The Why of Blogging for Business

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What is a Blog? When a business owner recently posed that question to one of my Say It For You blog content writers, I realized that sometimes we get so used to doing something, we forget why we’re doing it.

“A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically – like a what's new page or a journal," Darrell Zahorsky explains in About.com Small Business Information. “The term is actually weblogs coined by Jorn Barger in 1997,” he adds.
 

What does blogging provide to a small business?  Zahorsky lists three advantages:

  • Low-cost alternative to having a web presence.
  • Easy and quicker to update.
  • A chance to share your expertise with a larger audience.


For those who haven’t made the jump or are having trouble getting started, fellow blogging trainer Jordan White compiled a list of his best blogging tools to help “kick your inner muse into gear”.

Save ideas on the go. The idea, White says, is to capture creativity in moments when it naturally occurs.  I agree. Many of us who provide business blogging assistance keep “idea folders”. Those folders could be actual paper folders in which newspaper and magazine clippings are collected, or they could take the form of little notebooks to carry around, or even digital files on phones or tablets.

Pick topics.  “Broad topics lead to confusing posts; specific topics are actually far easier to write,” White cautions. Couldn’t agree more, which is precisely why I teach content writers to focus on the Power of One when it comes to their message.  Each business blog post should impart one new idea or call for a single action..

Silence the inner critic and just write. “The key to blogging success is to do it often,” White reminds bloggers. “Waiting on brilliance gets you nowhere – the Muse honors the working stiff” (Stephen Pressfield). For professional practitioners or business owners, allowing the blog to become “inactive”, with weeks and even months elapsing without posting fresh content is ultimate death blog.. It's crucial to maintain frequency and consistency in posting content on the Web.

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Chunking and Inverted Pyramids in Blogging for Business

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This week, all three of my Say It For You blog posts are devoted to elaborating on Debbie Hemley’s 26 tips for writing great blog posts,

Can users not only find the content, but read it? Is one of the five questions on the Ahava Leibtag essential checklist from which Debbie Hemley quotes. Readable content, Leibtag explains, includes an inverted-pyramid writing style and chunking.

Chunking is one way business bloggers can offering technical information in “chewable tablet form”, because it refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest it. Needless to say, whatever your business or profession, there’s no end to the technical information available to consumers on the Internet. Our job then, as business blog content writers, is to do all we can to help readers absorb, buy into, and use the information.

Chunking works in reverse as well. Blogging can take individual units of information and show how they are related, perhaps in ways readers hadn’t considered. Probably the most common example of chunking occurs in phone numbers, as Kendra Cherry points out. For example, a phone number sequence of 4-7-1-1-3-2-4 would be chunked into 471-1324. “By separating disparate individual elements into larger blocks, information becomes easier to retain and recall.”

Purdue University’s Owl website discusses the “inverted pyramid” structure, which for decades “has been a mainstay of traditional mass media writing. The “base” of the pyramid—the most fundamental facts—appear at the top of the story, with the rest of the information in descending order of importance.

Even in the media, not everyone agrees that the inverted pyramid is right for every story.  When it comes to blogging for business, not everyone likes the concept, either. In fact, Ginny Soskey of Hubspot titles her post “Why the Inverted Pyramid Doesn’t Work for Business Blogs.” She quotes studies showing that participants who actively read content online read (or at least scan) 60-77% of a story. “When reading business blog posts, people need to be hungry for more content after reading the introduction, not satiated with the information from a few sentences,” Soskey cautions.  “There should be valuable information presented again and again through the entire article, all the way to the call to action at the bottom,” she asserts.

Since at Say It For You, our freelance blog content writers are trained to keep post length between 250 and 400 words, some of Soskey’s concerns might not apply. Variety being the spice of life, my own conclusion is that writers might experiment with different formats for different posts.
 

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What Pictures Add to the Picture in Blogging for Business

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Out of Debbie Hemley’s 26 tips for writing great blog posts, there are a few that I think will be particularly useful for the new freelance blog content writers I train, and I’m devoting this week’s Say It For You blog posts to elaborating on those.

Using photos in business blog posts, Hemley explains, is critical, so she sends readers to a great Judy Dunn article on the subject (great example, by the way, of how curating material from other writers helps us elaborate on points we want to make to our readers).

What is it that pictures add to the picture?

  • Interest.  Words alone are boring, says Dunn. Plus, she adds, “Let’s face it, we’re all attention-disordered.”
  • Aids learning.  “At least 60% of your readers are visual learners,” Dunn observes.
  • Photos create analogies and metaphors.
  • Photos evoke emotions. (Henley advises choosing a photo that conveys the overall feeling or emotion of your post.)


Since there have been almost 850 separate Say It For You blog posts published thus far, each with a photo or clip art component, I performed a “thumb-through” to find examples for each of Dunn’s list of advantages.

Capturing interest:  In my post “Business blogging – Royal Pronouns in the Post?” The photo of the royal trumpets draws interest and connects with the topic of discussion, which is the way the use of pronouns sets the point of view and tone of a blog post.

 

 

As a learning aid:   The entire post “Raise Your Hand if You Read Blogs” is a commentary on a poster I’d seen on an Ivy Tech bulletin board, using that poster as a tutorial for blog content writers to demonstrate the importance of headline content, targeting the audience, and including calls to action in their posts.

 

 

 

As a metaphor:  For my post “Expand Your Blog Content Writing With Adjacency”, I used the photo of two pairs of shoes set out on the floor with the toes facing to symbolize using topic “adjacency” to expand the range of content for a business blog.

 

 

 


 

To evoke emotion: In “Blog More What You Believe Than What You Are!” I emphasize that the giving online readers a feel for the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs about their industry.

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In Blogging For Business, Just Keeping On May Not Do the Trick

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“Writers swear by this piece of advice,” says hongkiat.com, referring to writing every day without fail.  Maybe, honkiat suggests, they shouldn’t. “Writing every day doesn’t improve skills as much as we’d like to think,” he cautions. (Reminds me of Bubba, the worker Action Coach describes who claims the wisdom of 20 years’ experience, but who has really had the same one year of experience 20 times over!)

Of course, with SEO-conscious marketing blogs, frequency plays an important part in winning search, so establishing a habit is definitely a positive move. “But, here’s the thing,” observes hongkiat. ”Unless you’re a writer by profession, having to write every day is unrealistic. You have a business to run.”  

In fact, it was in response to that very reality that I created Say It For You six-plus years ago, providing concierge blog content writing for business owners and professional practitioners who “have businesses to run".

As John Jantsch  of ducttapemarketing observes, “Outsourcing content creation is an essential tactic, especially for small businesses.”

There’s no longer any dispute about the importance of content creation for attracting new customers and for retaining regulars. Content gets the business noticed online and helps it stand out from the competition. 

The kind of  content to which he's alluding includes:

  • the benefits of your products and services
  • the history of your business and your own journey
  • successful case studies and testimonials
  • company news of importance to your customers
  • your perspective on trends in your industry


“Outsourcing is not the same as abdication, Jantsch cautions business owners. “You need to maintain tight control on themes, voice, message, and specific topics.”  Owners can and should participate in the planning; it’s the execution that takes time away from running the business or practice, and that’s precisely where we professional content writers step in to shoulder the load.

 

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Timelines in the Say It For You Magazine Challenge

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For my third pick out of the People Magazine Style and Beauty Extra, I chose “10 Beauty Breakthroughs from Cosmetics Historian Gabriela Hernandez”, because that article reminded me of the important place “history” has in blog content writing for business. (Since business blogging demands consistency and frequency, every so often I offer a “magazine challenge” to myself and to other writers to scan some popular magazine in order to be reminded of new ways to present familiar information to readers.)

I like the way “Beauty Breakthoughs” is organized by date, beginning with 1915 and going up to 2011. I think using a timeline format every so often in one of your business blog posts would be helpful in several ways:

  • Helping readers navigate through and digest your material. (In 1915, we learn, rouge was first packages in a sliding metal tube, paving the way for lipstick.  From our blog writing point of view, this would be a good spot to insert tips and information about current product offerings.)
     
  • Sharing stories of struggle. History-of-our-company background stories have a humanizing effect, engaging readers and creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame adversity.
     
  • Calling attention to the modern solutions that grew out of those past attempts. (In 1965, we’re informed, Flori Roberts offered the first full range of makeup for black women.)


I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating: people relate to stories about people, more than to facts and statistics, and particularly more than to sales pitches..  As a business blogging trainer, I realize that's one lesson we bloggers all need to tape to our computer screens: Let the history of your industry and the history of your own business do the selling. A timeline is one way to let your company history “say it for you”!.
 

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