Icon-to-Person Business Blogging

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"They join you for breakfast every morning – shouldn’t you get to know them better?" asks Mental Floss Magazine.  Iconic characters, including the Quaker Oats man, Buzz the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee, Tony the Tiger, and the Pillsbury Doughboy have become part of our culture, and there’s a reason for that.  Mental Floss titles its write-up “You Are What You Eat”, but as a corporate blogging trainer, I think the message here is that we buy where we see ourselves in the picture and where we relate to the person (at least to the creature) bringing us that message.  

Of course, part of the power of the Cheerios and Pillsbury commercials comes from the human voice (Billy West for Buzz or Paul Frees for the Doughboy), but blog content writers can use “voice” as well. In fact, one interesting perspective on the work we do as professional ghost bloggers is to translate clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms with which target audiences are most likely to relate. That’s exactly why I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”, setting a tone of We’re here and we’re talking with you”.

“Authority” is an important term in SEO marketing blog writing. For one, Google’s algorithms are sensitive to authority when selecting which content to match with a reader’s search in any given category. Perhaps even more important, readers visit your blog for answers and for information they can trust. The success of your blog marketing efforts will be very closely aligned with your being perceived as an expert in your field.

But it’s not authority that draws buyers to Cheerios” Buzz or to Doughboy – it’s “personality”, and that’s what needs to jump off the screen for blog content readers. The content has to showcase the people behind the posts. Using first and second person pronouns gives a sense of revealing the personality and the beliefs of the business owner or of the team standing ready to be of serve.

 

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There’ll be Little Reader Patience for Rambling Blog Posts

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Ramblers drive everybody crazy, sales strategist Jill Konrath reminds us.  There are two sorts, she says:

  • Flounder-for-my-niche ramblers share everything they do, hoping something piques interest.  All they end up doing, says Konrath, is projecting a sense of desperation.

  • I-love-my-subject ramblers don’t stop talking, never focusing on what is relevant in their sales pitch to that specific prospect.

It’s precisely because ramblers drive online readers crazy that, in corporate blogging training sessions, I introduce the concept of The Power of One:

One message: Blog posts have a distinct advantage over the more static website copy, because you can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business in today’s post, saving other topics for later posts.

One desired outcome:  Each business blog post should impart one new idea or call for a single action. Focused on one thing, your post has greater impact, since people are bombarded with many messages each day. The idea is that respecting readers’ time produces better results for your business.

One audience: Blog content writing can have several different purposes, but make no mistake—blogging for business is marketing. The more focused a blog is on connecting with a narrowly defined target audience, the more successful it will be in converting prospects to clients and customers, I teach.

Although the “flounder-for-my-niche” expressions wasn’t used, students at Butler College of Business seminar on resume building were instructed not to ramble or “flounder”, but to  keep sentences short, using clear forceful language that stresses achievements rather than duties.

The “I-love-my-subject” rambling problem was addressed as well in that Butler seminar:  “Since most employers skim resumes rather than read them, your resume cannot be an exhaustive list of everything you’ve ever done.”

Ramblers of either type drive everybody crazy, from human resource directors reading resumes to prospects listening to sales pitches.  Be forewarned:  there will be little online reader patience for rambling business blog posts!
 

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Stories Can Work Two Miracles in Blogging for Business

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When Speaker Magazine posed the question, “Why do audiences want more stories, regardless of the topic, in the presentations they attend?”  Robert McKee was ready with the answer: Story fits the mind.  It is how the mind absorbs, sorts, and structures reality.”

As a corporate blogging trainer, I was especially interested in a remark McKee makes as he begins his one-day Business Story Seminar:  “In an age of 24/7 information, nothing dates faster than factual content,” he says.  Story, on the other hand, is both emotional and intellectual, he explains, capturing hearts as well as minds.  

Story, to hear McKee tell it, can work two “miracles”.  Each of these, I think, could be applicable to blog content writing.

Delivering what McKee calls “an immersive experience” around your products, services, and brand assets. What McKee cautions professional speakers to avoid is clinging to one “signature story” and including that in every presentation.  The trouble, he says, is that what is your signature story may not be the audience’s signature story. Better to have lots of stories, he advises, with each one designed for a particular audience.

In a very specific sense, the different-stories-for-different audiences idea is highly apropos for blog writing. Most business owners and professional practitioners will tell you they have more than one target audience for their products and services. While one market segment or demographic may be yielding the best results for them, they also have “outliers” who bring in just enough revenue to matter. Taking advantage of the flexibility of blogging, writers can offer different kinds of information, presented in different “tones”, in different blog posts.

Developing a narrative around which you and your employees can rally. As McKee helps organizations such as Microsoft, Nike, and Hewlett-Packard develop their narrative game plan, he uses story to transform the organization “into a united tribe,” explains Speaker Magazine. In other words, the very process of creating a story to tell your “public” (meaning your customers and clients), helps you clarify your story to yourself!
 

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The Seinfeld Strategy in Blogging for Business

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I thought “Chief Potential Officer” Kevin Eikenberry hit the jackpot with his latest leadership tip about consistency. Eikenberry calls it the “Seinfeld Strategy”.

The reason I was so taken with Eikenberry’s post was that six and a half years ago, in the process of explaining the way my company Say It For You came about, I talked about the “drill sergeant discipline” needed by blog content writers. What I meant was that, while all my business owner clients knew that writing blogs in their area of expertise was going to be a great idea for them, not very many of them felt they could take the time to compose and post content on a regular basis.  I also knew that, while my own considerable experience in writing newspaper columns was going to be an asset for blogging, that the main key to business blogging success was going to be simply keeping on task.

Eikenberry had picked up on a Forbes Magazine article about Jerry Seinfeld, who consistently earned tens of millions of dollars a year for more than a decade.  Seinfeld was successful because of consistency.  He’d figured out that the way to be a better comic was to write better jokes, and that the way to do that was to write jokes every single day.  Then, for every day he writes, Jerry puts a big red X on his wall calendar, and all that matters is not breaking that chain of X’s.

Novelist  Steven King employs a similar discipline, writing ten pages a day.  Every day, with no exceptions.  Jack Nicklaus went over every possible way to approach each shot.  Until he could visualize the perfect shot, he wouldn’t swing.  Sales and marketing great Dan Kennedy doesn’t go to sleep without completing at least one task that connects him to a customer or moves the sales process along.

Consistency. Discipline.  The Seinfeld Strategy.  No, I’ll probably never make even the tiniest fraction of the money that Seinfeld has raked in, but one thing I do know:  Successful blog content writing is about “getting your frequency on”, as fellow blogger Pat Flynn puts it.  If  a business owner throws in the towel before success has a chance to develop in an SEO marketing blog, she’ll have fallen prey to the biggest single reason most people fail at content marketing.
 

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A Delicate Hand’s Required in Business Blogging

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“I’m all for clear, precise communication,” observes humorist Todd Hunt, “but I think this sign on a garbage receptacle at my local movie theater goes a bit too far:  TRASH ONLY!  (Was there a problem with people depositing ‘non-trash’ items?” Hunt wonders.)

Like Hunt, Caro Clarke advises her beginning writers not to explain too much. “Give the reader the fewest descriptive words necessary to convey the scene,” she says.  “Better to have one piercing sentence than three paragraphs of room-by-room description.”  The ability to develop a dispassionate eye and a sense of pace, Clarke admits, comes only with experience, but at least beginners can recognize the problem of over-wordiness.

The core of the over-explaining problem, thinks K.M. Weiland, is repetition.  That’s usually symptomatic of authorial insecurity – We distrust our ability to explain things well enough the first time around, so we stick in more content just to make sure readers get the point. Don’t, is Weiland’s advice.  As a corporate blogging trainer, I must say I agree. It’s not only that business blog posts be kept relatively short (350-500 words is a reasonable goal) and conversational. We have to assume our online readers are a) intelligent and b) by definition, interested in our subject.

University of North Carolina’s Writing Center is saying much the same thing, telling students to write their essays in a manner that treats their instructors as an intelligent but uninformed audience.
 

 

As I think about all this advice, I realize that we freelance blog writers have an additional challenge to overcome – the short attention span of online searchers, whose sense of pace can be summed up in a word – quick!  I explain to newbie blog writers that it’s best to focus each blog post on one idea. Blogs, after all, are web logs, not web catalogs or web brochures.

In any kind of writing, of course, there’s a trade-off between brevity and detail, as Brandon Royal explains in The Little Red Writing Book. Developing that dispassionate eye and sense of pace Clarke mentions is a challenge for blog writers as well as for novelists. Even as we aim for clear, precise communication that avoids the “Trash only!” over-explanation effect, we’re conscious that engaging readers’ interest and emotional response requires a delicate hand.

Big signs saying “Trash Only!” just won’t do for blogs!
 

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