Isolating One Small Piece Per Post in Writing For Business

Celebrated portrait artist Chuck Close has a valuable lesson to teach business blog content writers, I think.  Close, whose story is told by author Kurt Anderson in Spark: How Creativity Works, reveals that as a student with learning disabilities, he would be overwhelmed by big projects. He found it helpful to isolate one small piece to work on “and forget about the rest of the picture.”

In offering corporate blogging training, one rule of thumb I often emphasize is focusing on just one idea in each blog post. Not only does this lend more punch to the post, it helps the blog content writer concentrate all his/her efforts around that one focal point, “forgetting about the rest of the picture”.

Fellow blogger Michael Reynolds, in his guest post on my Say It For You blog, suggests that  business blog writing can be broken down into two basic elements, idea generation and the writing itself. Rather than expecting to “sit down once a week and…magically produce great content out of this air”, Reynolds suggests capturing ideas that occur during a conversation or even in the shower, coming back to write them down later.

Another approach to finding “one small piece to work on” is to decide what “angle” or slant a particular post will have. Paul Gillin, in Secrets of Social Media Marketing, outlines at least six different types of blog. As an Indianapolis blogger offering blog writing services to small to medium-sized companies, though, what I’ve found is that even those who have embraced business blog writing will have just one blog rather than several.

However, I explain, even with just one blog, each post within the SEO marketing blog can be representative of a different type. Today’s blog post might be an advocacy post, “addressing a public policy upon which the company wants to make its position known.” 

Tomorrow’s might be a topical post, offering practical information that helps readers be more successful. Next week, there might be a CEO post, helping the executive connect with customers and shareholders. In fact, as a professional ghost blogger,my goal is to be the “voice” of the CEO or other officer, of the company in general, and sometimes of a customer for a testimonial.

As a freelance blog writer, then, I try to isolate “one small piece of the work”. Then, in corporate blogging training, I encourage blog content writers to focus each of their blog posts on one piece as well. Close discovered the technique by way of dealing with his learning disability. You don’t need to be learning-disabled, though, to realize that the one-topic-at-a-time  technique is excellent for sustained, effective, business  blog writing.