Not Every Business Blog Post Needs to be About Purple Cows

“Something remarkable is worth talking about.  It’s a purple cow…  Boring stuff’s invisible.  It’s a brown cow,” posits Seth Godin in his marketing book, Purple Cow.

My freelance blog content writers and I consider ourselves part of each Say It For You client’s marketing team, and Seth Godin, of course, has been one of my marketing idols ever since I began blogging for business. Godin, by the way, introduces his book by saying it’s about “the why, the what, and the how of remarkable.” 

Godin’s expanding on something late advertising guru Eugene Schwartz said: As the market for a certain type of product or service matures, “even unique claims begin to lose potency with buyers”.  Even purple cows, admits Godin, are interesting only for a while.

Business blog writers face exactly that challenge of “keeping the cow purple”. When I’m offering business blogging assistance, business owners, professional practitioners, and bloggers all confide they have trouble continually coming up with fresh ideas for their blog posts and finding new ways to talk about the products and services they offer.

My answer to that has been that, no matter what business, what professional practice, or what organization you’re blogging about, ideas for blog content writing are everywhere, so long as you’re alert. On the other hand, (begging guru Godin’s pardon), I wonder if, given the way the search process itself works, plus the proven very short attention span of online readers, purple-cow remarkable should always be the goal..

After all, first-time readers, (who probably constitute the majority of visitors to anyone’s SEO marketing blog site), came online seeking information about a particular thing.

What happened next, I tell business owners and professional practitioners, precisely because what those searchers were looking for had something to do with what you have, what you know about, and what you know how to do, those readers were matched with you.

Think about it – readers already interested in your topic are ready to receive the information, the services, and the products you have to offer. Now, I explain in corporate blogging training sessions, the very first task your blog post must accomplish is assuring them they’ve come to precisely the right place to get what they’re after.

Engaging? Fresh? Relevant? Unique?  Idea-centered approach? Yes, those are all qualities to strive for in blog content writing. But I think offering basic, brown-cow, usable information is quite OK in blogging for business.