“If a speaker delivers the most amazing speech of his or her life, but no one is around to hear it, did he or she really deliver a speech?” asks Sean Bradley in Speaker Magazine. “It’s the same thing with online marketing and advertising, Bradley goes on to say. If you’re not represented properly online, you won’t be found.

Understanding the “lay of the land” means understanding how powerful the Internet is as a resource of visibility, credibility, and business development, Bradley continues. Traditional marketing talks about three stages to the buying cycle, he reminds speakers:

• Stimuli (ads that lead to point of interest)
• First moments of truth (purchasing the product or service)
• Second moment of truth (the ownership experience)

Google, he notes, revolutionized this cycle in a book titled ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth). Consumers’  ZMOT is the time between stimulus and purchase, where they search for more information, reviews, and feedback to help them determine if they want to buy.

Bradley brings this idea into the speaker’s world.  “When people hear about you through an ad or blog post, or you’re recommended by someone, chances are they will Google before they call,” he remarks.  “What do you think they’ll find? Is your content relevant and current?”

The Content Marketing Institute concurs: “Smart marketers understand that traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute, and that there has to be a better way.”

But what exactly IS content marketing? Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and destributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acwquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The operative term here is “consistent content”, which is precisely what blogging for business is all about.  “Persistent” would be an appropriate desciptor as well, since the long-term effectiveness of any business blog depends on reliability and continued effort.

Content is king online.  But that content must be accurate, current – and dependable.  The content of a business blog must not only attract new customers, but keep regulars coming back. As the “hub” of any business’ or professional practice’s online marketing effort, the blog has a steady job to do.

Sure, a business or practice may be just one tree of many in a forest of competitors, but blog marketing is one way to help that tree make a big sound!

Who would’ve thunk – such ballyhoo about bullet points! It seems content writers either love or absolutely abhor those little black dots.

Representing the critics, Ken Lopez, in The Litigation Consulting Report, lists no fewer than 12 reasons bullet points are bad news, especially for trial graphics. He’d much rather see lawyers actually speaking to the jury, rather than showing them text-heavy presentations riddled with bullet points.

Jon of Presentation Advisors is equally antipathetic towards bullet points in PowerPoint presentations.  PowerPoint and Prezi, he says, aren’t text-based media, but are there to support the information coming out of a speaker’s mouth. What’s more, he gripes, when we use bullets, we tend to lump ideas together on the same slide without giving any one of those ideas a chance to shine.

As a business blogger, I’m kind of partial to bullet points, and from what I’ve been told, Google and the other search engines like them, too.  Online searchers who’ve found our blog posts, remember, aren’t getting the information out of our mouths – we have only our written words, with perhaps some charts or pictures, to engage their attention.

That lists and bullet points are generally a good fit for blogs is something I actually stress in corporate blogging training sessions.  What I’ve found over the years is that lists help keep readers – and writers – on track.

Susan Gunelius (“20 Ideas for Writing a Blog Post”) apparently agrees. She suggests starting with a number, then taking it from there, with. Top 10 lists, 5 things not to do, 3 reasons I love something, etc.

Interesting that in just the past two weeks, there’s been a lot of press about David Letterman’s plans to retire. Letterman’s Top Ten Lists were such an effective way of organizing content that, when the talk show host first moved to CBS, NBC unsuccessfully tried to claim ownership of the idea.

Like anything else, of course, bullet points can be both poorly used and over-used. Using parallelism is a good rule, beginning each bullet point with the same part of speech and using the same grammatical form throughout.

Writers.stackexchange.com has some wisdom to add: “Bullet points are visually attractive and make it easy for a reader to locate important information. Nevertheless, try to use them sparingly: too many bullet-pointed sections in the same document will mean that their impact is lost.”

Love ’em or hate ’em, those little back dots have their uses in blogging for business!