Here’s the critical question,” says Dave Grant in Financial Planning magazine – “If he found your website, would he give you a call?”  “Your website,” Grant tells financial planners, “should tell prospective customers a number of things:  firm services and philosophy, investment management methodology, as well as blog posts about different financial planning topics.’

As a blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer (with a background in financial services), I especially appreciated Grant’s specifying that a website “shows whether your firm is on the cutting edge and how it values technology.” Grant tellingly adds, “Your site needs a blog at a minimum.”

The author describes a situation in which a prospect is seeking a financial planning firm.  

• Firm A has a template website and says the planner has been in the profession 25 years. His bio photograph shows him to be about 40 years old.  Why is that photo so out of date?
• Firm B has exactly the same template (instant turnoff, says Grant), with a “latest update” that is 18 months old.
• Firm C has dynamic graphics, blog posts only days old talking about current topics, with fresh, interesting bios.

So why don’t more financial planners update and improve their websites and include fresh, relevant blog content writing? It’s interesting that, in general, financial planners often work with their clients to create an overall financial plan, then hire professional money managers to implement those plans with specific investments. "If were spending a lot of time on investment selection, reported one Certified Financial Planner® in the Journal of Financial Planning. “I couldn't do the premier job that I want to do for my clients. There just aren't enough hours in the day."

“Outsourcing tasks lets companies focus on growth,” reads a recent USA Today headline.

Blogging for business, as Grant is trying to communicate to his financial planning colleagues, is an essential customer acquisition tool in our increasingly web-based world. Yet the creation of effective SEO marketing blog posts is no mundane task, and few business owners, even with the help of talented employees, can spare the time to post relevant, new material with enough consistency and frequency to improve search engine rankings.

The critical question remains: “If they find your website, would they be likely to give you a call?” Fact is, blog content writing services can be a big, big part of the answer.

 

“Reading around” for my blog is a habit I’ve developed, one I highly recommend for all blog content writers. Having found a gold mine of ideas in the latest issue of Mental Floss magazine,  I’ve been sharing those insights over the past week and a half with Say It For You readers.

Today, though, I’ve some thoughts to share based on a gem I found in Women’s Health Magazine based on myth busting. One very basic strategy I teach business bloggers, is, in fact, myth busting. No matter what field you’re in, there are sure to be misconceptions about what you do and what you sell, and getting the word out about the real story is a fine application for business blog writing.

The Women’s Health article that caught my eye, “Healthy Dose”, used a three part format I hadn’t seen before, one that could lend itself very well to SEO marketing blog content:

• Old thinking
• New Thinking
• Your move

Flossing one’s teeth is one example.  The old thinking is that there is a link between periodontal disease and hear disease, and that bacteria that collect between the teeth could enter the bloodstream, increasing the risk of heart attack.

The new thinking is that there’s no solid evidence to support the idea that poor oral hygiene causes heart disease. One condition doesn’t cause the other.

Your move, Women’s Health informs readers, is to floss on!  Why? Flossing reduces the risk of gum disease, and prevents foul breath.

It’s the Your move” part that I think can be a great technique for writers to include in the content of SEO marketing blogs. By gathering information on their topic and presenting it as part of their blog, online content writers are providing a valuable service, but to go the next step, each blog post has to offer some perspective. WHY is this information important to the reader? What can that reader “do about it”? 

As a college career mentor, I have students write “Reflections”, summarizing an experience they’ve had, using a “What, So what? Now what?" format.

The “Your Move” is the “Now what?” part of the blog content writing.  It offers the reader a new way of looking at things based on the knowledge and experience business owners or professionals have shared in their blogs.  Most important, it gives readers a road map for using that information.  It’s their move!.