Aiming for Less in Business Blog Content Writing

It’s no fun to think about it, but as marketers, we know we’re “befogged”. My National Speakers Association friend and fellow blogger Karl Ahrichs calls it “the media fog surrounding us all”. As a benefits professional, Ahlrichs advises his benefits brokers to “explain it all in 6 second or less”.

What’s all the need for speed? In the space of any fifteen minutes of our typical day, our brains are likely overloaded with messages on television, radio, and the web, while 100 emails hit our inbox. We have bare seconds to make our point with any modern business professional before that person shuts us off mentally and starts thinking about something else.

Uh-oh, so where does that put us blog content writers in terms of capturing the attention of readers? How about 8 words?  That’s how many steamfeed.com says bloggers have to make an impact.  “Every day, you fight a battle, competing with the internet, emails, texting and voicemail. “  Kimberly Yuhl of SteamFeed quotes a quite startling word quota from Statistic Brain: The average attention span in 2013 was 8 seconds. If the average adult listens to or reads one word per second, that gives us eight words to capture our readers’ attention.  “They had better be some powerful words,” advises Yuhl.

Your best chance, she says is telling stories.

• Through storytelling, you can immediately connect with people and other distractions will fall to the wayside.
• ” Don’t be afraid to talk about feelings. People can relate to a feeling while they don’t necessary relate to a number, statistic or even logic. Talk to Each Person
• You have to talk directly to someone in order for them to commit their attention. Bring the reader into the story.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I’m always considering different ways of communicating with online readers. We see ourselves at Say It For You as a matchmaking service that helps our clients “meet strangers” and hopefully convert at least some of them into friends and customers.

Karl Ahlrichs’ piece reminded me that we content writers need to “matchmake” a little faster!