Good Grammar Affects the Effect of a Business Blog – Part A

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Of the 11 common mistakes bloggers make in their first year, blogger Holly Sutton observes, one of those is making too many spelling and grammar errors.
As a blog content writing trainer, I find, grammar errors are all too common even among experienced bloggers. So, reasoning that social distancing requirements have left many content writers with extra time on their hands, I decided to devote this week’s Say it For You posts to spelling and grammar cleanup hints. (Sure, as Sutton points out, there are editing tools out there, but they don’t catch all the details and don’t really explain the principle behind each change.)

Homonyms are words that sound alike, but mean different things.  It’s important to choose the word that says what you meant to say. Otherwise, a goofy mistake can just make you look silly, as Brian Clark of copyblogger.com points out. Confusing homonyms  Clark specifically mentions include:
  • Your (refers to something you own); you’re is a contraction of “you are”.

  • It’s means “it is” – It’s cold outside. Its means belonging to it. Each toy should be put in its proper place.

  • Affect is a verb meaning influence.  The weather affects my mood.  Effect is usually used as a noun meaning “result” – Cloudy weather has a depressive effect on me.

  • Lose and loose are not true homonyms, and they are certainly not synonyms, yet too often I see one being used when the other would be correct.  Your clothes might be too loose, but you certainly wouldn’t want to lose them accidentally.

  • When someone praises us, we appreciate the compliment; a complement is something that matches well with something else, such as an armchair in a color that looks good next to your sofa.

  • The principal in an organization or company is the most important person; a principle is fundamental truth or standard.

Amy Mascott, writing in Parents Magazine, names other common homonyms that can be confused, including two threesomes:
  1. There will be a lot to eat at their house tonight; they’re (they are) buying up all the hot dogs in town.

  2. We went to the park two nights in a row. Did you go, too?

    No doubt about it – in blogging for business, grammar affects the effect!

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Contagion on Purpose Through Blogging

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In recent months, the word “contagious” has certainly taken on frightening meaning.  But in his book Contagious, Jonah Berger explores ways to create contagion around good ideas, products, and services. “Regardless of how plain or boring a product or idea may seem,” Berger says, “there are ways to make it contagious.”

Every one of Berger’s ideas for achieving contagion, I found, is directly applicable to blog marketing:

1.  Find inner remarkability (break from what people expect from the experience of using the product or service). For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?”  

2.  Leverage game mechanics (use elements of a game to keep people engaged, motivated and wanting more. A core mechanic is the essential play activity players perform again and again in a game. Each business blog post should impart one new idea or call for a single action. 

3.  Make people feel like insiders (scarcity and exclusivity drives desirability). Hitting precisely the right “advertorial” note is the big challenge in corporate blog writing. Exclusivity is one of the five “key copy drivers” which business content writers should use to enhance audience response.

4.  Use “triggers” to keep ideas and products fresh in the minds of consumers, associating your product or service with some familiar aspect of life. In your blog content, link your products and services to prevalent trends.

5.  Use emotional content to evoke feelings that drive people to share and to act. Evoking emotion creates a feeling in your audience of being connected with you and the people in your business or practice.

6.  Provide practical information that helps others save time, energy, and resources. Chunking, or breaking down information into bite-sized pieces , allows readers to digest and more easily use new information.
7.  Embed your ideas in stories that people want to hear and retell. Let stories about people tell the story of your company, your products, and of the services you provide.

When it comes to spreading ideas through blogging for business, the word contagious can be a very good thing indeed!
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Practicing Social Nearness Through Blogging

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“Let’s face it. For most of us, business blogging is hard,” admits Mark Pridham of Canada-based the pridhamgroup.com. “Coming up with new ideas, doing the research, and then doing the actual writing are all big pieces of it. It takes time, patience, strategy, consistency and perseverance,” Pridham adds.

With social media being all about social connection, we’re certainly living though a strange time, a time when it’s all about social distancing. No easy solutions here, but perhaps, as blog content writers, we can heed the reminder offered by John Sharp, MD offers in Harvard Health Publishing

Avoid unintentionally practicing emotional distancing.

Amen, I want to say. After thirteen years of interviewing business owners and practitioners and creating blog marketing content for them, I think Sharp’s statement is true all the time, not only during this unprecedented self isolation period. A few years ago, in a Science News article, editor Nancy Shute put it this way: “The fear of solutions may be greater than the fear of impacts. Being bombarded with facts can make people dig in even more. People tend to seek out evidence that supports their own world view. In short, emotion trumps fact.”

In her book In This Together, business writer Nancy D. O’Reilly describes strengths that help women succeed in business, including these three:

  1. Emotional intelligence (the capacity to notice, manage, and express emotions)
  2. Empathy (the ability to understand other people’s feelings)
  3. Compassion (sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it)
It’s always true that, in blogging for business, face-to-screen is the closest blog content writers come to their prospects. And, yes, even in B2B situations, emotion-based blog marketing can be effective.  Remember, behind every decision, there is always a person, a being with feelings.

Always, but especially now, we must use content to create connections with our audience, which will make them feel a) supported and b) receptive to our message. As writers, we must present the business or practice as very personal rather than transactional.
More than ever before, it’s important for readers to sense there there are real-life humans behind the scenes providing the information, the products, the services. If ever there was a time to focus on being authentic and practicing emotional nearness, it’s now.
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Ways to Feed the Blog Content “Monster”

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“There are two ways to “feed the content monster”, Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick suggest in their book The Art of Social Media:
  1. Content creation
  2. Content curation (finding other people’s good stuff, summarizing it and showing it)
However you’re finding – or ”birthing” your content, the authors tell us, there are dictates to follow:

Be valuable. (What happened? What does it mean? How can readers do that?)
One way to talk “value”, we teach at Say It For You, is to translate a benefit that a product or service has that isn’t typically expressed in dollar terms.

Be interesting. (Don’t assume your followers want to read about only a narrow band of subjects.)
Blog content writing is the perfect vehicle for conveying a corporate message using a a seemingly unrelated piece of trivia.

Be bold. (Express your feelings and agenda.)
Whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.
Be brief. (People make snap judgments and move along if you don’t capture interest quickly.)
While blogs should be “small” (readers should not need to scroll down to read “the rest of the story”), the way to make blogs exciting is to find the “bigger idea”.  
Be visual. (Every post should contain “eye candy”.)
Engaging blog posts need to contain visuals, whether they’re in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, to add interest and evoke emotion.

Be organized. (Structure information in chunks.)
Chunking is one way business bloggers can offering technical information in “chewable tablet form”, because it refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest it.

Be a Mensch. (Make positive and intelligent comments, suggest resources.)
Providing external links from your blog post to a news source or magazine article or to someone else’s blog post on your subject shows you’re staying in touch with others in your industry and that you’re confident you have special value to offer within a competitive environment.
Feeding the content “monster” over weeks, months, and years is certainly a challenge. Luckily, as Shakespeare pointed out many moons ago, “There are “more ways on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy” Could the Bard have been foreseeing the art of social media?
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In Business Blogs, Dessert May Come First

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“When you sit down for a meal, most people don’t expect to eat dessert first.  And when you sit down with a book, you don’t expect to know the ending before you start reading.” So begins the intro to Sherry Deutschmann’s business book Lunch With Lucy.  Nevertheless, Deutschmann, founder and CEO of Letter Logic, Inc. lets us know upfront – and very precisely – what the central theme of her book is going to be.
As blog content writers, our first instinct might, in fact, be to leave “dessert’ for last, offering information using a logical, linear structure. For a variety of reasons, though, that might not be the most effective way to present ideas in every situation.

A blog itself is made up of short, frequently updated posts arranged in reverse chronological order.  Within any one post, topics may be presented sequentially or climactically (building
towards an important conclusion). The traditional structure of a newspaper story follows the model of an upside-down pyramid, with the most important information first and the details filled in later. That inverted pyramid concept may not be right for many blog posts, because readers must be kept hungry for more information in order to keep reading. Ginney Soskey of Hubspot suggests presenting valuable information again and again through the entire article.
Whether readers access the content in the first place, of course, depends on whether they click on the title. There are two basic categories of blog titles, we’ve found at Say It For You. The first simply conveys what content readers should expect to find in the post or article. That type of title is not “cutesy” or particularly engaging, but can be highly effective in business blogging because it’s short and to the point and uses keyword phrases that match up with what a reader may have typed into the search bar. The second category of title arouses readers’ curiosity, but gives only the barest hint of the content to follow. 
With an important purpose of marketing blogs is attracting online readers, blog post titles are a crucial element in the process. Readers need assurance that they will be coming to “the right place” for the information they need.
In blog content writing, at least a little taste of the “dessert” might need to be served straightaway!
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