Fire and Jello in Your Business Blog

An “ice page”, I learned, is a web page on which the primary content has a fixed width, usually set to the left side of the window. (More flexible settings are called “jello” or “liquid”.)

Interesting. Since I train blog content writers in Indianapolis, I immediately realized that “ice” in blog writing can be a time-saving device.  After all, the primary excuse business owners use to explain why their corporate blogs have fallen into a state of disrepair (or been outright abandoned) is lack of time.

While up until a few days ago I wasn’t familiar with the term “ice page”, I am familiar with the general concept.  In fact, when company owners or professional practitioners (or the professional ghost bloggers they’ve employed to help them) express doubts about their ability to keep generating new blog content over extended periods of time, I have been introducing them to an “ice” concept which I call the leitmotif.

Effective blog posts for any company, professional practice, or organization can be planned around key themes.  (Leitmotifs are the recurring musical phrases that connect the different movements of a symphony, for example.) Those themes, like “ice pages”, are fixed ideas that form the basis for blog posts.  But around those pieces of “ice”, blogging for business means filling in new details, examples, and illustrations (the “jello” and “liquid” elements that bring variety and freshness to individual posts).

That’s why, at Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions, our discussions are not about ways to continually find brand-new ideas, but on building “e.g.’s” and i.e.’s around the business’ or the practice’s core themes.

A teacher for many years, I know that every lesson needs to be offered in a variety of formats, because students have different learning styles.  Blog writing services need to incorporate the same principle – the basic messages remain the same, but since online readers have different tastes and needs and learning styles, SEO marketing blogs must offer a variety of styles and material. 

With well-defined “ice” content as the core around which that “jello” is created, that otherwise formidable task becomes a whole lot easier for blog content writers!