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Easy Martha Stewart-Inspired Updates for Blog Content

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“To invigorate the look of old china on your table,” Martha Stewart advises on the “Easy Updates” page of her latest Living magazine issue, “identify common shapes and details to weave through the new elements.” Stewart suggests three specific updating techniques:

  1. Add new patterns.
  2. Play up one color.
  3. Mix mod materials.

Along with antique tableware, blog content can benefit from updating, as we teach at Say It For You, and each of Martha’s tips can serve as a guide for giving a bygone blog post a freshening-up. After all, as Richard Harding Davis so aptly remarked, “The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way, or an old thing in an old way.”

Add New Patterns
“Stick to the colors of your old china to keep the table cohesive, but mix in a serving piece with another motif that compliments it.” In composing blog content, it’s a good idea to repeat themes already covered in former posts, but the trick is to change the pattern by a) adding new information and b) using a different format – listicle, Q&A, comparison, etc.

 

Play Up One Color
“Choose a shade from your pattern that you want to highlight, and let it fly in accent pieces like linens or glasses.” In a blog post or series, link new information to themes you’ve emphasized in former posts, “coloring” new concepts or information by referring to concepts you’ve introduced months or even years ago. As Martha Stewart suggests, the old and new are unified through “color”.

 

Mix Mod Materials
“Elevate older porcelain with glass, wood, metal, or ceramic items that add texture and dimension to your table,” Finding word combinations that resonate with blog readers is a big part of the challenge involved in blog content writing. Since there is a definite generational factor involved in language, knowing your target audience is key. In different posts, therefore, you can alternate a friendly, even humorous tone with a professional, authoritative one.

 

In table settings or in blog content writing, invigorate the look of the old “china” with new patterns and colors.

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Break Full Articles Apart in Blogging for Business

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When it comes to blogging, we at Say It For You firmly believe in the Power of One:

  • One message
  • One outcome
  • One audience
  • One writer
  • One client

    A very well-written article that appeared recently in the Indianapolis Business Journal reinforced for me an important difference between nonfiction articles and blog posts, with each post having a razor-sharp focus on just one idea or concept, one aspect of a business or practice. With apologies to George Lesmeister, CEO and founder of LGC Hospitality, I’m going to use his article to illustrate how a single topic article can provide the fodder for several very focused, very effective blog posts.

The overall premise of the Lesmeister piece is that a large pool of job candidates till now be actively seeking employment, those job seekers are going to be choosy. The author offers several pieces of advice to employers about ways to provide a good hiring experience for candidates.

Statistics:
“While Indiana’s unemployment rate spiked to 17% during the pandemic, it’s now 3.9%). Our sector (Lessmeister’s staffing firm specializes in the hospitality industry) lost the largest number of jobs.” What’s more, the author adds, “A May estimate shows some 116,000 job openings in Indiana.”

In teaching business owners and professional practitioners how to create content for blog posts, I stress the power of using statistics in blogs:

  • Statistics can serve as myth-busters, dispelling false impressions people may have regarding your industry.
  • Statistics grab visitors’ attention.
  • Statistics can be used demonstrate the extent of a problem opening the door for your to show how you help solve that very type of problem.

My point: This one portion of Lesmeister’s article (the unemployment statistics) can constitute an entire blog post.

Best practices:
The author’s admonition that “Respect is a two-way street” would make for an engaging blog post title. Workers see help-wanted signs, go inside to apply, fill out an application, and never hear back, Lessmeister laments. Certainly an entire blog post might focus on best practices within your industry or profession.

One thing I suggest stressing in blog posts is best business practices.  While a goal of any marketing blog is to help your business or practice “get found”, once that’s happened, the goal changes to helping online readers appreciate the specific ways you choose to run your enterprise.

  • Specific solutions and advice
    “Even if a job candidate does not have experience in one particular area, evaluate the soft skills during the interview process. …Can the applicant quickly be trained to make an impact?”

    Solve a problem, own the customer, sales trainers like to say. That’s because people are online searching for answers to their problems or solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  If your business has been consistently posting content, those people are going to find you, because your posts provide the solutions they need. Providing a powerful online “voice” to solutions to searchers’ problems is the essence of content writers’ work!

    Out of just this one article might come many different, powerful blog posts:

  • busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing
  • offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service
  • describing an unusual application for that product
  • describing one common problem their service helps solve
  • updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession
  • offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Break full articles (your own or others’) apart for blogging for business!

 

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Blogging for Business in Leitmotifs and Thaumatropes

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Whenever company owners (or sometimes even the blog content writers they employ) express doubt about their ability to keep generating new content for their blog posts, I remind them about leitmotifs.

True, blog posts tend to be most effective when they focus on just one idea. For example, in different posts, a content writer might go about:

  • busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing
  • offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service
  • describing an unusual application for that product
  • describing one common problem their service helps solve
  • updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession
  • offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Focusing on one aspect of a topic at a time is precisely what helps blog posts stay much more flexible and impactful than the more permanent content on the typical corporate website. But it’s the leitmotif (a German term meaning “leading theme” often used in discussing music) that helps the separate posts fit together into an ongoing blog marketing strategy.

Just the other day, while waiting in line at CVS, I picked up a magazine named “The Complete Guide to Your Brain”,” intrigued by the title. Once I had the chance to browse the article, I realized that I was looking at a perfect example of the way business blogging can be sustained over weeks, month, and years. Using a “leitmotif”, content writers can continue providing content at once fresh and evergreen, content that is varied to appeal to different readers, yet readers who share a common interest.

Amazing, I found. In just one publication, Brain included more than twenty different approaches to one subject. For example:

  • “Your Brilliant Baby” explained the way in which newborns experience a 64% increase in brainpower during their first three months of life!
  • “Sexes and the Brain” debunks the popular myth that male brains differ greatly from female brains. In fact, “humans with only feminine or only masculine characteristics are extremely rare”.
  • “The Plastic Brain” describes ways in which making and listening to music involves information from all five senses. Listing other activities that can make one’s brain more plastic.
  • “Fuel for the Mind” discusses elements of a brain-healthy diet.
    “”Why We Need Friends” discusses the way social connections make us smarter and strengthen our brains.

A second term that applies to the way individual blog posts work together over time to convey content marketing “leitmotifs” is “thaumatrope”. Thaumatropes were Victorian-age paper toys consisting of a card with a picture on each side. The card would be attached to two pieces of string; twirling the strings made the two pictures appear to combine into a single image. That’s precisely the effect of different blog posts.

As blog content writing continues over long periods of time, there’s a cumulative leitmotif/thaumatrope effect, conveying one central message to readers in all its many permutations and details.

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Put Some First-Person Impact in Your Business Blog

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“You thought I was just brewed leaves and nothing more, but I’m the most consumed drink in the world next to water. I have launched ships and started wars, and I helped birth your country.” So begins a three page article by Kate Lowenstein and Daniel Gritzer about the history of tea.

We know what it feels like to be human and write from the perspective of a human. But, what does it feel like to be a shoe or a pencil or a dictionary? The point of view in a story, is “the narrator’s position in the description of events,” explains Pamela Hodges in thewrwitepractice.com. 

Looking for unconventional, potentially striking ways to explore what it means to be human in your writing?  It may seem counterintuitive, but personification—ascribing human qualities to inanimate objects—can open new avenues to plumb the depths of human experience, writes Katherin Quevedo of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Whether you’re representing an inanimate object or a very human business owner or professional practitioner, first person writing has a certain power. Admittedly, nobody likes people who speak of nothing but themselves, but in blog marketing, I stress first person writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the person or the team standing ready to serve customers.

  • “At —— Dry Cleaners, we believe….”
  • “At ——— Heating & Air, we always…..”
  • “Despite the widely held belief that….., I’m convinced that……”

In blogging, of course, different posts serve different purposes. First person (“I”, “I’m”,” we”, “we’re” packs emotional punch. Second person pronouns (“you”, “your”, and “you’re”) can be a good fit for how-to blog posts, while third person (“he”, “she”, “they”) pronouns may be the choice for news items.

Whether you as owner or practitioner are doing the writing or using the services of a blog content writer, your perspective can be provided only by you, in first person, straight to the readers:  In the blogosphere, the more personal, the better.

On the other hand, all content writing for marketing blogs needs to be based on the “you”s who are the targeted readers, and about their wants and needs. Bottom line? Keeping your target audience (the “you”) in mind, put some first person impact in your business blog!

 

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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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