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Go Ahead – Blog About Your Misplaced Oscars

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Winning an Oscar is a big deal, but still old news; losing your Oscar – now that makes for more attention-catching copy. I think that’s the appeal of the Mental Floss Magazine story about ten award-winning movie stars who actually misplaced the statuettes they’d been so excited to win in the first place.

“Owning a little gold guy is such a rarity that you’d think their owners would be a little more careful with them.” Apparently, that’s not the case:

  • Olympia Dukakis’s Moonstruck Oscar was stolen from her home.
  • “I don’t know what happened to the Oscar they gave me for On the Waterfront,” Marlon Brando wrote in his autobiography. “Somewhere in the passage of time it disappeared.”
  • Colin Firth nearly left his new trophy for “The King’s Speech” on a toilet tank the very night he received it.
  • Matt Damon and Ben Affleck took home Oscars for writing Good Will Hunting in 1998, but in the confusion of a flood in his apartment while he was out of town, Damon isn’t sure where his award went.
  • Whoopi Goldberg sent her Ghost Best Supporting Actress Oscar back to the Academy to have it cleaned and detailed. The Academy then sent the Oscar on to R.S. Owens Co. of Chicago, the company that manufactures the trophies. When it arrived in the Windy City, however, the package was empty.

So how does all this apply to blog marketing for a business or professional practice?  It brings out a point every business owner, professional, and freelance business blogger ought to keep in mind: Writing about past failures is important.

True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice. What tends to happen is the stories of failure create feelings of empathy and admiration for the entrepreneurs or professional practitioners who overcame the effects of their own errors.

Blogging about mistakes has another potential positive effect: it can turn out to help with customer relations and damage control.  When  complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” or the “remediation measure” more weight. In fact, in corporate blogging training sessions, I remind Indianapolis blog writers to “hunt” for stories of struggle and mistakes made in the early years of a business or practice!

Go ahead – blog about your misplaced Oscars!

 

 

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Going for Words that Sell in Business Blog Writing

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Words That Sell book

 

I like calling attention to books I’ve come across that are must-reads for business blog content writers, and Words That Sell, by Richard Bayan certainly falls in the must-read category. Words, after all, are our basic tools in conveying our business message to online readers.

After all, as I remember social media consultant Jason Falls commenting way back in 2009, when he discussed with business owners why they wanted to use social media, the answers came down to one thing – selling more stuff.

On the other hand, as business coach Jack Klemeyer pointed out, going directly to the selling stage without first satisfying all the prerequisites such as establishing rapport and gaining a complete and mutual understanding of the client’s needs is probably going to mean failure. Plus,
“Online marketing is about help, not hype,” Mitch Meyerson writes in the book I highlighted earlier this week in my blog.

It’s important, then, to find word that do some of the selling for us, and that’s where Bayan’s tips and categories can be so useful to us content creators.

Open with a challenge:

  • Prepare yourself for…..
  • Beware of….
  • Join the…..
  • Recapture the…..
  • Take a deep breath and…..
  • For once in your life…..

Appeal to their sense of belonging:

  • You’ll stay in the loop….
  • You’ll be privy to….
  • You’ll join the ranks of…..
  • You’ll feel the warmth of….
  • You’ll build strategic alliances….
  • Take part in….

Avoid wordiness:

  • Instead of “at the present time”, say “now”
  • Instead of “on the grounds that”, say “because”
  • Instead of “be in receipt of”, say “get”
  • Instead of “during the time that”, say “while”
  • Instead of “make use of”, say “use”
  • Use provocative question openers:

Use provocative question openers:

  • Have you thought about….
  • Are you drowning in a sea of…..
  • What’s the most effective way to…..
  • Did you ever ask yourself…

Go for words that sell in your business blog writing!

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Sales-Lite for Business Blogs

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cotton balls
Your objective of blogging may be to generate leads, to increase web traffic, or to raise your profile as an authority. But if you use your blog just to spread your sales messages, cautions kissmetrics.com, you may struggle to find readers.

So, how do you get your sales message across through your blog?  This week, my Say It For You posts are devoted to that very question. Here’s what some folks are suggesting:

Kissmetrics: To gain business with your blog you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. By providing solid advice on a regular basis, you build authority and trust; and that’s how you win new customers.

B2bleadblog: Automation can help you manage lead nurturing, but you can’t automate trust.
Trust is earned by being helpful, relevant and honest with your prospects. When considering what targeting options to use, you need to know and understand the make-up of the heavy user. Knowing gender and age is only a fraction of the story. You need to also learn about the benefits they seek as well as their motivations for using that particular product or service. Get into the mind of the heavy user. Knowing who they are and what they do every day will help you better decide multiple locations where you should place the message to reach the right consumer and what that message should look like.

Alina Diaz, Center for Sales Strategy: At the end of the day, the marketer is looking to get their message in front of the right audience. Using analytics, pay attention to the characteristics of heavy users.

Jane Sheeba Media of dailyblogging.org:
For online sales, especially through blogs, you should be cautious to provide the information in a logical fashion, addressing all expected concerns from a customer point of view. If the content is provided by careful wording, product images (with front view, top view, left view and right views and other angles) revealing the functional components, there is a great chance to make a sale in the first shot.

For blog content writers, serving up a sales-lite menu can help increase leads that lead to sales.

 

 

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Stop Asking for More in Business Blogs

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Hand writing A to Z with marker, business concept
“The more information you offer to people, the more likely they’ll be confused.  When people are confused, they don’t become customers,” warns Neil Patel in his quicksprout.com blog.

I couldn’t help remembering those words while enjoying the humor in a recent Dilbert comic strip. Carol’s  babysitter canceled, but Wally said “I will not watch your kids tonight.” “I was going to ask you to adopt them,” Carol said.  “Absolutely not,” Wally says. “The best I can do is watch them tonight.” This seems to demonstrate that, if you ask for a lot more than you want, you might get the customer to agree to what you really wanted in the first place.

Sorry, folks, that just won’t work in blog content writing.

What can work, says kissmetrics.com, is, in your marketing message, teaching your leads how to move as close as possible to Z (the point they want to reach) before you ask for their money or their commitment. The closer you get them on the road from A to Z, the more likely they are to buy from you in order to go the final few steps needed to arrive at their desired end result.

Even more powerful, advises kissmetrics, is using the pain motivator, showing your prospects all the dangers on the road from A to Z, and how your product or service is the weapon they need to defeat those dangers and discomforts.

In “Say This, Not That”, Christine Georghiou advises salespeople to justify a request or statement with the word “because”.  That word immediately answers the question on every prospect’s (and every online reader’s) mind – “What’s in it for me?”

Your team will love our software because we offer email response tracking.

“Emphasize value over price when presenting your product,” adds Georghiou. Value is results-oriented, and results are precisely what you want the prospect to be pondering, not price (which highlights what he/she will lose).

As a trainer in corporate blogging, there’s another reason I think the Dilbert ask-for-more-than-you-want technique would fail miserably in blogs:  Carol doesn’t like sitting for his own kids, but is trying to get someone else to want to do it. Blog content is at its most compelling when the writer is immersed in the lifestyle whose participants they’re trying to attract as customers. “It’s not an essential key to a successful business but it does help that you are immersed in the lifestyle of it, says Steve Watts on Shopify.com.

Stop asking for more in business blogs; focus, instead, on moving prospects closer to Z!

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