Try a By-the-Numbers Business Blog Post

The editors of For the Record Magazine (a publication for health professionals) have latched on to a good I page is decorative, with seven 7 numbers (in color) heading up the seven short paragraphs of text.

While the basic information in your blog will be served up in work form, visuals add interest.  What’s more – (our grade school teachers used Show and Tell for a reason), people absorb information better when it is served up in more than one form.
For the Record’s writing about seven statistics, each having to do with health care.

Earlier this week, I described a “one-tank template”, based on a Columbia Club magazine article about places its members could visit using less than one full tank of gasoline. In the health magazine article, the” template” is the numbers:

• 8
  Only 8% of primary care phy6sicians reported being “very dissatisfied” with their Electronic Health Record system’s ability to lessen their workload.
• 72
  This is the percentage of physicians who said technology was helping them make more informed health care decisions.
• 94
  This is the percentage of patients who prefer video visits to telephone-only consultations with their doctors.

The point of using numbered lists in business blogs, I explain to blog content writers, is to demonstrate ways in which your product or service is different, and to provide valuable information that engages readers, helping them see you as a go-to guy or gal to solve their problem or fill their need.

A gem of a quote I found in the book “Dance First, Think Later”, is this: “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you.  But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.”

Numbers are valuable tools in corporate blogging for business because they add both interest and credibility to any factual material.  So, in order to freshen up blog post content, I teach in corporate blogging training sessions, start with an idea about your product or service, then put a number to it:

Whatever your business or professional practice, the real point of the numbers is to offer valuable information, showcase your expertise, and demonstrate ways in which your product or service can help problems.