More Say It For You Magazine Challenge Ideas

Continuing my challenge to myself to find at least one week’s worth of ideas for Say It For You blog posts in a single magazine issue, I continued browsing through the August issue of Self. ( As an Indianapolis blog writer, I offered the magazine challenge to all content writers in Indianapolis as part of giving business blogging assistance.)

SIFY readers – as you read this, be thinking about a magazine you can use to respond to my challenge.  Come up with three different blog post ideas, all out of a single issue of a magazine of your choice. Select articles which trigger ideas for you to blog about your business – what you sell, what you know, what you believe, and what you know how to do.

If you do corporate blogging for business, send me a link to at least one of the blog posts you write which was triggered by a magazine article.  If you are not blogging, email me a blog post, and I will publish it here on blog.sayitforyou.net.

The second article I found was “How Do I Wear That?”  As a ghost blogger who offers training sessions in business blog writing, I found two important qualities in this article that I think blog content writers ought to emulate:

The article was written in question/answer format, first describing a “style dilemma”, then offering a “self-solution”. In other words, the article offered valuable information (in this case from fashion experts) which readers could use without having to buy anything. Nevertheless Self’s style expert was very obviously there to sell stuff, because, under each self-solution, there appears a list of pants, dresses, shoes, and bags that can be purchased in order to implement the solution, along with a listing of stores that carry them!

SEO marketing blog content writers need not apologize for connecting their content to solutions offered by the blog’s sponsoring company, so long as there is information offered that does not entail a purchase.  

The questions are written from the reader’s viewpoint. “I want to try faux fur, but I worry that it will overwhelm me.” The “solutions” are written in first person: “My buying tip: The more subtle the gradations in the color, the more real your fur looks.” Reading the piece, I felt fashion director Metzner was talking just to me!

Effective writing for business is very much a matter of tone. That very personal, conversational, “just between us” tone is exactly the one for which every blog content writer should be trying to incorporate in writing for business!