“Is cardboard OK?” is the question that caught my eye in Birds and Blooms magazine as part of the self-imposed magazine challenge blog writing exercise I took on this week for my Say It For You blog. 

With the whole idea behind the magazine challenge being to combat “writer’s block” (you know, that time when, inevitably, blog content writers get stuck thinking up new ideas to keep their business blog posts engaging), I’d come up with the concept of leafing through popular magazines to spark ideas to help owners explain what they do and how and why they do it.

The article about using cardboard in gardening does two things that I teach newbie corporate bloggers should be included in any SEO marketing blog strategy::

• It debunks some common myths. While consumers might worry about the formaldehyde in the glue used with cardboard, it’s at a very low level and will decrease as time goes on, Birds and Blooms assures readers.
   
• It deals head-on with a touchy issue (in this case, environmentally non-friendly materials or practices). While it’s perfectly OK to leave cardboard in the garden to break down on its own, before you grow vegetables in cardboard be aware of what the cardboard held before (could it have been used to ship industrial chemicals?)  In general, Birds and Blooms assures us, cardboard should be fine.

Think about your own business, I ask owners in the course of providing them with business blogging assistance: Is there anything that might be considered unsafe, cruel, or environmentally non-friendly about your industry or your business? What are you doing to mitigate those factors?

Certainly, I explain, the content on a website can deal with the subject and offer reassurances, but there's nothing like the cumulative effect, spread over time, of stories, testimonials, tidbits, and information delivered through corporate blog writing.

And when it comes to any negative comments or negative PR, business blogging is the ideal vehicle for defusing and offering reassurances.

Is cardboard OK in blogging for business?  You bet!

 

 

“Don’t have time for a Big Year?  Learn how to master a day instead,” writes Ken Keffer in “Big Day of Birding.”  Birding?  What can that have to do with blogging for business?  A lot, I think. 

Last August, in my Say It For You blogs, I gave myself the challenge of finding three ideas for business blog posts in a single issue of any popular magazine, and I composed those three initial challenge posts during an airport layover in Minneapolis on the way home from a family visit.

The whole idea behind the magazine challenge was to combat “writer’s block”.  In my years offering corporate blogging training in Indianapolis, I’d discovered that business owners’ and blog content writers’ two biggest fears are running out of ideas to sustain their blog, and running out of time to write the blog posts.  I wanted to offer the magazine-skimming idea as one solution.

My take on all this is that, whatever magazine we choose, if we’re alert, we can find items that suggest new ways to explain what we sell, what we believe, and what we know how to do.  (Of course, Indianapolis freelance blog content writers like me can use the same technique to explain our clients’ businesses and professional practices to their online visitors.)

Going back to the birding magazine, I found it on the table at the Butler College of Business break room and started leafing through it the other day while enjoying a cup of coffee between student appointments. I saw that “don’t-have-time-for a-big-year-learn-how-to-master-a-day” headline, and I was hooked.

Ghost-blogging, you see, is a concierge service, a task outsourced by business owners and professional practitioners who understand the importance of online marketing, but have the traditional no-time problem. And, when it comes to attracting online visitors to a website, “mastering a day” isn’t going to cut it in terms of having any chance of winning search rankings.

On the surface, it would appear that blogging for business falls under the category of tasks better not delegated to others.  That’s precisely where the “Big Day of Birding” article suggested a perfect compromise that I could share potential Say It For You clients and with other blog content writers.

Think about it: The professional blog writer picks up the information about the business through interviews with the owner, with employees, and with clients, adds some research and scouting other pieces written on the subject, then cleans and polishes the material into finished blog posts.  Every so often, though, either at preset intervals or when the fancy strikes, the owners themselves weigh in with content of their own, and “say it for themselves”! “Last spring I was so busy I opted for a Big Half Hour, instead!” quips Ken Keffer. 

Consistent business blogging content writing may need to fall to professional ghost bloggers, but when owners and employees can find a Big Half Hour to contribute to the mix – all the better!