Practical Plan for Quilters Words for Blog Content Writers as Well

Quilt with Fan of BlocksPlan. Shop. Cut. Sew.  These are the four steps in a practical plan McCall gives quilters.

  • Plan. That’s the real secret behind corporate blog writing sustainability. At the very outset of the blogging initiative, define a few basic “leitmotifs” or themes to form the backbone of your writing, including beliefs you hold about your industry that you think are important to convey to readers, and specific ways you successfully serve customers and clients.
  • Shop. Then, to help you flesh out these themes on an ongoing basis, one truly practical planning tip is to keep a blog idea file, online or in a paper folder. In this folder would go articles you cut out of newspapers or magazines (I’ve used just such a one in today’s Say It For You post), notes on ideas gleaned from a seminar, radio, blogs and book. Ideas are everywhere – you simply need to stay in “shopping mode”.
  • Cut.  “If your copy tells too many irrelevant stories, you will lose your prospects’ attention and interest,” fellow blogger Michel Fortin reminds us. And, whether you happen to be a freelance blog writer like me or are blogging for your own business, it’s clear that blog posts have a simple advantage over more static traditional website copy.  While each post should have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business or your professional practice, there’s no need to toss those extra pieces of “material“ – simply save them for another post.
  • Sew.  Writing blog content to help market a business or professional practice is very much like sewing the small, different colored squares of a quilt together into one sustained, coherent thing of beauty. First of all, the pattern is varied, yet repeating.  Remember, the more frequently your content mentions the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business, the better your chances of your site being found for those very phrases. Maybe even more important, a business blog, consists of many, many posts spread out over a long period of time, clarifying, adding, proving, restating, giving examples, testimonials, and stories, building belief piece by piece.

McCall’s  practical plan for quilters works for blog content writers as well!

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Questions Readers Shouldn’t Need to Ask at an Open Blog

“The best way to find out if a school is a good match for your student and your family is to visit the school in person.” Great-Schools.org offers a list of questions to ask at the next open house:

Does this school have a particular educational philosophy or mission? For blogs to be effective, they must serve as positioning statements. The “visit” has to cute boy sitting at table and writing. conclude with readers understanding exactly what your particular philosophy or mission is.

What is this school’s approach to student discipline and safety?

Prospects are always mentally posing the “What’s In It For Me?” questions.
What’s the benefit in this for ME? How will MY interests be protected and served if I choose to do business with you or become your client or patient? What will you do to keep me “safe” from risk?

What kinds of library resources are available for students?
Serving as a “go-to” source for online readers can be a great formula of success for
business bloggers. Readers could, in theory, have sought information from sources
more authoritative than your blog. Yet those same readers will be sure to appreciate that  you’ve gone to the trouble of culling valuable nuggets from a variety of sources and  helped them make sense of the information.

How do students get to school? Is free busing available?
Generally, online searchers want to find out what they’ll get if they buy and want to gain
perspective about how the pricing and the quality stacks up against the competition.

Online searchers who visit your business blog are very much like those parents at a school
open house. The parents are looking for the very best institution to help with their children’s
education. Online searchers arrive at your business blog needing to know how to find products
and services, how to do something, how to solve very specific problems.

Don’t wait for readers to pull out that list of prepared questions – your
blog content should address those questions ahead of time. That way, the answers will be
there waiting when visitors arrive!

 

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Smaller Targets, Better Hits in Blogging for Business

Smaller target“No business can be all things to all people. The more narrowly you can define your target
market, the better,” according to Entrepreneur. com. “Rather than creating a niche, many
entrepreneurs make the mistake of falling into the ‘all over the map’ trap”, ” the authors continue.
In fact, they advise, these days the trend is toward smaller niches.

In a way, business blogs are the perfect marketing tool for niche markets. Remember that  you, the business owner, are not going out to find customer through your blog content. Blogs
work the other way around, through “pull marketing”. The people who find your blog are those  who are already online looking for information, products, or services that relate to what you
know, what you have, and what you do!

The other day I came across an excellent example of targeting a niche within a niche. AARP
Magazine had a full page article called “In Your 50s: 3 Supplements to Take Now”. Just think
about that for a moment. AARP is an organization for seniors, and today their magazine is
enjoyed by readers in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, not just their 50s. But in that issue, the focus
was on one niche within their readership.

Do you suppose the AARP editors worried about “turning off” the other 4/5 of their reader
demographic? Not at all. Those readers will expect to have their needs discussed in another
issue of the magazine.

In fact, that’s what I love most about blogging as a communications channel. Each post
can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business.
Other important things you want to discuss? Other segments of your market you want to
address? There will always be later blog posts!

Blogs are smaller, shorter and more centered around just one idea than e-zines or newsletters
or even web page content. And blog posts will stick around forever. Blogs can link to other blogs
and web sites, turning mini-power into maxi-power, and increasing exposure to the search
engines.

In darts, narrowing the target would make it harder to hit. In blogging for business, smaller targets can make for better “hits”!

 

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Who’s Who Blogging for Business

I think the article “Who’s Who in Your Doctor’s Office” in AARP Magazine is 
onto a good Shield. Armor. Question mark.thing, using a concept that could be useful for us blog content writers.

“Back in the day, there were doctors and nurses,” AARP authors Sarah Barchus and Cady
Sagon explain. “Now a plethora of health care professionals may be caring for you. Here’s how
to keep them straight. .. ”

There follows a detailed description of what each professional wears (the length of the white
coat differentiates a physician’s assistant from a medical student, while technicians wear
scrubs), the level of education required for each position, and what each professional actually
does.

The tone of this article – well, I found it quite reassuring. As a consumer, I must say, it made me
feel “armed” with understanding.

That’s precisely the feeling tone I think every professional practice or business would like to
communicate to customers and clients, and one way to do that might be through writing “Who’s
Who in our business/our office/our industry” blog posts. Apart from the typical “Our Team”
landing page on your website, which introduces people by name with a brief bio, the “Who’s
Who” would focus on the function each position serves.

“Analytics and data give us all sorts of insiqhts into what our customers want from our business. But
sometimes … don’t you wish you could get an answer straight from your customers?” asks
KISSmetrics .. Why are people using one feature three times as often as another? What causes
customers to use your product less frequently (and eventually stop altogether)? When we match
customer feedback to what we’re seeing in our analytics, we get a much clearer picture of what’s
going on. Then we’ll know how to fix problems and go after the right opportunities, KISSmetrics
observes.

After dealing with Say It For You client companies representing dozens of different industries and
categories, I discovered that the feedback “loop” begins with customers knowing what to expect from each
department or each professional in the companies or practices with whom they’re doing business.

Helping your customers understand “Who’s Who”, I explain to blogging clients, will go a long, long way towards putting people at ease with your products and services.  Over time, you’ll be arming your readers with information!

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Spam Comment Remedies for Business Blogs

For advice on the issue of the spam comment “attacks” that tend to plague newly created blog pages, I turned to friend Jeremy Politt of the ITeam . Jeremy was kind enough to share some of the following information for the benefit of Say It For You readers:

Jeremy starts out by admitting that there is no definitive way to stop SPAM comments 100%.

However, there are a couple of steps business owners can take when first setting up their blog platform:

  • Don’t automatically accept comments. Comments can still be submitted, but you can at least review them and decide whether to publish them.
  • Include a “Captcha” (you know, where they have to type in a set of numbers or letters to prove they’re human, not a digital SPAM machine gun.)
  • There are free or very inexpensive plug-in software solutions that filter keywords in comments to test if they’re legit. Jeremy was nice enough to provde this link to a list of plug-ins: http://premium.spmudev.org/blog/stop-wordpress-comment-spam/

According to anti-spam service Askimet, at least 80% of all comments posted to blogs are spam.

Have you been having this very problem on your business blog? (Isn’t it nice to be noticed? LOL)

 

“Jeremy Pollitt is the Founder and President of ITeam.  ITeam provides customized internet marketing solutions to small and medium sized business for the last 7 years.  ITeam has a proven track record of helping business getting greater exposure on the internet.  Click here to contact Jeremy.

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