Top Beliefs for Exercise and Business Blogging

Do you think business owners’ top beliefs should be on their prospective customers’ need-to-know list? I certainly do!

So, apparently, does exercise trainer and best-selling author Jorge Cruise.  As part of the introductory section in his book “Inches Off Your Tummy”, Cruise lists his top 10 beliefs about health and fitness.

That Top Beliefs list, by the way, is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to devote this week’s Say It For You blog posts to ideas I gleaned from Cruise’s exercise book. As a corporate blogging trainer, it’s long been my own belief that, when online searchers arrive at your website, they need to find a lot more than product and service descriptions, price lists, and testimonials. Blog readers, I’m convinced, are mostly what Barbra Strieisand calls “people who need people”; they want to meet the people behind the page.

I especially loved these three of Cruise’s passionate statements:

1. “I believe the human body is designed for movement, not sofas.”
    
2. “I believe that yesterday is history – no matter what happened – and today is an opportunity.”
    
3. “I believe anyone can sculpt the body he or she wants.”

What I believe is that in blogging for business, compelling personal belief statements like these powerful. I often begin by questioning the blogging client: "If you had only 8-10 words to describe why you're passionate about what you do, what you know, and what you sell, what would those words be?"

For business blogs to be truly effective, I believe, they need to be the "voice" of the company or professional practice. That "voice" can change over time, and a blog, of course, is no one-time effort, but something that develops over months and years. And what I'm finding is this: the very process of creating content to "put out there" in your blog forces you, over and over again, to answer the question of "What-do-I-want-my- business/practice-to-be-as-it-grows-up?"

It’s healthy, in both exercise and blog content writing, to examine – and express to readers –  your top beliefs!