Blog More What You Believe Than What You Are!

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The 2009 annual report for the Indianapolis charity Art With a Heart is set up to resemble a children’s book.  The content of the report itself could serve as a wonderfulBelieve model for the most adult among Indianapolis bloggers.

As a professional ghost blogger who trains blog content writers, I was fascinated by the Art With a Heart “What we do” page.  There are two sections on the page. The “We are…” section is one sentence long; the “We believe…” section contains seven short, powerful paragraphs.

Unfortunately, I realized, almost all SEO marketing blogs appear to use a ratio that is the exact opposite, with the majority of the corporate blog writing devoted to describing “what we do”, in other words, to describing all the services and products the company or organization offers. Too little space seems to be devoted to “what we believe”.

When I’m offering business blogging assistance, I emphasize that the best website content – and the best corporate blogs – give online readers a feel for the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs about their industry and the way they want to serve their customers.  Those intangibles are precisely what makes a company stand out from its competitors.  Those “we believe” statements can turn out to be the business’ most powerful calls to action.

There are many details in the projects and programs offered by Art With a Heart, yet their annual report manages to express them all in one statement:

“We are encouraging Indianapolis youth through success in art.”

I’d ask business owners and the freelance blog writers who tell their stories  – Can you find the one statement that expresses the core of what the business brings to the world?

Now, (I add in corporate blogging training sessions), tell me what you BELIEVE!

By the way, here are a few of the things Art With a Heart believes:

…that we can positively affect some of the city’s neediest children emotionally, intellectually, and creatively.

…that the processes used in creating art, such as planning, problem-solving, analysis, synthesis, and self-evaluation, will be used again and again by our students throughout their education.

…that the success and pride in accomplishment these students experience will develop into a desire to enhance their own surroundings…

Indianapolis blog writers composing content for businesses might challenge the premise of this Say It For You blog post.  After all, Art With a Heart is a charitable organization. Can this core-beliefs-over-core-products-and-services emphasis really be as appropriate and effective when the content is about a for-profit business, with the goal being not only to win hearts, but to make the cash register ring?

Give me your thoughts…..

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Catchy Corporate Blog Writing with the End in Mind

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conductorA great opener with a lame last line is.., well, lame. Sure, it’s super-important in blogging for business to have great titles and strong, curiosity-stirring openers, but as I teach in corporate blogging training sessions, you’ve got to “close your parentheses” (Uh, oh – shades of my undergrad degree in English Ed.!).

In this Wednesday’s Say It For You blog, I cited blogger Graham Jones’ opener as a great example of a bandleader-type “downbeat” of an opening line. “Search engines are after one thing…” Jones’ post begins, discussing ways to improve search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, as a professional offering business blogging assistance, I have to give Jones a “C” for the ending of the post.  By my lights, at least, Jones offers well-written, valuable, and interesting information, only to let the reader down at the end. The blog post sort of “tapers off” without a catchy ending line to sum up and emphasize the content. 

The Seth Godin piece that began with such delightful definitiveness  – “There are actually two recessions”, offers the perfect example of the advantages of using a catchy ending line to emphasize, review, and leave the reader with no doubt about the writer’s point of view:

“This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.”

Brian Clark’s blog post “Little Known Ways to Write Fascinating Bullet Points” (with the opener I quoted the other day – “Oh, those magical bullet points..”  ends by remarking that bullet points are maligned because most people don’t know how to write them. Clark urges readers to “put a little time and effort into making yours fascinating.” What this post demonstrates is a tactic I often suggest to freelance blog writers for Say It For You and to business owners, which is to put a call to action in the text of the blog post itself.

Of course, in corporate blog writing, it all matters – the title, the opening line, and the reader-friendly, relevant, updated, useful content.  Somehow it’s not the same, though, without a great finish. If the opening line in blog content writing is the conductor’s “downbeat”, the closing line represents the final notes of the symphony – “TA-DAH!

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Catchy Corporate Blog Writing from the Beginning

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weak UK growth headline“Your page titles are an important part of your web design,” small business consultant Lorraine Ball reminds business owners. Blogger Michael Gray agrees, explaining that, while you want the title as “click-enticing”
(meaning search engine attention-attracting) as can be, titles need to be enticing to readers – as well as short enough to be easy to share on social media. 

Some favor putting the website name in blog titles, Gray remarks, yet he recommends leaving the website name off if that would make the blog post title overly long.

In Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions, I always emphasize that “catchy” and “enticing” can’t be adjectives to strive for only in the titles of SEO marketing blogs. Once the “click” has happened, I tell content writers in Indianapolis, your task is to keep the reader engaged with valuable, personal, and relevant information, beginning with the “downbeat”, which is what I call the first sentence of each post. (Think of an orchestra conductor bringing the baton down to signal the start of the music.)

In order to offer the most specific and detailed business blogging assistance in this very blog post, I did some “strolling” around the blogosphere to find examples. Reading others’ blogs is invariably a great way to learn and gain new perspective for your own blog content writing, I’m fond of telling all business owners new to blogging, and all new freelance blog writers, for that matter!)

Here’s a great opening sentence from Graham Jones, writing about search engine ranking for blogs:

“Search engines are after one thing…”  (Can you see how Jones grabs your attention right away with that “downbeat” opener?)

A second catchy opener I found was in Brian Clark’s piece about bullet points:

“Oh, those magical bullet points.  What would blog posts, sales letters, and bad PowerPoint presentations be without them?”

In corporate blogging for business, readers need to know, right away, what the post will be discussing, but they also need to get interested – right away.  Well-crafted opening lines can accomplish both those things for readers.

Seth Godin (so well-known a writer that he could get away with breaking all the rules), offers the perfect example of a great “downbeat” first liner in a blog post about marketing in recessionary times:

“There are actually two recessions.” There are no links, no keyword phrases for marketing, only a real grabber of a first line.

There are blog content writers and there are blog content writers.  To move into the second category, begin at the beginning, bringing your baton down with catchy, curiosity-building titles and opening lines.

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The Secret Life of Blog Words

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humanizing through corporate blog writing“The smallest words in our vocabulary often reveal the most about us,”asserts James Pennebaker in “The Secret Life of Pronouns" (in the September 2011 issue of Science in Society). Hidden inside language, explains Pennebaker, are “small, stealthy words that can reveal a great deal about your personality, thinking style, and connections with others.”.

No information could be more important for blog content writers, since words are the power source in blogging for business. As I explain in corporate blogging training sessions, words and pictures are the tools we use in business blogging to create connections with others.

James Pennebaker, I learned, is a social psychologist who developed a computer program to analyze the language people use, discovering that words associated with positive emotions have therapeutic value.  From the vantage point of the freelance blog writers I train, however, the most important discovery to come out of this research involves the use of pronouns.

The Pennebaker team’s most striking initial discovery was that the more people changed from using first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) to other pronouns (we, you, she, they), the better their health became!  The scientists went on to discover that gender, age, social class, and leadership ability al related to their choice of pronouns.

These discoveries could be of the most amazing business blogging help, I realized. One of my own discoveries in abandoning my generational bias towards long, individually composed pieces of business correspondence and traditional marketing brochures was that the core “mission” of blogging for business is to humanize online communications.

In four and a half years of providing business blogging services in Indianapolis, I’ve realized that whether the business owner him or herself is doing the writing, or whether they’re collaborating with a ghost blogger partner, the very process of deciding what to emphasize in the blog is a process of self-discovery!

And, since engaging readers’ interest in blogs is about expressing your understanding of their problems or dilemmas (“It’s- not-just-you-we-solve-this-problem-all-the-time”), pronouns in your business blog are your way to “get down and human”!

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Vague vs. Clear in Business Blog Writing

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question marksShort vs. long – that is the question.  At least that’s what Indianapolis bloggers might conclude from my Say It For You business blog post earlier this week.  There’s more to that question, of course, and lots more to the answers, as Brandon Royal demonstrates in The Little Red Writing Book.

Royal warns writers that “Vague language weakens your writing, because it forces the reader to guess at what you mean.”  “Choose specific, descriptive words for more forceful writing," he advises. Sometimes, the author adds, “to be specific and concrete, you will have to use more words than usual.  That’s OK.”

I particularly liked the examples Royal culled from interviews with job candidates. (Besides doing corporate blog writing and offering corporate blogging training, I serve as Executive Career Mentor at Butler College of Business, and our program trains students in interviewing skills.) A common job seeker’s mistake, he points out, is using a “shopping list” of traits, rather than using concrete examples of strong points:

Candidate:  “Not only did I develop important operational skills in running a business, I experienced the challenges entrepreneurs face on a daily basis.” 
Question left in interviewer’s mind:  What challenges are those?

Candidate: “Growing up in both the East and the West, I have experienced both Asian and Western points of view.”
Question left in interviewer’s mind: What are those Asian and Western points of view?

Candidate: “I am energetic, loyal, creative, responsible, and ambitious.”
Questions left in interviewer’s mind: Really?  How can I tell?  Why don’t you support a few of those traits with concrete examples?

Anyone involved in business blog writing should try some of the writing exercises Royal offers in the book, to practice replacing vague language with words that are specific and concrete.

Vague: “Firms should advertise to increase sales.”
Specific: “Billboard advertising is low cost and has been shown to increase sales as much as 10% in a given region.”

Personalizing examples makes them even more memorable and specific, a piece of advice that can be applied to any SEO marketing blog.  Back to the short-vs.-long question, stories and testimonials take up more space, but make for far more impact than general marketing claims.

Short vs. long, clear vs. vague, specific vs. general – who ever said this blog content writing thing would be a breeze?

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