Variety is the Spice of Sentence Length in Blogging for Business

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Fashion designers think about it; blog content writers should, too.  Varying lengths, that is.

One rule that is of business blogging help in particular is keeping sentences short. Short sentences have power, and, particularly in titles, can more easily be shared on social media sites.

While Brandon Royal, author of The Little Red Writing Book agrees, he reminds us that not every sentence needs to be kept short.  Instead, Royal advises writers to weave in short sentences with longer ones. Every so often, he suggests, a “naked” (extremely short) sentence can add a dynamic touch.

Ever on the alert for examples of excellent business writing, I found a gem in a recent USA Today issue. In “Stocks soar, so do Treasury prices; what gives?” reporter Adam Shell hits the bulls-eye in length-varying.

In fact, in my next corporate blogging training session, I plan to use Shell’s first paragraph as a rather extreme demonstration of the power of varying sentence length in business blog posts. The entire paragraph consists of one 48-word sentence followed by a six-worder.

“Not that Wall Street price moves ever make total sense, but what was odd about Monday’s rally, which powered the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to another record high, was the fact that the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to its lower level of the year. “That means bond prices rallied, too,”

That entire USA Today article, I couldn’t help noticing, happens to be 148 words long, only half the ideal length for the typical SEO marketing blog. Its three paragraphs are 54, 35, and  59 words long, respectively,  effectively offsetting the long and short of it.

The third paragraph does even better, interspersing “naked sentences” with longer statements:

  1. What gives? (2 words)
  2. At one point Monday, the yield on the 10-year note fell to 1.65%, eclipsing Friday's prior low of 1.66%.(20 words)
  3. It closed at 1.67%. (4 words)
  4. At the start of 2013, the yield was 1.76%, and seven weeks ago, it hit a high for the year of 2.06%. (22 words)
  5. The lowest closing yield on record was 1.4% on July 24, 2012. (12 words)


In fashion design, and in writing blogs for business, varying lengths engage interest!
 

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Let Business Blog Readers Self-Test

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Blog readers tend to be curious creatures.  What’s more, that curiosity factor is highest when readers are learning about themselves.  As a longtime Indianapolis blog content writer, I’ve found that “self-tests” tend to engage readers and help them relate in a more personal way to the information presented in an SEO marketing blog. Popular magazine editors appear to agree as well, because current issues are full of tests, games, and quizzes.

Salvatore Didato’s book, “Who Are You? Test Your Personality” offers no fewer than forty quizzes to “reveal the real you”.  It’s not just the variety of quizzes that I found so helpful about this book; it’s the way each is presented that can serve as a model for business blog writing.

“How Daring Are You?” is the header for Didato’s Quiz #1, but rather than diving directly into the series of questions, the author whets his readers’ appetites with an introduction, citing a study done at the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry showing that 1/2 to 2/3 of risk-taking propensity is probably inherited. Blog writers, too, can whet readers’ curiosity with a little-known statistic or fact at the beginning of a post.

Didato then continues with a ten-question true/false test containing statements such as “When shopping, I usually stick to known brands.” But, for business bloggers and business owners who are conveying information to online readers, what is most important is Didato’s commentary following that risk-propensity self-test.

“Studies of group dynamics confirm that a pattern called ‘risky shift’ occurs when members of a group bolster each other’s daring and shift to more risk taking than when they are alone.”
 
I once heard WIBC Radio”s Denny Smith make a comment that I considered very relevant for business blog content writing: People are looking to their advisors for more than just information, he said. They need perspective.  In providing information to searchers, remember that they need some guidance as to what they can do about those facts, and ways in which the information can make a difference to them.

As a corporate blogging trainer, then, I’d remind bloggers to be “tour guides”. The quiz, test, or survey, engages their curiosity.  The next step is “nudging” readers towards a point of view – or a course of action!
 

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Food, Not Gadgets, Keeps Your Corporate Blog Alive

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An old joke revisited in the Reader’s Digest Humor Collection reminded me of one important lesson for Indianapolis blog content writers:

A lonely woman buys a parrot so she’ll have someone to talk to.  After a week, the parrot hasn’t uttered a word. The woman goes back to the pet store and buys a mirror for the parrot’s cage, thinking that might stimulate a reaction. Nothing.  The woman buys a little ladder for the cage.  Still no communication.  A swing elicits not a peep.  A week later, the parrot, lying on the floor of the cage, dying, whispers, “Don’t they have any food at that pet store?”

When it comes to blog content writing, we’re often advised that we need to create content that’s engaging, different, and unique. And yes, those are qualities to strive for in blog content writing. But offering very basic, usable information is quite OK. After all, first-time readers, (who probably constitute the majority of visitors to anyone’s SEO marketing blog site), came online seeking information about a particular thing.

(At the risk of belaboring the metaphor), the joke reminded me that, while the ladder and the swing and the mirror added interest to the parrot’s cage, the first task the pet owner needed to address was to provide food.

In “Twelve Tips for Writing Better Marketing Brochures”, local marketing maven, Al Trestrail, offers more valuable advice for content creation: “Putting (basic)helpful information in your brochure will encourage the reader to keep it, refer to it often, or pass it on to other people”.

Simplifying your topic makes your blog content reader-friendly. Offering online visitors easy-to-understand, usable information on the subject of their search, helps convert them into customers. In blogging, B is for basics!
 

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There’s No Kinda-Sorta in Blogging for Business

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Among his “Top 10 Most Annoying Speaker Habits”, leadership coach David Lim lists kinda-sorta statements.  “Either you did it or you didn’t,” he observes, and using “kinda” statements undermines your own authority.

“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 effortso will be very closely aligned with your:

  • Being perceived as an expert in your field
  • Positioning yourself as a go-to source of information
  • Presenting a definite perspective on your industry

Related to taking a definite stance is avoiding another David Lim no-no: being fake.  “Speakers are nothing without authenticity,” he says. “You can’t communicate with someone who’s not real, or who’s acting like someone else.”

As a corporate blogging trainer, in fact, I teach newbie blog content writers in Indianapolis how important it is for readers to “meet” the “man or woman behind the text”. In fact, that’s the enormous advantage of using first person pronouns in business blog writing – they reveal the people behind the posts, introducing the personalities of the business owners.

At Say It For You, we know that, before employing any marketing tactic, we need to know what the common challenges are facing our client’s target customers and clients. We then decide then decide what one important point concerning that one challenge we’re going to emphasize in each post.  

No room for kinda-sorta in blog content writing, no pretending.  Readers need a specific problem solved; here’s the specific way this business or this professional practice goes about doing just that.
 

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The Privilege of the Business Blogging Platform

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If ever you’re tempted to become cavalier about the quality of your blog writing, just remember – it’s up to us professional content writers to counterbalance stuff such as this:

“So here’s an contra-growing old additionally anti-itchiness do-it-yourself solution which causes your body robust and as well as minimizes our itchies in icy temperatures, waterless local weather, ensure that it is a component of an article rewrites Christian louboutin men shoes craigs list program for sprouting younger and you wont amount to an prepare such as calf.”

(Can that be for real? Unfortunately, yes.  And a lot more like it is crowding our business blogging air space, too.)

As a corporate blogging trainer in Indianapolis, my favorite recommendation to business owners and to the freelance blog content writers they hire to help bring their message to their customers is something I learned from my sixth grade English teacher: “Autograph your work with excellence.”:

I confess that when I began to come across incomprehensible online content, my first “take” was that it must have been created by non-native speakers of the English language. Business owners or professional practitioners had needed content writing help, I concluded, and had chosen to outsource the work overseas to save on costs.

When I learned about “spinned content”, I realized that the “gibberish” effect in some of the incomprehensible text I was finding could well be the work of a computer program, not of some overseas content writer. (Spinned content is reproduced by replacing words with synonyms, for the purpose of re-using content and repeating keyword phrases many times with an eye to “winning search”.)

I can recall the time that, as a new member of the National Speakers Association, I was first introduced to the phrase, “the privilege of the platform”. Along with the privilege of addressing an audience, taking people’s time and attention, I was being taught, comes the duty to offer quality material and to present it in a quality manner.

Today, decades later, I realize that there’s a privilege to blogging, too.  That privilege comes with a duty we freelance blog content writers have to offer usable, high-quality, well-researched content, presented in quality fashion.  Our online readers have a right to expect no less.
 

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