Help Blog Readers See Themselves in Your “Home”

/0 Comments/in , , /by

In “Stage a Home That Sells”, AARP’s Upfront/LIVE magazine is talking about appealing to young couples when selling real estate, but what I noticed is that three of the recommendations listed under “What Buyers Want” are made to order for blog content writers, no matter what the product or service we’re marketing:
“Buyers want a home they can see themselves in.”
Help online visitors to your business blog assimilate your message through visualizing, I advise at Say It For You. Painting word pictures is an important part of blog marketing. Sure, there is room for technical, precise language in discussing your product or service, but you want listeners to “put themselves in the picture” by becoming customers or clients.
“Buyers want a sense of wellness in the home.”
According to the Writing Center at The University of North Carolina, “In order to communicate effectively, we need to order our words and ideas on the page in ways that make sense to a reader”. Assume your readers are intelligent, the authors advise, but do not assume that they know the subject matter as well as you. Using familiar words and word combinations gives readers a sense of comfort and “wellness”.
“Buyers want a home with potential for connectivity.”
Does creating connection relate to blog marketing? In every way. “How would most people describe their relationship with your company?” asks Corey Wainwright of hubspot.com. Is the relationship purely transactional, making you just a place they go to get something they need, or do you elicit more personal feelings
Each claim a content writer puts into a blog post needs to be put in context for the reader so that the claim not only is true, but feels true to online visitors.
Home buyers typically look at under a dozen  homes before making a decision, but, in that same timeframe, online readers can scan dozens upon dozens of posts before making a decision about a product or service.
My way of describing the process of blog marketing is this: painting the picture (“staging the home”) is only Step #1; What comes next is putting the reader into the picture!
Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

A Recommended List of Reading Genres for Better Business Blogging

/0 Comments/in /by

“Reading fiction, it seems, could be a way to break old habits and unlock more effective, empathetic marketing,” Carina Rampell of the Content Marketing Institute observes, quoting William Faulkner. (Good news for me; since the pandemic stay-at-home thing began, I’ve worked my way through some 18 different novels!)

Like all writers, marketers have a lot to gain from exposure to literature, Rampell continues. “Marketing is all about empathy and storytelling, and great stories are proven to make us more empathetic.”’ But not all reading – and not all stories, she cautions, are the same, and “some genres are more effective than others in helping you “improve your marketing chops”.

 

Rampell lists advantages we content writers can gain from reading:
  • Reading poetry teaches us clarity and precision.
  • Reading the classics teaches us compelling storytelling structure, building tension to pull an audience along to a satisfying resolution.
  • Reading helps us get away from our subject or product expertise and unlock our creativity.

One of the principles I stress at Say It For You is that, in order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing.  I’m often asked when I train business owners and employees or newbie blog content writers for hire is this: Where do you get ideas for blog posts? My answer is – everywhere!  But that doesn’t mean the ideas are going to jump right onto your page. At least half the time that goes into creating a blog post is reading/research/thinking time! The lesson I try hardest to impart in corporate blogging training sessions is: “The more you know, the more you can blog about”.  Business content writing in blogs is the result of a lot of reading and listening on the part of the blogger.

 

The Rampell article discusses the value we blog content marketers can gain by reading and classical novels. A genre I can add to her list is one that, on the surface, seems the very antithesis of the “fresh” content we aim for in blog writing – historical fiction.

The insight I gained? Material doesn’t need to be “new” in order to be “fresh”. Readers may already know some or all of the information you’re presenting in your business blog, but they need your help putting that information in perspective.  In fact, that’s where blogging for business tends to be at its finest, helping searchers with more than just finding information, but helping them understand its meaning and significance.
Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Best Communication Practices for Business Blogging

/0 Comments/in /by
blog communication
No surprise – a special research study conducted for the Journal of Financial Planning on ways planners communicate with clients showed that, in most categories, more communication is better.  But exactly what kinds of communication matter most?

As Evan Beach, CFP® reports in the article, several different types of communication were examined:

1.  Educational pieces about investments: These had a high positive association with satisfaction and trust, but the difference was marginal when sent more than once per month.

2.  Non-investment-related educational pieces: These seemed to result in the most referrals, particularly when sent digitally.

3.  Interest and hobby-based pieces:
These are best sent quarterly, and should be focused on clients’ interests, not planners’.
Just as financial planners are trying to offer information, encouragement, and thought leadership to clients, we blog content writers are using different methods of reaching out to readers.

If we substitute the product or service being marketed for “investments”, we can use all three of these communication categories in blogging for business, seeking to increase reader engagement and trust:

 

1. Educational blog posts –
Business blogs are wonderful tools around facts.  That’s why business owners and professional practitioners can use corporate blog writing as a way to dispense information, but, even more important, to address misinformation. Blog content writing is a way of “cleaning the air”, replacing factoids with facts, so that buyers can see their way to making decisions.
2.  Non product or service-related blog posts –
One company that made the list of Forrester’s Top 15 Corporate Blogs was 37 signals.com. Why were they chosen? The company “rarely blogs about their products, instead devoting their blog content writing to sharing advice about business and other topics.”

3. Interest-based pieces –
One of the realities about corporate blogs that is toughest for newbie Indianapolis writers of blog content to accept is that other people, specifically online searchers, are interested, first and foremost, in themselves and their own needs, wants, and interests. Their curiosity about what you do – or about what you have to say or sell, I explain in corporate blogging training sessions, will be at its most intense when it concerns testing their own limits or their own knowledge.

Remember, Evan Beach told those financial planners, ”marketing events are just a conduit to get people in the door when the time is right for them.”  For us blog content writers, we use blog posts of different types to get readers “in the door”, so they can act when the time is right for them.
Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Who-Helps-the-Helper Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

compassion in blogging

How you communicate can serve to eliminate, decrease, or exacerbate panic experienced within yourself, your family, your team, and your clients,” asserts financial psychologist William Marty Martin, writing in the Journal of Financial Planning.  “Words have the power of providing comfort, or generating panic, or even helplessness,” Martin adds.

Just as financial planners use words to offer information, encouragement, and thought leadership to their clients, we blog content writers use words to reach out to readers.  And, just as financial planners must help themselves before they can offer help to others writers must prioritize the safety and welfare of ourselves, careful to prioritize our own thinking while serving our business owner and practitioner clients helping them bring the right kinds of messages to their customers and clients.

Martin’s advice to financial planners includes three communication guidelines for use during this time of pandemic-induced uncertainty and fear.  Each of these suggestions, I believe, is relevant to the messages we craft for business blogs:

  1. Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a freelance blog writer, I’ve always known that linking to outside sources is a good tactic for adding breadth and depth to my blog content.  Linking to a news source or journal article, for instance, adds credibility to the ideas I’m expressing.  I encourage content writers and business owners alike to curate, meaning to gather OPW (Other People’s Wisdom) and share that with readers, commenting on that material and relating it to their own topic.
  2. Communicate seeking to inform, comfort, and connect with compassion. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going t be as important in coming years as technical skills.  Your content helps visitors judge whether you have their best interests at heart.  Even if you’ve come across as the most competent of product or service providers, you still need to pass the “warmth” test.
  3. Communicate with clarity and leverage multiple ways of connecting. Mp dpibt about it, the words you use to tell the story are the most important part of blogging for business. Visuals, whether they’re in the form of ‘clip art”, photos, grpahs, charts, or even videos, add “leverage”, connecting in a different, but supporive way.  Yet another way t offer multiple ways of connecting is having guest bloggers explain their point of view on an issues.

Ultimately, as Dr. Martin points out, service providers cannot deliver on their brand promist or fully meet their professional duties until they’ve “taken care of themselves”, clarifying their own opinions and constantly re-examining their own ideas in light of changing realities.

Be the helper in helping-the-helper blogging for business, using this time of crisis to gain new insights for the future!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Business Blogging and SEO – How Strong is the Bond?

/0 Comments/in , /by

SEO and blogs

One of the points Carol Tice lists in comparing blog posts to articles is that blog posts are “built around SEO keywords”.

Does blogging help SEO?  To be sure.  Kristen Hicks of HostGator lists six reasons why:

 

  1. Blogging keeps your website fresh and current.
  2. A blog keeps people on your website for longer.
  3. Blogging helps target long-tail keywords (half of all searches are for terms four words or longer).
  4. A blog offers opportunities for internal linking.
  5. A quality blog gives other sites more reasons to link back to your site.
  6. A blog helps you connect with your audience (which encourages sharing and driving traffic to the site).

All true, but…. Are blogs – should blogs – be “built around” SEO keywords? “ Every successful blog is built on a solid foundation of content, but it’s consistency that’s the real key to successful search engine rank,” offers top web infuencer Neil Patel. “Using your keywords in a natural way in your post isn’t a bad SEO practice,” Patel says,” “but don’t overdo it”. .

 

SEO is the practice of optimizing content to clearly define what your webpage is and what information it is providing, explains Elena Terenteva in the SEMrush Blog. Some areas that need to be optimized, Terenteva explains, include:
  • page titles
  • meta descriptions
  • alt-text
  • internal links
  • anchor text
  • URLs

“Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing!” cautions yoast.com ( The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is the guide our blog content writers at Say It For You rely on).

 

So, no, Carol Tice, blog posts should not be “built around” SEO keywords. As the Yoast article so aptly concludes – “The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone.  Nowadays, quality content is king.”

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail