In Blogging for Business, How Are You Heading Today?

As something of a wordsmith when it comes to corporate blogging for business, I’m always listening to the NPR Radio programs dealing with language.  Tuned in the other day to “RadioLab”, I learned the most interesting thing:

There are 7,000 languages used around the globe , and in fully a third of them, there exist no words for “left”. “right”, “front” or “back”.  Instead, direction is described in those languages as “north, “northeast”, “south”, “southwest”, etc., with the orientation being a birds-eye view above the person being referenced.

In fact, the radio host explained, among Australian tribes, rather than the standard greeting being “How are you today?”, it’s “How are you headed today?”

Since, for all of us blog content writers, words (and, to a lesser extent pictures) are our only tools to tell the business owner’s story, it’s important for us to appreciate how the language we use shapes our own thoughts, and how we can use language to help shape the thoughts of our online readers.

In the 1940’s, I learned, a linguist named Benjamin Whorf claimed that speakers of Hopi (a native American language spoken in parts of Arizona) see the world differently because of differences in language.

All of this, at least in my mind, goes to suggest the importance of what words we select for our business blog writing. Sure, we need to remember to use a lot of the website’s keyword phrases in an SEO marketing blog, but I’m talking a couple of layers deeper than that. After all, blogging is about “heading” our readers in the direction of understanding who we are, our unique fix on our marketplace, and what level and type of service and product we aim to bring to consumers.

In a way, that very concept is what I was trying to express in my own Say It For You website when I referred to the “training benefits” the business owner gets from writing the blog content or (often to an even greater extent), from working with a blog writing service. In continually being involved with talking effectively about your business, putting your accomplishments down in words, verbalizing the benefits of your products and services, the language you use has an influence, not only on visitors to your blog, but on you!