"Use 'hopefully' the way you use a gun.  If you don’t know how to handle it, leave it alone,” advises James W. Smith, Jr. of Writer’s Digest.  You wouldn’t say “Hopefully, you will die,”, he adds, even when you mean “It is hoped you will die”.  

Better to say “I hope you die,” says Smith. As I teach new blog content writers, using first person and second person pronouns adds power and personality to your blog. I teach Indianapolis blog writers they’ll be at their most effective when they are at their most personal. Even professional ghost bloggers, I explain, can write in “I” format when sharing a personal experience that brings out some important aspect of the client company’s products, services, or corporate culture.

But even “I hope you die” pales next to “Drop dead”, adds Smith. One rule that is of particular business blogging help is keeping sentences short. Short sentences have what I call “pow!” Not only can short sentences, particularly in titles, be more easily shared on social media sites, but focused content keeps readers’ attention on the message.

Brandon Royal, author of the Little Red Writing Book, calls really short sentences “naked”.  It’s not that he recommends making every sentence short (which would create a choppy style, he admits), but that short sentences add a dynamic touch to your writing.

Another way to achieve greater “pow”, according to James Smith, is to cut down on the adverbs. “Use stronger verbs,” he explains, “and you’ll find you don’t need the help of adverbs. That’s a great tip for bloggers. While it may be the keyword phrases in the title that start the job of getting your blog found, once the online visitor has actually landed, it takes a great opener to fan the flicker of interest into a flame. The shorter, more direct, and more personal that opener is, the more “flaming” is likely to happen.

Drop-dead sentences stand out in blog content writing!
 

My friend and fellow blogger Karl Ahlrichs, as usual, is offering excellent advice to employee benefits professionals, and, as usual, I’m finding that his advice works for blog content writers.

“People want the answer in a few, short, well-thought-out words, with a long answer to follow if requested.”

Karl complains that he’d sat in a workshop on voluntary benefits trends that went on for the first five minutes without speaking plain English. “We need to promulgate the histogens and project profitability based on actuarial calculation….yadda, yadda” sort of thing is what he heard.

I’ll tell you – after six years writing blogs and web page content for businesses and professional practitioners of every type, I’ve come to conclusions very similar to Karl’s.  Simply put, our challenge as content writers lies in finding the sweet spot between the informative and the yadda yadda.

“We need to get good at the power of summary,” says Karl. He used to think the average adult attention span was three minutes, but then learned from a presentation coach that he had a mere six seconds to make his point with a modern business professional before they mental shut him off. “Yikes!” was Karl’s reaction, shortening the phone message he leaves for prospects to the following: “Hi, I can explain all of Obamacare in 30 seconds.  Call me, and I’ll do it for you.”

Given that Karl was making an outgoing “cold call”, while our blog marketing draws inbound traffic based on an already existing interest in our topic, we Indianapolis content writers don’t need to keep our posts to 30 seconds’ worth of reading..

Still, let’s keep reality in mind: people want their answers in a few, short, well-thought-out paragraphs, with longer answers to follow if requested (that’s why we have CTA’s or Calls to Action as part of business blog writing).

Thanks, Karl!  We promise not to promulgate the histogens in blogging for business!