For Sale: Blog Platform. Never Used.

Ernest Hemingway, challenged to write an entire novel in six words, scribbled these six on a napkin:

                                             For sale: baby shoes, never used.

There are any number of lessons, I think, that business bloggers can learn from the legendary Hemingway "demo":

Brevity
Six-word blog posts aren’t going to hack it in terms of SEO "Brownie points"; six-word titles certainly are. Since, as Brian Halligan points out in his new book Inbound Marketing, Google (and other search engines) try to match article titles with the phrase being searched, the more focused titles are on the business’ keywords phrases, the better..

Arouses Curiosity
"Show ’em a gun in the first reel" is an old screenwriter’s rule-of-thumb. The blog title is the "first reel", introducing the theme, hinting at "action" to come.

Emotional Impact
Yes, we’re talking about business blogs here, but blogs are a part of "pull marketing", and  emotions are what’s behind the "pull" in the posts. Professional speaker and speech coach Lou Heckler says a story needs to have moved/astonished/angered/tickled/amazed you for you to share it effectively with your audience. Never-used baby shoes have an emotional impact. While blog posts can be informative, filled with myth-busting proofs, it’s the emotional impact that keeps readers engaged.

The first few ingredients listed on a food container are the most important.  Since the first "ingredient" of a business blog post is, in fact, the title, take a tip from Ernest Hemingway and  make that ingredient count!