A Business Blog By Any Other Name

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“There is not a better way to add relevant content to your website on a regular basis than to utilize a blog,”  says Nicole Beachum  of socialmediatoday.com. “If you do not want to call it a blog, you can call it a “learning center” or any other catchphrase that you want to use to categorize the frequent posts to your website—at the end of the day they are blogs and these blogs are powerful,” asserts the digital marketing advisor.

“For most small businesses, they do not have the financial resources to run a bunch of advertising and marketing campaigns. Many don’t have the resources to even have a professionally designed and optimized website built.  At least with blogging and some simple SEO you can do yourself, you still have an opportunity to be present, be found, and get your business in front of your target market,” chimes in Chris Eggleston.

So, have the latest changes in Google’s algorithm taken away that opportunity to be present and found?  Newbie blog content writers and business owners alike have been asking me that question, having gotten a whiff of  “Hummingbird”, the latest iteration in Google’s attempt to render the matchmaking process between searchers and providers ever more effective.

As Jim Yu of All Things SEO explains it, “Hummingbird allows the Google search engine to better do its job through an improvement in semantic search.  As conversational search becomes the norm, Hummingbird lends understanding to the intent and contextual meaning of terms used in a query.”

Search engine results pages were often polluted with misleading results, explains marketingprofs.com. With Hummingbird technology, the “search engine is better able to discern the relationships between words and thus the context and the user’s intent, delivering a much more relevant search result.”

As my associate Bob Chenoweth explains it, Hummingbird is good news for developers of high-quality content, but bad news for keyword stuffers.” At Say It For You, we’re looking forward to the best matchmaking since Yenta in “Fiddler on the Roof”.

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Higher Blogging for Business

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Why do gurus seek mountaintop retreats? To get the big picture, of course, says James Rogers in the March issue of the Mensa Bulletin. A RPV (transcendental point of view) is a place “from where one can discern the relationships of part-to-part and part-to-whole,” Rogers goes on to explain.  In fact, he adds, we humans are the only primates who stand entirely upright in order to broaden our horizons and get our eyes to TPV level.  From the judge who sits high on her bench to someone who pays to live in a penthouse, people strive for a big-picture aspect on life.

My business blogging trainers’ point of view (BBPV?) doesn’t wax nearly as philosophical as Rogers’, who ends his essay by saying that “Going to higher and higher TPVs draws us nearer and nearer to God.”

I always remember a comment local financial radio talk show host Denny Smith once made to the effect that people are looking to their advisors for more than just information – they need perspective.  That is absolutely true, I believe, when it comes to blog content writing.

Fact is, the typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate.  The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers.  In other words, it’s the SEO marketing blog that often is where readers get that TPV.  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?” or “So, is that good for ME?”

Whether a business owner is composing his/her own blog posts or collaborating with a professional ghost blogger, it’s simply not enough to provide even very valuable information to online searchers who’ve landed on a company’s site.

Question is: Can you take your blog readers to TPV level?

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Blogging the Right Stuff to the Right Audience

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“If your marketing is not getting enough people into the pool, you’ll find the problem is in one of three places.  You’ve either got the wrong STORY, the wrong STUFF, or the wrong AUDIENCE,” says my Rockstar friend and fellow blogger Thaddeus Rex.

Since blogging for business is all about telling and selling stuff, I found Rex’ list of “Four Ways STUFF has of Differentiating Itself” worth sharing with Indianapolis blog content writers:

  1. Features – your product or service can do something your competitors can’t (or yours does it better).
  2. Location – your product/service is available someplace your competitors’ is not (or it’s more easily available)
  3. Service – the buying experience you provide sets you apart
  4. Cost – you’re the cheapest or the most expensive (exclusivity).

(As a corporate blogging trainer, I need to repeat here that what you don’t want to do in any business blog post is “litanize”, meaning offer an extensive boast session of all the ways your stuff is better than their stuff.  In fact, this stuff-characteristic list is for your own use, your tool kit from which you’ll select just one item to emphasize out of all the things you have, do, and know how to do.)

The real secret, as Thaddeus Rex so rightly points out, is to know, really know, your audience. That way, you’ll know which “tools” out of your STUFF list will be most likely to appeal to that audience.

To achieve that outcome, advises blog consultant Mark White, “your knowledge (of your target audience) needs to influence every aspect of your blog, including:

         What your blog looks like
         The content of the blog
         The style of writing
         The length and frequency of posts
         How you elicit comments and feedback

Your “water slide” (which is how Thaddeus Rex refers to the sales process) must take people where they want to go. “Otherwise you just generate work vetting leads that will never convert,” he cautions.

When you blog the right stuff to the right audience in the right way – magic happens!

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The Journalistic Side of Blogging for Business

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OK, so I’d chosen to buy Time Magazine because the title “Who really decides which flights get canceled?” had intrigued me and made me curious. But, how did reporter Bill Saporito structure the article itself to keep me reading through a four-page, small-print article? And what can we freelance blog content writers learn about keeping online readers engaged?

As a prelude to the article “Mission Impossible”, the magazine served up a giant visual showing the American Airlines Integrated Operations Control Center outside Dallas, with labels for the key players in an flight cancellation decision: the Manager on Duty, the Repair expediter, the Maintenance controller, the Jet specialist, etc. While the picture didn’t live up to the expectation of some inside secret that the word “really” had conjured up, it certainly went a long way towards helping me visualize the enormity and urgency of the flight cancellation process.

Fellow blogger Michael Fortin believes most blogs would be strengthened by a visual representation of the product, the business, the person, the quality, the claims, or more importantly, the benefits of the product or service.

The journalist opens with an anecdote, immediately humanizing the narrative and making it more relatable to readers. “Tim Campbell, senior vice president of air operations for American Airlines, is staring at a diagram of the Charlotte, N.C. airport,” Saporito begins.

Stories of all kinds (“case studies”, customer testimonials, famous incidents from the news, Hollywood, folklore – you name it) help personalize a business blog. Even if a professional ghost blogger is doing most of the writing, employees and customers can provide true-story material.

Now, having set the stage, Saporito gets to the down-and-dirty implied in the “really” title:
“But the weather alone does not explain why on any given day, tens of thousands of passengers may find themselves stranded…” Explaining the vast complexity of the issues surrounding crew scheduling concerns, backup jet scheduling and placement, passenger reimbursements, safety issues, and on and on takes up the remainder of the thousands-of-words-long article.

My question has been answered, though. Who or what is really is in control? It’s the Cancellator, a computer algorithm that “weighs which flights can be shelved while keeping an airline’s schedule as whole as possible.”

As a business blog post, of course “Airport Confidential” would violate some of the rules I teach newbie blog content writers:  It’s much too long, and the primary focus isn’t on the need of the reader..

What this very well-written piece of journalism did accomplish, of course, was getting me, the prospective reader to “click” by buying the magazine and then keeping me interested through the entire article!

 

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Once-They’ve-Come-Inside Business Blog Content Writing

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OK, so I’d chosen to buy Time Magazine because the title “Who really decides which flights get canceled?” had intrigued me and made me curious. But now, was I going to stay interested enough to read through the entire issue?

That’s precisely the sequence of events for businesses and practices that engage in blog marketing. Blog readers are “deposited” at your “doorstep” due to the fact that the keyword phrases you’ve used proved a good match for the words those readers had typed into their browser’s search bar. If they are intrigued with your blog post title, readers click on the link, where they gain access to the blog content itself.

In a way, online readers who arrive at your business blog have already “drunk the the Kool-Aid”. They already have an interest in your topic and are ready to receive the information, the services, and the products you have to offer. Your task is to keep them engaged with valuable, personal, and relevant information. You don’t have a very long “window” to accomplish that task, really just a couple of seconds.

The Neilsen Norman Group make it their business to measure that “window”. “Users often leave Web pages in 10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer,” says Jakob Nielsen. Neilsen Norman uses a reliability engineering concept called a Weibull distribution which measures the probability that a component will fail. Applying that same concept to web readers, Nielsen found that “It’s rare for people to linger on Web pages, but when users do decide that a page is valuable, they may stay for a bit.”

“If you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll stay much longer – often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.,” Neilson concludes.

As a corporate blogging trainer, what that “negative Weibull distribution” says to me is that we content writers should “give out the goodies” early in the post. (Interestingly, that very thought seems to trigger a certain degree of fear in many business owners – if they share too much information about their field, prospects won't need to pay them to provide expertise!). 

Well, they won’t be paying if they aren’t staying, now will they?

 

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