Is It Smart to Make Your Blog Readers Into Maltsters?

In Mental Floss magazine’s “In Praise of Light Beer”, Jed Lipinski may have taken things a bit far, at least where blog content writing is concerned.

On the one hand, I’m quick to assure business owners and professional practitioners that writing about what they do almost never leads readers to want to “do it themselves”. On the contrary, the valuable, detailed information they offer in their SEO marketing blog showcases their own expertise and specialized knowledge.

The other side of it, though, is that effective blog posts keep things short. Lipinski’s “Let There Be Lite: A Step-By-Step Guide” is, itself, 150+ words long, within a five page article – hardly “lite” fare!  One detail of the article is interesting: Lipinski introduces the term “maltster”, describing a person who makes beer professionally.

Blog content writing, I believe, is at its best on the middle ground between over-simplification and maltsterdom. In reading business blogs about a product or service, online searchers want to:
 

• Find out what they’ll get if they buy
• Discover whether the product is a good match for their needs
• Gain perspective about how the pricing and the quality stacks up against the competition

In short, your blog content needs to address the “Why you?” and “Why now?” questions. What those readers really don’t need to – or want to – know is that in order to make beer, they must steep barley in water, dry it in a kiln, boil malt together with hot water and hops in a copper kettle to produce wort, add yeast and let in spend weeks fermenting.

Indianapolis blog writers (and the business owners and professional practioners who hire freelance bloggers) can be reassured: Readers want to know you’re the maltster – they just need to relax and enjoy the end result!”