Staying Specific in Blog Marketing

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“Including one, or a combination of certain aspects can generate higher opt-in,” Ryan Duss and Russ Hennesberg explain in the book Digital Marketing for Dummies. Those important aspects include:
  • a promise
  • an example
  • a shortcut
  • a solution
There’s a big caveat – these will work only if they are specific, the authors caution.  Generic or clever titles, for example, generally decrease conversions, so it’s important to craft a clear promise. An example must also be specific, perhaps in the form of a case study, and the more specific you are in describing the shortcuts and solutions, the more engaging that content will be.

One way to keep it “real”, we agree at Say it For You, is to be specific. One concern business owners and practitioners express to me is that they don’t want to come across as boastful in their blog.  At the same time, they need to convey the reasons prospects ought to choose them over their competition. This is where being specific comes in – let the facts do the boasting, I explain.

When Inc. Magazine interviewed the purchasing agents of several mega-corporations, asking how each preferred to sold to by suppliers and vendors, the responses supported the concept of specificity.  Northrup Grumman executives actually said, “”Be as specific as possible when describing what you can do for us.  Don’t be shy.  If you have a capability, highlight that capability.”

Benefits consultant Mel Schlesinger tells salespeople the same thing.  Instead of a generic opening (“I have an idea I want to roll by you”), he suggests agents switch to idea-specific ones (I have an idea that can help you reduce employees’ pressure on you to increase wages.”)

Rush’s Magnetic Marketing Checklist is based on the same concept:  Choose a specific audience, she advises, then choose a specific program you can solve for them.

Web searchers are on a fact-finding mission, looking for information about what you do, what you sell, and what you know about.  The more specific the key words and phrases in the title and in the body of the blog post, the greater the chance search engines will direct those searchers to your blog.

To succeed in blog marketing, it’s important to stay specific!
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Getting Creative With Organizing Principles for Blogs

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“A well-chosen organizing principle can serve as a strong differentiator for your story, helping to set it apart from the competition,“ suggests Paula Munier in her book the Writer’s Guide to Beginnings. 

Organizing principles run from beginning to end throughout the story, and can:
  • help add layers of meaning
  • enhance the imagery
  • deepen the story’s themes
If you’re writing from the first-person point of view of the heroine, for example, you should stick to that point of view for the entire story, Munier suggests.  But, using the novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple as an example, Munier shows how a resourceful author uses devices to being other voices into the story. Semple incorporates emails and letters received by Bernadette, school notes, signs, police reports, even report cards.  That way, even though the entire novel is in first person, the reader can enjoy other points of view and styles of writing.

In corporate blogging, I stress first person business blog writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the business owner, practitioner, or the team standing ready to serve customers. In terms of getting creative, though, curating materials from different sources allows the content to keep its organizing principle intact while offering a broader range of information and adding interest as well.

Different blog posts, of course, serve different purposes. Second person (“you”, “your”) is a good fit for how-to blog posts, while third person (“he”, “she”, “they”) may be a choice for news items.

“The voice of a writer is usually easier to hear in first person,” says William Cane in Write Like the Masters. Why? “Third person narratives so often mimic the ‘beige voice’ of an objective reporter,” Cane explains, whereas “with first person, it’s usually easier to be intimate, unique, and quirky.”

Each blog (not just each blog post) needs an organizing principle, which should be based on a deep understanding of the target audience. Still, by incorporating outside sources, “Other People’s Wisdom”, and even quoting from documents, letters, comments, etc., blog content writers can get creative around that principle.

To stay personal, we Indianapolis blog writers need to show readers we’re talking very specifically to them. At the same time, blogging for business will be at its best when it’s colorful, filled with the company’s special brand of energy and passion, all built around that all-important organizing principle.  
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For Lack of a Genre, the Blog Was Lost

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“I’ve learned the hard way that it’s very hard to sell any story that doesn’t fit neatly into a known category,” writes Paula Munier in her book The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings. “I won’t know where or how to sell it, the editor won’t know how to pitch it to her publishing board, the bookseller won’t know where to shelve it, and the readers won’t know where to find it.
In blog content writing, the same issue exists.  If it’s not clear what the genre, or category is, search engines won’t know where to “shelve” your blog post, and readers, therefore, won’t see it in their search results.
In the WordPress platform, for example, categories are the general labels or “genres”.  A category symbolizes a topic or group of topics, themeisle.com explains, that are connected to one another in some way. The category assigned to each blog post helps organize the website content, making sure that the reader has an easy time finding the content on the ‘shelf”.
Meanwhile, themeisle.com adds, assigning categories to your own blog posts prevents Google from doing the indexing for you, perhaps in ways that are not the most beneficial in helping you get found.

When you categorize a new blog post, that quickly tells readers what the post is about, as well as providing a helpful way to group posts together, making it easier for readers to find related posts. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension offers a list of best practices when using categories, including:

 

  • Plan what categories you plan to use throughout your site and stick with those.
  • Assign each new post to one-three of those categories.
  • Use consistent capitalization and spelling (WordPress treats capitalized and noncapitalized versions of the same name and two different categories).
  • Use terminology that you believe will be familiar to your audience.
  • Don’t use categories that are applicable to only one or two posts.In keeping with all this good advice, at Say it For You, we’ve always used categories to help our clients’ readers find their way to content that matches their specific interests.  But after reading the book “the Lean Startup”, I had an additional thought, based on using a lean production principle in assigning individual blog posts to certain categories. When you‘re studying your Google Analytics, you can see which categories were most frequently viewed by readers that week. Let’s say there were twenty five “sessions” for a particular category. That tells you to “replenish” that category with new content in the same manner as the car dealer might replenish its stock of front bumpers based on 25 customer orders. In other words, the content creation would be driven by the ‘demand” for each category, with the blog itself functioning as a consumer survey tool!

    “For lack of a genre, the sale was lost,” Paula Munier quipped.  Don’t allow the effect of your blog content to get lost for lack of a category!

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What’s Tops in HVAC Blogs is What’s Tops in Blog Content Writing – B

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Marketing company Broadly.com looked for certain qualities in compiling their list of top HVAC Blogs in 2018. Earlier this week, I commented on six of those points, because they can work for  blog content writing in any industry or profession. Here are six more:

Advice on finding the right components
Employment consultants name four things workers need:  people who help them, tools, information, and an exchange of ideas. Blog readers need those same components.

Region-specific posts
Niche marketing means targeting the information you offer in the blog to a small portion of a market that is not being readily served by the mainstream product or service marketers.  Your blog helps you serve specific “regions” or “niches” through providing up-to-date, frequent, and relevant content that applies specifically to their needs.

Numerous posts (there’s a lot of content to pick from)
With frequency and recency playing such important roles in search engine rankings, what the consistent posting of content on behalf of a business or practice provides readers with “content to choose from”.

Lists of resources
On a blog, links represent resources  you’ve collected, or curated, for your readers. Adding links to other, credible, resources means you take your responsibility – to keep your readers fully informed – seriously.

Advice on respiratory health
Air conditioning/heating professionals don’t pretend to be healthcare mavens.  At the same time, they realize that indoor air quality affects residents’ or workers’ health. Content writing can be about not just your brand, but about related topics. 

Site updates regularly
The parallel lesson I stress to Indianapolis blog content writers is “yo-yo blogging”.  Spacing SEO marketing blog posts at regular intervals and maintaining consistency has a double advantage. The blogging becomes part of the business owner’s or blogger’s routine. Meanwhile regular readers and subscribers (and search engines as well!) come to expect a regular flow of information.

At Say it For You, we realize, all twelve qualities which Broadly.com pinpointed in “Top HVAC practitioners in any field!.

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What’s Tops in HVAC Blogs is What’s Tops in Blog Content Writing – A

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What makes for a good heating and air conditioning blog?  Well, some of the qualities marketing company Broadly.com looked for in choosing “the Top HVAC Blogs of 2018” can serve as a guide for blog content writers in any field:

A focus on industry changes
What I’ve learned over the years of helping Say It For You clients in different industries create content, is that customers expect their service and product providers to keep them up-to-date by condensing all that website/newspaper/magazine/trade journal wisdom into bite-sized pieces..

Checklists and troubleshooting guides
Blog readers often download a checklist and often share it with someone else., and, often, a checklist serves as a Call to Action.

Energy-saving advice
The whole concept of offering practical, usable, advice, especially if it’s a bit out of the ordinary is a perfect fit for business blog content writers in any industry or profession.


Energy myths
Myth-debunks are a great use of blogs, I’ve found, because many of the misunderstandings about a product or service present themselves in the form of questions and comments from readers and customers. Shining the light of day on that misinformation shines light on your own expertise.

Descriptions of new technologies
Repurposing involves turning existing blog posts into new ones. The content in the new posts reinforces the content from the former posts. But the new version progresses to new information about developments in your field.

Easy-to-understand articles
Readability is a critical aspect of online writing, with the idea being to match your writing to your intended audience. There are tests you can put your blog through, including the Flesch-Kinkaid, which shows what grade in school a person would need to have completed to  be able to understand your content.

These six important qualities which Broadly.com pinpointed in “Top HVAC Blogs of 2018” are just the beginning. In our next Say It For You post, we’ll note even more ways in which those good tips from the HVAC industry can “heat up” blog content writing.
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