"If you plan to stay anywhere within your home remodeling budget," cautioned the interviewee on a Destination DIY radio episode I heard just the other day,  "stay away from 'so long as' extras.  In other words, she explained, "So-long-as-we're-fixing-up-the-kitchen-we-might-as-well-add…" can turn out to be a very expensive train of thought.

"So-long-as" add-ons in blog content writing tend to get "expensive" in a different way.  Attempting to cover too much ground in a single blog post, we lose focus, straining readers' attention span.

"One message per post" is the mantra I pass on to newbie Indianapolis blog writers.  In fact, because blog posts are updated so much more frequently, they have a distinct advantage over more "static" website copy.  Each post, I teach in corporate blogging training sessions, should contain a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice.  Other important things to discuss?  Save those for later posts, I tell them.

Still, I like the idea employee benefits professional Mel Schlesinger teaches his salespeople: adding an "Oh, by the way…" to describe an add-on service or product feature.  In SEO blog marketing, you can lead to "so long as" information with a link to another page, an offer of a down-loadable white paper, or by simply telling readers to watch for that additional information in your next blog post.

Keeping the primary focus is crucial in business blog writing, though, because online searchers tend to be scanners rather than "readers".  (Truth is, many won't ever get far enough into your post to even notice any "so long as" towards the end.)

In Do-It-Yourself projects, "so long as" add-ons may not be a very smart idea from a budgetary standpoint.  In business blog writing, lack of focus can get uncomfortably costly as well.  But for readers who stick with you, you can use "so long as" add-ons to let them know you have lots more helpful information, products, and services to fill their needs.

“To freshen up blog post content, start with one idea about your product or service, then. try putting a number to it” is one piece of blog content writing advice I’ve been sharing with business owners and professional practitioners ever since an O Magazine cover  three years ago drew my attention with the title “100 Things That Are Actually Getting Better.” 

The point of using numbered lists, I explained to blog content writers, is to demonstrate ways in which your product or service is different, and to provide valuable information that engages readers, helping them see you as a go-to guy or gal to solve their problem or fill their need. Truth is, that numbering technique had been a staple for women’s magazine covers for as long as I could remember, and in corporate blogging training sessions, it was easy for newbie bloggers to emulate the technique of using numbers to entice.

14 home remedies

17 room décor tips

 6 knottiest marital problems

 2 discipline problems to fix first…

Just name an issue, I posited –  some women’s magazine editor will be serving it up with a number attached! 
 

Just the other day, though, I found out we women aren’t the only ones onto the numbers game. Browsing the local CVS magazine rack (As a professional “ghost blogger”, I’m constantly on the hunt for content idea triggers), I focused this time on the MEN'S magazine section.  To my surprise, I found no fewer than seven magazine covers sporting list-based titles:

Robb Report:  50 Great Escapes

Men’s Health: 15 Foods That Fight Fat

Muscle Mag:    5 Reasons Your Arms Stopped Growing

Men’s Journal:  Eight New Discoveries

Golf Magazine: 6 Longest new Drivers

Sporting News: 300 Top Prospects

GQ: The 100 Sexiest Women of the 21st Century

“64% of sophisticated blog readers believe that using a number in a post title is so pathetically obvious that it couldn’t possibly still work,” says Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communication. Fact is, Simone explains, posts with numbers consistently bring in more traffic and more referrals than posts without.

Do you really need any more statistics than those to try business blog writing by the numbers?