Blogging for Business – What Makes You Tick and What Ticks You Off

At sales training meetings, in business books – if I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “People do business with those they know, like, and trust.” I’ve even used the expression myself in offering business blogging assistance. I don’t think the concept was ever as real to me, though, as when I was reading an excerpt from Tim Gunn’s Gunn’s Golden Rules.

That’s because, in that excerpt, Project Runway’s fashion mentor Gunn shares “what makes him tick and what ticks him off”.  In doing that, Gunn became someone I “know”. 

As a freelance SEO copywriter, I realized, although I’ve never met the man, his opening up about what’s really important to him about his work and about which bad industry practices he detests made him real to me. 

In today’s competitive business world, as blogger Thom Singer reminds us, “there are many complex issues that impact sales decisions. ‘Like’ matters. ‘Trust’ matters,” Singer concludes. As any good blog content writer needs to keep in mind, corporate blogging for business represents an ideal tool for “getting personal” and earning trust.

Too often, though, what I find is that business owners are so focused on marketing strategy and tactics development through blogging, they forget that the blog needs to express who and what they are, or to put it another way what their belief systems are. What makes them tick?  What ticks them off about their industry?

As a professional ghost blogger, one of the very first questions I pose to each blogging client is this:  “If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what you know, what you sell, or what you do, what would those words be?”

There’s an old Hebrew saying: “A man may be known by three things: His pocket, his wine cup, his anger.” (In Hebrew these three are a play on words: Kee-so, Ko-so, Kaa-so”.) In short, what makes you tick?  What ticks you off?

When you’re writing for business, readers must be able to tell!