In their new book Branding Yourself, fellow Indianapolis bloggers Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy observe that the starting point of a personal brand campaign is the “positioning and transaction statement”. This statement, they explain, is basically a tagline, a catchy or memorable phrase or sentence that expresses the uniqueness of your brand.

In corporate blogging training sessions, I like to talk about leitmotifs or recurring core themes to which blog content writers can refer again and again.  The five-question exercise that Decker and Lacy suggest for setting up the P&T (positioning & transaction) statement can be perfect for pinpointing such central themes for any SEO marketing blog:

   Positioning:
   Who is your competition?
   How are you different (3 reasons per competitor)?
   How are you similar (3 reasons per competitor)?
  
   Transaction:
   What does the transaction look like?
   What is the end goal?

Just such a thought process leads to what I’ve nicknamed “the training benefit” business owners can derive from corporate blog marketing. (This holds true, I’ve found, whether owners do their own blogging or collaborate with a professional ghost blogger.)  The very exercise of answering the questions and thinking about your own business practices helps train you to articulate those things to clients and customers.

While the Branding Yourself authors are guiding business owners towards a one-phrase or one-sentence statement, the very same five questions they pose can be of business blogging help. In fact, the big advantage business blog writing has over ads, billboards, brochures, and even static website content is that blogs are, by definition, a work in progress.  Using blogs, the corporate mantra or professional practitioner’s message can continually be honed.

Blog posts, as we see them at Say it For You, are continuous-run positioning and transaction statements!

 

 

“We are what we write,” professional speaker and handwriting expert Theresa Ortega shared with me almost three years ago, explaining that “all writing is brain writing”. I learned, to my amazement, that amputees who hold a pen their mouths or even between their toes form their letters precisely the same way they used to before their accident!

Of course as an Indianapolis blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I use the word “writing” in a context broader than just penmanship.  Still, as Ortega and I concluded about personal branding by business owners as expressed through business blog writing, we are also what we blog.

Just this month, as I shared with my Say It For You freelance blog writers, Theresa Ortega was featured in the Indiana State University Magazine. As part of a study, the school’s recreational sports department compared Ortega’s analysis of the writing by newly hired staff members to results of those same staff members’ assessment tests.

Ortega found one handwriting sample that set off alarm bells, and she enlisted the help an FBI friend, who confirmed her suspicions that the individual’s writing revealed traits found in serial killers. The university was alerted, so that the person’s behavior could be closely monitored.

To a certain degree, all of abusiness’ marketing materials reveal the owners’ attitudes and beliefs.  But as I’ve continued, over the years, to offer business blogging help to corporate owners and professional practitioners, it’s become apparent to me that blogs are most “telltale” of all forms of marketing. That’s partly because of blogs’ conversational, personal tone, and also because business blog content writing continues over weeks, months, and even years.

It doesn't matter whether you’re doing all the writing yourself or collaborating with a professional ghost blogger like me. As the story unfolds, blog post after blog post, about what you sell, what you do, and what you know, the clearer it becomes  to readers who you ARE!