Titles — Seldom What They Seem

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One lesson we content marketers learn pretty quickly is that the rose may not smell as sweet “by any other name”.  In other words, titles are super-important. Periodically, I browse the shelves at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble to find examples of how a single topic can be approached in a plethora of ways. Yesterday, I sauntered down the Healthy Living aisle, only to notice how, to a much greater extent than I’d noted a year earlier, that the majority of titles did NOT make clear what kind of content I might expect to find inside the cover! 

  • The Good Vices (Ofgang & Ofgang)
  • High Octane Brain (Braun)
  • Floating in the Deep End (Davis)
  • Thinking Fast & Slow (Kahneman)
  • Generation M (Shepherd)
  • The 36-hour Day (Rabins)
  • Outlive (Attila)
  • The Vagina Business (Gerner)

When it comes to content marketing, all the titles show above could be classified as “Huhs?”, meaning that each needs a subtitle to make clear what the book is actually about. (The covers of the books named above did not offer even that type of clue.) There was one that had a “Huh? Oh! combination:

  • How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest (van de Laar). 

True, in choosing titles for blog posts and articles, it’s a mistake to ignore the kind of “intrigue” demonstrated above, and the power of a title to engage interest. Yet, because the keywords and phrases in the title help search engines make the match between online searchers’ needs and what your business or professional practice has to offer, the content in the body of the post had better “match” the headline “promise”.

So, did I see any titles on that Barnes & Noble Healthy Living shelf that gave more of a clue to what I’d discover inside the covers? A couple…

  • Eat Your Age: Feel Younger, Be Happier, Live Longer (Smith)
  • The Hormone Shift (Bahtia)

In devising content titles, we’ve learned at Say it For You, it can be useful to incorporate an element of surprise. Going back to the Barnes & Noble titles:

  • “good” and “vices” don’t belong together in the Ofgang title
  • “fast” and “slow” don’t belong together in the Kahneman book
  • “36-hour” and “day” startle in the Rabins title
  • “generation M” – we’ve heard of Gen X, Y, and Z, but M?

The quality and information contained in your writing doesn’t matter if no one ever reads it,” as Roy Youngman of the Business Relationship Management Institute bluntly states. “The Title of anything helps the reader decide whether or not the subject warrants their precious time to read further.”

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Time to Turn a Page?

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(photo – Chris Montgomery – Upsplash)

 

One decision every seller of products or services must face is how much to “give away” in order to “get”.  A very provocative piece from friend and writing colleague Myra Levine offers some very challenging observations –and her own decisions on the matter…

Have you wondered whether your own marketing plan is working against you? That’s where I’m at right now.

First, a bit of background.

I am a writer and a writing coach. My industry—writing, editing, and publishing—has no licensing, no rules, no supervising organization, and no obvious way to prove your qualifications or abilities. So we can’t fling a pencil without hitting a fake editor, literary agent, or publisher. They troll social media, including Facebook, watching for unsuspecting writers who ask for help.

There’s a lot of money in this. The FBI recently arrested a group of scammers in the Philippines. The saddest victim was told that his self-published book had been chosen to become a Netflix series. All he had to do was pay the lawyers, screenplay writers, script consultants, producers, etc. He would make over a million dollars when it aired. He signed legitimate-looking contracts, and over a few years, he paid the scammers $500,000. The contracts were fake, there was no impending Netflix series, and he’ll never recover a penny.

How do you prove you’re REAL in a market like this? 

My Approach to Prove I’m REAL and Attract Clients

I offer free live Zoom seminars each month, through Eventbrite and Hubspot.  My focus is writing skills, and after 88 minutes of teaching, and a minute or two of sales pitch, I’ve proven my expertise. I present each seminar twice, on a Wednesday at 7 pm and a Saturday at 11 am, so eight hours apart, to accommodate more time zones.

Five years later, I’ve presented to well over 2,000 participants from all over the world. I have writers who come every month and love what I do.

Do you see the Problem?

I’ve developed a loyal fan base who will probably never become paying customers. Why should they, when I’m giving it up for nothing? I didn’t feel this cynical a few months ago, but several clients recently dropped away for financial reasons, which forced me to rethink what I’ve been doing.

The final smack on the head came a few weeks ago, when I bought a six-week online workshop with an excellent writing instructor. It’s the only way to get access to her magnificent brain, aside from her One-on-one Coaching program, which is quite expensive. She offers two classes a year and only takes seven students per class. She’s creating scarcity. I give FREE seminars on valuable writing topics. Every month. No scarcity.

She offers two options to access her wisdom, at different price points that offer different levels of personal attention. I’m offering two options—free and paid. If she offered monthly free seminars, I’d be there every month and probably never pay for her advice!

It’s time to PIVOT!

I’ve set up a meeting with the woman who helped me set up my business.  I’m thinking about quarterly free seminars, and two paid courses per year, with a limited audience so everybody gets enough personal attention to justify the cost. Participants will also watch recorded videos in which I’ll present short lessons on writing skills, so I don’t have to cover those things in every in-person course.

I always intended to record the free seminars separately, without the Zoom audience, and charge a fairly small amount of money for these, since people who can’t make it to a seminar often ask if there’s a recording, but it’s a big job, and I never seem to get around to it. Short videos on specific topics would be free to those who pay for a class, while others would pay a small fee for each short video.

That’s my plan, at least. I’ll see what my business guru has to say.

 

 

Myra Levine is a novelist, memoirist, and writing coach. Her free online writing seminars through Eventbrite have attracted over 2,000 writers from all over the world. She publishes as M. E. Levine on Amazon.com & Audible.com  Find her at www.MyraLevine.com

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Content That Gets Gestalt

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In a post last week, I’d explored factors that make content more memorable, citing a study done at Cornell University suggesting that, while lines in a movie might become popular because of an unusually effective delivery by an actor, there are specific qualities that make quotes “stick in our minds”:  Memorable lines, for example, tend to be short, using simple syntax but distinctive words. 

This week, an Indy’s Child article about autistic kids caught my attention, because in essence it was describing an approach to language and learning that is quite the opposite of using “distinctive” individual words and phrases to get our point across…

 “Most people assume language develops in a linear, word-by-word fashion,” Jessica Willitz explains.  That’s not the case for the majority of autistic children, researchers found. 84% of autistic individuals are GLPs, gestalt language processors, learning in chunks and scripts – phrases they’ve heard from songs, shows, and the people around them. (The term “gestalt” is derived from a German word that means “whole” or “put together”. Gestalt therapy was developed in the 1940s as an alternative to traditional, verbally-focused psychoanalysis.)

A “gestalt” approach can be applied in creating marketing content, a WordPress article suggests. “The perception of stimuli as groups or chunks of information, rather than as discrete bits, facilitates memory and recall.”  When creating written content, we’ve found at Say It For You, consistent use of bolding and font size for key terms helps readers subconsciously group those together, as does white space surrounding a set of related statements. The object – making our copy more readable – and more memorable.

Going back to the tendency of autistic children to repeat “scripts” from songs and shows,  in content marketing, we’ve seen that threesomes can make content more  memorable (“the good, the bad, and the ugly”, “stop, look, and listen”). In articles and blog posts, while there can be a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business or practice,  one call for a single action, that focus can be supported by three points.

In creating marketing content, get gestalt!

 

 

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Creating Customer-Friendly Content

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I always enjoy Todd Hunt’s wry observations in Hunt’s Headlines.  This month’s issue featured a photo of a sign posted on a vending machine: “Price levels on this machine reflect the cash price, which is 10¢ lower than the retail price….Credit card purchases will reflect the full retail price.” Hunt’s comment: “Rather than admit there is a “10-cent surcharge for credit cards”, they say you get a 10-cent discount for cash…”

 Price increases tend to be unpopular, and you always run the risk of customers deciding that they don’t find enough value in your services to justify the higher cost, Spring Insight authors admit.  In their case, in order to soften the blow, they made sure to highlight the additional services their clients could look forward to receiving with the higher prices. “After reading the email and seeing a clear list of the additional value accompanying the higher prices, all our clients elected to continue utilizing our services,” the owners now report.

“Breaking bad news to customers is not an easy task,” Susan Berkley admits in zenbusiness.com. To do this in a compassionate and professional manner, she advises, “Give as much information as you can about the who, what, when, where, and why,” Take charge, outlining a specific plan of action that you and your company will take, and what actions you recommend customers take.

As is true of newspapers, business blog content writing can balance feature stories with news. In general, the word “news”, when it comes to blog marketing, can mean two entirely different things.  The first type centers around you and your company or practice, with the second type of news relating to your community, your city, your country, even worldwide events. If, as blog writers, we can go right to the heart of any possible customer fears or concerns, addressing negative assumption questions (before they’ve been asked!)  we have the potential to breed understanding and trust.

Todd Hunt’s vending machine story is a perfect example of breeding misunderstanding and distrust. Sure, as a business or professional practice grows and changes, there are probably going to be negative publicity and  instances of customer dissatisfaction. As content marketers, our job is to help our clients get “out in front” of those negatives — and quickly. “A swift response demonstrates your brand’s commitment and shows you value stakeholder concerns and feedback,” SmartComment.com advises.

One very important function corporate blog posts can serve is damage control. When customers’ complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” more weight.  Creating customer-friendly content may involve “letting the client tell his story,” which then gives you the chance to offer useful information to other readers and to explain any changes in policy that resulted from a negative situation.

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Elevating Content with Semi-Colons

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In content marketing, the most common use of the colon is to introduce a bullet-pointed list, and, back in July, this Say It For You blog discussed this and two other ways writers can make use of the colon, including in two-part titles and to set the stage for dramatic reveals or punch lines.Today’s focus in on the semi-colon….

In the “Unsung Punctuation” section of Writer’s Digest, Ryan Van Cleave comes out “in support of the semicolon”. Which is “stronger than a comma, but less final than a period, offering a middle ground that creates balance and nuance.”. The semi-colon, he claims can:

  • connect ideas
  • untangle complexity
  • elevate your prose

But “mastering the balance” isn’t all that easy, Van Cleave cautions; the key is to use the semi-colon only when clauses are closely related in meaning. Don’t force the issue, but use the semi-colon sparingly to preserve its effectiveness, he advises. “Overuse can make writing feel formal or stilted.” Important to remember is that semicolons don’t pair with conjunction like “and” or “but”.

But, wait! Aren’t blog posts supposed to be easy to read and informal in tone? Do content marketers need to go back to high school English class?  Perhaps. According to author Joanne Adams, pay attention to proper spelling and grammar, and “people who read your writing will know, without a sliver of doubt, that you are somebody who really knows their $h*t”. Point of fact, Laura Mondragon writes, the semicolon does a job no other punctuation can do, and is often more “polite” than a period or exclamation point. “I got your email; I haven’t finished the project yet.” gets the point across simply and effectively.

 

I like Caitlin Berve‘s example of the way content “flow” is enhanced with a semi-colon: “He not only worries he will never return to the castle in the mist; he worries he won’t even remember the palace exists.” Yes, the clauses before and after the semi-color could be separate sentences, but a period would take away from the way the two halves fit together, she explains.

At Say It For You, while we aim for different levels of content readability depending on the target audience for each client’s business or professional practice, we believe that using proper grammar and punctuation, without “dumbing down” the material, shows respect for readers’ intellect – and for their time.

And, if the semi-colon can help “elevate” our content by connecting ideas and untangling complexity, bring it on!

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