blogging starts and grows because of trust!

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Surprising Blog Titles

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“If it is broken, don’t fix it”, reads the tile of an article in this month’s issue of Indianapolis Monthly. (Wait — what?) Experts advise, the article relates, that, if it’s going to cost more than 50 percent of the value to fix an item, you’re better off replacing it with a new one. The author was apparently following a piece of advice from the Rob Powers Business Blog: For a catchy title, use the unusual insight, delivering the unexpected. “Write a headline that makes people do a kind of double-take when they read it. Make them wonder and ask if it’s even possible,” says incomedieary.com, citing a National Enquirer piece titled “How Jack the weakling Slaughtered the Dance Floor Hog”.

In two-part titles, we teach at Say It For You, the first part (the “huh?”) needs a subtitle to make clear what the article is about. The second part (the “oh!”) clarifies what the focus of the piece is going to be. Another title from this month’s issue of Indianapolis Monthly is an example of a “Huh?-Oh!”. The “Huh?” – Street Wise (this part could be about a variety of things from infrastructure to drug trafficking). The “Oh!” – : “A new retail space angles to be both sanctuary and style inspiration”,  with the article providing details about new streetwear retailer Sanctuary by Streetly.

To a certain degree, in business blog writing, we don’t have the luxury of using totally “mysterious” titles, since search engine algorithms will be matching the phrases used in our titles with the terms typed into readers’ search bars. For that reason, composing business blog post titles involves a combination of art and science, arousing readers’ curiosity and, at the same time, satisfying search engines. The title “Wink Wink”, for example, while a cute name (for a piece about tweed multi-effect eye shadows, is unlikely to link to a search for makeup options. The “Oh!” part of the equally enigmatic “Jump In”, on the other hand, explains that that the article features Bloomington’s Hopscotch Kitchen. “Slice of Life” is about Bargersville Pizza and Libations, while “Make a Break” is about Tennesee’s Maker City. The winning combination, it seems is to arouse curiosity to the point that readers want to find out what the devil that first part of the title means.

Where a lesson learned in one field of activity is applied to a completely different field of activity, those headlines grab people’s attention because they offer a completely new perspective on something, Rob Powell goes on to explain. Promise readers to help them avoid pain or failure, solve problems, and gain insights, but the story begins with surprising blog titles.

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Being Heard, Not Only Seen, in Your Blog

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In this week’s Say It For You blog posts, I’m sharing insights from the October issue of Poets&Writers magazine. An insightful profile of CelesteNG’s new book, Our Missing Hearts offers valuable concepts for business blog content writers. Poet Maggie Smith believes NG’s book should be required reading for all, “grappling with big questions such as art, freedom, and ethics”, but there is one particular line in the book that resonated with me as a content writer: “We talk a lot about being seen, but I think we also want to be heard. Everybody has stories inside them but not always someone to tell them to.”

Social media maven Neil Patel agrees, One sure way to sabotage your own brand on social media, he says, is talking without listening. “Users want something real. They want real people, real interactions, and real, unbridled human connection…The real human essence of the brand is what users want to see come through loud and clear.”

“Who doesn’t want a personal fortuneteller?” Tom Searcy writes in Inc.com. Customers are looking for people who “hear” their concerns about upcoming regulations, technology trends, mergers and acquisitions, and modern day issues. “Remember,” Searcy says,”When you talk to the buyer about the buyer, you increase his or her engagement.” Potential customers want great products, outstanding service, and a competitive price. But, according to According to research from HubSpot, there’s something else they want even more: listening.

Over these years creating Say It For You blog content for different business owners and professional practitioners, I’ve come to realize that, in addition to wanting to be heard, blog readers actually want to “hear”. Unfortunately, I came to realize, most blog writing was being devoted to describing “what we do”, describing all the services and products the company or organization offers. Too little space seemed to be devoted to “what we believe” and to “who we are” as citizens of the community. For that very reason, when I’m offering business blogging assistance, I emphasize that the best website content – and the best corporate blogs – give online readers a feel for the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs about their industry and the way they want to serve their customers.   Those “we believe” statements can turn out to be the business’ most powerful calls to action.

A provider’s blog may not, at least not on a level similar to CelesteNG’s book.”grapple with big questions such as art, freedom, and ethics”, but the content must clearly demonstrate that the owners “hear” their customers’ concerns, and that, in return, their prospects and customers are able to “hear them!

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How-I-Learned Blogging for Business

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“All authors improve their writing skills the more they write,” Mark Shaw reassures book writers in the Author Learning Center, including learning how to connect with their audiences. Meanwhile, writer Madeline Sharples offers tips on how to choose a different perspective for your story. Terry Doerscher tells new writers to ask themselves “Why am I writing this book?” to gain clarity on length and writing style. Meanwhile, in Writer’s Digest, journalist Alison Hill shares “10 Dos and don’ts of Writing a Piece of Journalism”., including some fundamental rules such as: Be truthful. Be objective. Use multiple sources. Human interest stories, Hill explains, emphasize entertaining, educating, and engaging the audience. “After being an independent poet touring the world the better part of a decade, I’ve decided it’s time to give back to this magical art form and the broader community that has carried me so far. It’s my turn to provide some of the life-changing opportunities that spoken word has gifted to me,” Sierra DeMulder writes at the Jason Taylor Foundation. 

These quotes are all examples of How-I-Learned sharing of information and tips freely offered by “pros” for the benefit of “newbies”. In blogging for business, sharing your experience is a great way to build an audience, the wordpress.com team explains. “If you’re an expert on a subject or know something that others might find useful, you can attract a sizable following.” At Say It For You, we’ve learned, addressing real-world challenges that readers face is a path to success in blog marketing.

One point I’ve consistently stressed in these blog content writing tutorials is how important it is to provide valuable information to readers, while avoiding any hint of “hard sell”.  It’s helpful to collate helpful hints from a variety of experts, offering those as a “gift” from the business owner to blog visitors. Even more impactful, though, is sharing valuable lessons learned by the professional practitioner or business owners based on their own hard-won experience and expertise. In fact, in business blogs, it’s a good idea to actually write about past mistakes and struggles, blogger Beccy Freebody posits, because it’s much easier to connect to someone who has been where you are.

How-I-learned content can be how-you-connect blogging!

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Opening Up Options in Your Blog

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In his business book Good to Great, Jim Collins writes that his favorite opening question when meeting a prospect is “Where are you from?” That opener allows the other person to respond in a myriad of ways, the author explains. The prospect might talk about her hometown or country – “I grew up in Berlin”, or about her employer – “I represent Fidelity Bank and Trust”, or reveal that she’s originally from LA, but has been living in the Midwest for most of her adult life. The concept is, as Daniel Pink mentions in his own book To Sell is Human, when talking to prospects, open things up rather than shutting them down by making people think you’re passing judgment on them.

When it comes to converting readers into customers, our job as blog content writers is to present choice, we stress at Say It For You. Given enough “space” to absorb the relevant and truthful information we present over time, consumers are perfectly able to – and far more likely to – decide to take action. Defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. But showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience in providing solutions to very that problem can help drive the marketing process forward.

But what I don’t mean in advising you to present a variety of options is the “Swiss army knife” approach – you don’t want your blog to be an all-in-one marketing tool that forces a visitor to spend a long time just figuring out the 57 wonderful services your company has to offer!. What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts.  I often remind business bloggers to provide several options to readers, including “read more”, “take a survey”, “comment”, or “subscribe”. On websites with no e-commerce options, of course, “Contact” might be  the ultimate reader “compliance” step.

I think the important take-away from Collins’ “Where-are-you-from?” approach is that people are different. Action-oriented readers will want our best recommendations from among the choices. Idea-oriented persons will want to know about the business owners’ core beliefs underlying the way that business is structured. A process-oriented reader will want to know how the process of purchasing and using the product or service works.

To sell what you do and how you do it is human, but be sure to open up a variety of options in your blog!

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