It’s All in the Game for Your Business Blog

“There’s a unique recipe that goes into coming out ahead in just about anything,” Jessanne Collins writes in Mental Floss, “an enigmatic equation of skill, technique, calculation, probability, chance, and all kinds of other immeasurable factors.” Collins examines competitions ranging from carnival games to spelling bees and Texas Hold “Em poker, concluding that the perfect formula for winning is uncrackable.

Despite the myriad of words devoted to blogging advice, the secret code for blogging success is probably uncrackable as well. Still, I can’t help thinking, the equation for business blog content writing contains all same basic elements Collins found in poker playing and carnival games:

Skill
“The vast majority of content online is poorly written,” laments Kevin Muldoon of elegantthemes.com. While anyone who can use the Internet can technically write a blog post, all content is not created equal, he observes.

“The best writers are also keen readers,” advises wordstream.com., adding that content writers must expand their horizons to more challenging material than they typically read, paying special attention to sentence structure, word choice, and flow.

Technique
Great blog posts begin with planning, and that means creating outlines, doing research using authoritative resources, fact-checking, creating good headlines, editing, using images, and inserting humor judiciously, wordstream.com continues.

Calculation
“In our site reviews we often see that a site’s category / tag structure is completely unmanaged,” reports Joost de Valk in Yoast. When used correctly a good “taxonomy” system can boost your blog’s SEO; when used incorrectly, he says, “it’ll break things”. Using analytical tools is the blogger’s way of calculating which tactics are most likely to succeed.

Chance
“Until you’ve had a chance to build up a target audience, you’re dealing with assumptions and educated guesses based on your first-hand experience and anecdotal evidence,” says Peep Laja of conversionxl.com.  After you learn more about the market, you can pivot, changing direction to fit the facts.

Just as with carnivals, spelling bees, and Texas Hold “Em poker, with corporate blog writing, it’s all in the game!