Blog to Express, Not Impress

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“Write to express, not impress,” advises Mary Cullen in 87 Advanced Business Writing Tips That Actually Work. “Your goal is to easily transmit ideas and information, not to flaunt a big vocabulary,” she says.

Blog content writers should find these three tips particularly apropos:

1.    “Be certain your paragraphs aren’t longer than seven lines (lines, not sentences). Any longer than that and readability studies show that your readers just see a big block of text and jump over it,” Cullen warns. At Say It For You, I call that a “wall of text” – off-putting to searchers, who tend to be content scanners with little patience for “wall-scaling”. At the same time, bunches of short paragraphs can be distracting. What’s more, if all the sentences and paragraphs in a blog post are approximately the same length, you run the risk of boring your readers.

2.  “Use clear words rather than emphasis punctuation, Cullen cautions. “ Exclamation points are often used in business writing to generate enthusiasm when the real problem is imprecise information,” she observes. Maybe. In blog posts, I’ve found, it can be important to “exclaim”, given the tendency for online searchers to only briefly eyeball the blog content. Punctuation, italics, and bold type are some of the ways to draw attention to the central point(s) in each post.

3.  “Don’t smother verbs,” Cullen warns. When verbs are changed into nouns, that muddles the meaning while increasing sentence length. The word “decide” is far more impactful than “decision”, Cullen explains, and “unsmothering verbs is a very powerful clarity technique”. Adverbs sometimes “smother” verbs, I tell content writers. Use stronger verbs, Writers’ Digest says, and you won’t need the help of adverbs.

These are just three tips out of the 87, but, at Say It For You, we know that the basics of blogging for business remain the same – building trust and offering valuable information. In fact, you might say, when we write to express, not impress, it’s about two things – creating customers and keeping them engaged.

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Blogging the Lure and What They Say

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At Say It For You, I’m always on the lookout for different “templates” for presenting information about any business or professional practice. The “nucleus” around which business blog posts are formed is their topic (issues, products, services and advice related to their field). Although the general topic remains the same over time, there is endless variety that can be used to make each blog post special, with one way being the use of different templates.

Browsing through a magazine called Where to Retire, I found an interesting template in a long article naming the 50 Best Master-Planned Communities in the United States. For each community, the report consisted of two longer sections: the Lure (special features of that community) and “What Residents Say” (testimonials), followed by facts and statistics (the name of the developer, the price, the monthly homeowner fee, and whether the community is age-restricted).

Whenever you have several pieces of information to impart, consider different “templates” that can unify them under one umbrella. The “template” is the glue that ties the different pieces of information together and makes the information more usable for readers.

Collating and curating are two ways blog content writers deliver value to readers:

In collating, we gather content from our own former blog posts, newsletters, or even emails, adding material from other people’s blogs and articles, and from magazine content or books. We then organize that material into categories, summarizing the main ideas we think our readers will find useful. The Where to Retire article is a perfect example of collation.

Curating goes one important step further, progressing from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic. When curation is really successful, two things happen:

  1. Readers relate to the “curator” – you, the author of the blog post – as an involved person who is personally engaged with the subject.
  2. Readers realize there’s something here that’s important and useful for them.

Blogging “the lure” is a perfect example of collation combined with testimonials!

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The Thesis or “One-Sentence Speech” Can Come Anywhere in the Blog

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one sentence speech in blogs

Years ago, at a National Speakers Association meeting, I remember being taught to create a “one-sentence speech”. The idea was that anyone who’d been in the audience should come away being able to summarize in one line what I’d said; otherwise, my speech would not have been well-constructed.

I believe the same rule holds true for blog content writing. The “thesis statement” consists of the words that summarize the whole idea of the post. The “thesis statement” doesn’t need to be at the beginning of the piece, I teach at Say It For You, but there needs to be little doubt as to which sentence it is.

To illustrate that point, I found an article in a journal called BioTechniques (a professional journal left inadvertently on the table at my favorite coffee house the other morning). Not being a physicist, I understood very little of the technical information in the article titled “High-throughput Quant-iT Pico-Green assay using an automated liquid handling system”. Still, the structure perfectly illustrates the idea that a topic statement does not need to appear at the beginning of your essay or blog.

The article begins with a 122-word paragraph introducing the work of the NGS service that processes and tests DNA samples. Then, and only then, is the thesis statement presented: “A novel approach based on fluorescence assays is more appropriate and accurate for DNA input quantification for any applications in molecular biology.”

At Say It For You, I’m fond of saying to blog content writers that their task is to keep the reader engaged with valuable, personal, and relevant information, beginning with the “downbeat”, which is what I call the first sentence of each post. But that first sentence can be used to capture attention and make an impact without actually stating the “thesis” or conclusion of the piece.

Whether your blog is about food, bedding, pet care, or biotechnology processes, you need a one-sentence speech, but it needn’t come at the beginning of the post.

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Master Lists Can Call Blog Readers to Action

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master lists in blogging

 

This month’s issue of the Journal of Financial Planning included a description of two experiments designed to explore the way consumers make investment decisions. Simple lists, researchers found can overcome “cognitive blind spots”, speeding up the decision making process…

(Now retired from my career as a CFP®, I stay interested in behavioral finance, which is using science to move individuals in the direction of better decision-making. I view my present work as content writer for business blogs as very similar – helping my clients’ readers make good buying decisions.)

“Identifying investment goals is a critical step in developing a sound financial plan that helps investors reach their objectives,” but the success of goals-based planning hinges on two important steps, behavioral scientists at Morningstar realized. Investors had to find what goals are important to them, and then prioritize those goals. The reality, however, was that behavioral biases too often undermined the process, and investors found themselves unable to take action that truly matched their own goals.

Dual process theory suggests that our minds use two different processes to make decisions:

  1. System One is fast and intuitive
  2. System Two is slow and deliberative

Because of a lack of pertinent information, a failure to pay attention to key information, and time constraints, science has found, we often rely on System 1 when it comes to decision-making

In this experiment, the researchers created a “master list” containing 12 typical financial and non-financial retirement goals (financial independence, health care, housing, travel and leisure, etc.). Study participants were asked to complete two sequential tasks through an online survey:

Step One: Each participant was asked to list and rank their top three investment goals. (The program then added those self-generated goals for each participant, in random order, to the master list of common investment goals.)

Step Two: Each participant was asked to look at the master list of goals and, if they wanted to, change their list of top three goals.

Results – 26% of respondents changed their top goal after seeing the master list. Almost twice as many changed either one or both of their top two goals, and 73% changed one or more of their top three goals.

Conclusions – The provision of a master list helped clarify a person’s previously ambiguous self-reported goals. “When asked to prioritize a list of goals that are important to them, people may not know what their preferences are and therefore elect to prioritize short-term goals over long-term ones or emphasize minor objectives while neglecting major aspirations because of the desire for instant gratification.”

How does all this information about investor behavior translate into blog content writing? Hasn’t the technique of using lists in blog posts been overdone? Perhaps, but I think using lists in blog posts is less about grabbing attention and more about demonstrating ways in which the company’s (or the practitioner’s) products, services and expertise are useful, perhaps in unexpected ways.

Since buyers often use System One thinking, relying on brand awareness or past purchases to make buying decisions, providing a “master list” showing other options is designed to stimulate more thoughtful purchasing choices. At Say It For You, an important goal is opening up readers’ minds and “calling them to action”. The research I read about in the Journal of Financial Planning suggests that master lists might help in the process!

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Things About Consumer Behavior Blog Content Writers Need to Know

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consumer behavior
This month’s issue of the Journal of Financial Planning included a description of two experiments designed to explore the way consumers make investment decisions. Since success in blog marketing is designed to assist in consumer decision making, I’m devoting this week’s Say It For You blog posts to discussing the insights those researchers share with Journal readers…

Who is investing in ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds)? Using an investor survey, researchers investigated the relationship between financial knowledge of an investment product and consumers’ choice to actually invest in that product. Their hypotheses going in –given that ETFs are still a relatively new product with benefits still not fully understood by the full investment community, increasing investor knowledge would be a significant variable when predicting ETF ownership.

Interestingly, the authors divided “knowledge” into two categories:

  1. Subjective knowledge (how much an investor SAYS they know on the subject)
  2. Objective knowledge (how successful that investor is answering knowledge questions on the subject)

Their hypotheses going into the experiment was that both subjective and objective investor knowledge are positively associated with ownership of the product itself. The findings? Both subjective and objective investor knowledge do have a positive association with ETF ownership.

Researchers’ advice to financial advisors? To increase ETF adoption among clients, engage in education efforts to pave the way for greater acceptance. Significantly, the authors stressed that “supporting investors’ confidence in their own financial knowledge may be as important as educating those investors.”

Now retired from my career as a CFP®, I stay interested in behavioral finance, which is using science to move individuals in the direction of better decision-making. In fact, I see my present work as content writer for business blogs as very similar – helping readers gain access to – and process – the information they need to make good buying decisions.

In blogging for business, teaching is the new selling. Since customers have access to so much information, they want to know that you and your organization have something new to teach them. Even more important, you need to help readers absorb, buy into, and use the information you provide through your blog.

At the same time, (recalling the Journal researchers’ advice about supporting consumers’ confidence in their own financial knowledge), even when it comes to myth debunking in blogs, our content has the potential of rubbing readers the wrong way. People generally don’t like to have their assertions and assumptions challenged, even when they came to a website seeking information on a particular subject.
As a blog content writer, then, you want the provider (vendor or practitioner) to be perceived as a subject matter expert who is offering usable information and insights in addition to readers’ own knowledge level…

To the extent you’re successful, the blog content itself constitutes a Call to Action!  Once readers feel assured that you’re “meeting them where they are”, they might be ready to take action before they even read all the way into the blog post!

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