In Blogging for Business, Start With the End in Mind

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If anybody knows about crafting stories, it’s humor speaker Jeff Fleming. Start with the end in mind, Fleming advised us at the National Speakers Association of Indiana meeting just a week and a half ago. Why? Deciding, up-front, what your point is going to be allows you to organize your story for maximum impact and surprise.

Maximum impact, of course, is what every blog content writer aims to achieve for her business, practice, or organization. As I listened to that talk on ”Humor Secrets for Improving Presentations”, I couldn’t help sifting for secrets that might apply to the blogging world. Since our primary tool is the printed word, we can’t use all the voice variations and body language techniques Fleming has mastered. The impact needs to come from engaging with the reader’s desired results –from the get-go.

Organization counts for a lot.  There are three goals my Say It For You contract writers are out to accomplish on behalf of each client:

  • Provide information that is valuable to readers and which satisfies the needs that brought them online to find answers
     
  • Demonstrate the particular expertise and history of the company or the professional practitioner and how they are different from their competitors
     
  • Provide a clear navigation path that brings readers closer to becoming clients and customers of that business or practice

Of those three, it’s absolutely essential for the first to happen quickly, so that readers are assured they've come to the right place.

“All of us speak on hope,” Jeff Fleming observed, knowing that, in our speakers’ group, most were content speakers, not humorists.  “No matter what the topic, listeners are hoping to have a better life in some way.”  In blog content writing, I believe, it’s the “pow!” opening lines that engage the reader by appealing to that hope.  If we fail at the “pow”, readers may not stick around for us to tell them the “how”.

Funny or not, in each business blog post, start your writing with the end in mind!
 

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Actively Blogging for Business

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Blog content writers can take a tip or three from the laminated student guide “Writing Tips & Tricks” by quickstudy.com that I found on a carousel at the FedEx store. One idea stressed in the guide that definitely bears repeating is how important it is to use the active voice in writing. “Passive voice occurs when the subject of the sentence is the receiver of the action; active voice occurs when the subject of the sentence performs the action,” explains Quick Study, comparing the passive “The race was won by the girl” to the active “The girl won the race.”

Since one of the very purposes of business blog writing is to showcase the accomplishments of the business owners, as a general rule we bloggers need to focus on “staying active” in our content. “Sentences in the active voice have energy and directness, both of which will keep your reader turning the pages” is the advice from dailywritingtips.com.

So, is it ever OK to use the passive voice? Yes, it is, says editor and writing coach Debra Butterfield. It depends where you want to put the emphasis.  If the recipient of the action is more newsworthy than the one who performed the action, she says, the recipient should take precedence.  As an example, she points to the sentence, “The three year old little boy was abducted by a neighbor.”  Sometimes in statistics, Butterfield points out, we don’t know who’s performing the action: “1 in 4 girls is abused before she turns 18.”

I know that in this Say It for You blog I spend a lot of time discussing the ingredients of good writing. There’s certainly a lot more to effective blogging than just the writing. Bloggers need marketing expertise and at least some degree of technical expertise.  The bottom line, though, is that blogging involves the skillful use of words.

As writers, we’re constantly feeling our way, aiming for short versus. long, clear versus vague, specific versus. general, active versus. passive, and on.  Whoever said corporate blog writing was an easy job? I love helping blog content writers perfect their craft. The goal – we all get better and better at sharing information with our online readers in the most impactful of ways!

 

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The Three-Legged Stool in Blogging for Business

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The laminated student guide “Writing Tips & Tricks” by quickstudy.com I found on a carousel at the FedEx store might have been made to order for my Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions. This week, I’m devoting my blog-about-blogging to sharing scraps of wisdom from that guide.

“Ask yourself what you want the reader to know about your topic….Think of three details or three examples for each idea.”  Quick Study is referring to student essays, typically much longer, much more formal, and more detailed than corporate blog posts. In fact, the sample outline format contains three main ideas, each with three details and examples.

In business blog posts, by contrast, I recommend a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business, a practice, or an organization.  Other aspects can be addressed in later posts. Focused on one thing, I tell business owners and practitioners, your post will have much greater impact, since people are bombarded with many messages each day. Respecting readers’ time produces better results for your business.

That doesn’t mean blog content writing shouldn’t make use of the “the three-legged stool” idea, with three examples or details supporting the main idea of each post.

Another interpretation of the 3-legged stool concept comes from public speaking maven  Jim Endicott.  Just as it takes three legs to keep a stool balanced, every oral presentation must use three elements to be effective: visual presentation, content, and delivery, Endicott explains..
 
Engaging blog posts need to contain more than well-structured sentences. Pictures and charts add interest and aid learning, and evoke emotions. How can the term “delivery” apply to blogs? To me that means the “voice”, the way the message comes across. Whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business to consumer blog writing, it’s opinion that clarifies the difference between that business, that professional practice, or that organization and its competitors.

Keep your blog content writing balanced with the three-legged stool!

 

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Two Thesis Statements to Start a Blog Post

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It takes a great opener to fan the flicker of a reader’s interest into a flame, so, in blogging for business, I teach, opening lines are key. In fact, openers are key in all kinds of writing, as quickstudy.com’s “Writing Tips & Tricks” points out. Their thesis statement, Quick Study explains to students, will set the tone for their entire essay.

Of course, there’s more than one way to skin that thesis statement cat, meaning that the same information can be presented to blog readers in a variety of ways.  Quick Study offers students a great example of an assignment to write a persuasive essay offering the prompt “If you could travel to any city in the United States, where would you visit and why?”

Sample thesis statement #1: “If I could travel to any city in the U.S., I would visit New York City.”

Sample thesis statement #2:  “Some people dream of visiting Chicago, others would choose Los Angeles, but for me, no city would be better to visit than New York City.”

Let’s examine both statements from a blog content writer’s point of view.  

From a pure inbound marketing, keyword-phrase standpoint, the first statement might attract a consumer who’d typed “visiting Chicago” into the search bar.  Since the point of the essay was to tout the benefits of New York City, starting the piece by saying “I’d choose to visit New York City over any other city in the United States” might be a more “SEO-pure” approach.

The reason I prefer the second version has little to do with SEO. It’s about what fellow blogger Mark McDonald calls “marketing the differences, not the similarities.” Acknowledging that readers have many choices is a good approach to take in a business blog. Our job, though, is to help those readers (and that includes B&B prospects) make sense out of the ocean of available information, clarifying why we have (or why our business owner or professional practitioner client has) chosen to do business or to create a product in a particular way.

There are many other ways to write what, in corporate blogging training, I call the “pow opening line” (what Quick Study calls the thesis) to set the tone of a blog post. Isn’t it great to have choices?

 

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Don’t Let Your Middle Posts Fall Asleep

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When the setting becomes the story, that’s an “uh-oh”, Writer’s Digest’s Larry Brooks cautions historical novelists. “If your narrative is composed primarily of a series of moments and happenings…then your middle pages may already be asleep as a result.”

Books grounded in rich historical settings can lead to wonderful stories, Brooks concedes, but (and here’s the part so relevant to us Indiana business bloggers): “Readers need to identify what they should be rooting for.”

Shock advertising can, in fact, move people to action, I learned, reading reports from the British Department of Health on the anti-smoking campaign “Get Unhooked” (which was banned because the ads caused fear and distress in children). In business blog writing, though, while it’s important to appeal to readers’ need to avoid pain, you’re more likely to “win friends and influence people” in your blog posts by giving searchers a “feel” for the relief and comfort they’ll gain after using your products and services. In fact, the whole tone of blog posts has to be welcoming and reassuring: We know what we’re doing around here. Rest assured, we’ll listen to your needs and you’ll be taken care of.

So how do you avoid the falling-asleep-in-the-middle effect? Author Steven James teaches budding novelists to maintain suspense in their writing. One way to do that, James says, is to put characters or things that readers care about in jeopardy.

In the same way as historical novelists need to avoid presenting what is an essentially a series of disconnected moments and happenings, business bloggers need to avoid disconnected series of product descriptions and lists of service offerings.  

“WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?). That’s what your prospective clients want to know. A champion salesperson understands this and, rather than selling on price, sells value by way of the customer’s expressed value areas and by educating the customer on the cost of ownership,” teaches SalesGravy’s Steve Ferrante.

In blogging for business, always keep in mind – readers are rooting for themselves and they need to identify why and how you can help.
 

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