Blogging for Business – What Makes You Tick and What Ticks You Off

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Tim GunnAt sales training meetings, in business books – if I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “People do business with those they know, like, and trust.” I’ve even used the expression myself in offering business blogging assistance. I don’t think the concept was ever as real to me, though, as when I was reading an excerpt from Tim Gunn’s Gunn’s Golden Rules.

That’s because, in that excerpt, Project Runway’s fashion mentor Gunn shares “what makes him tick and what ticks him off”.  In doing that, Gunn became someone I “know”. 

As a freelance SEO copywriter, I realized, although I’ve never met the man, his opening up about what’s really important to him about his work and about which bad industry practices he detests made him real to me. 

In today’s competitive business world, as blogger Thom Singer reminds us, “there are many complex issues that impact sales decisions. ‘Like’ matters. ‘Trust’ matters,” Singer concludes. As any good blog content writer needs to keep in mind, corporate blogging for business represents an ideal tool for “getting personal” and earning trust.

Too often, though, what I find is that business owners are so focused on marketing strategy and tactics development through blogging, they forget that the blog needs to express who and what they are, or to put it another way what their belief systems are. What makes them tick?  What ticks them off about their industry?

As a professional ghost blogger, one of the very first questions I pose to each blogging client is this:  “If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what you know, what you sell, or what you do, what would those words be?”

There’s an old Hebrew saying: “A man may be known by three things: His pocket, his wine cup, his anger.” (In Hebrew these three are a play on words: Kee-so, Ko-so, Kaa-so”.) In short, what makes you tick?  What ticks you off?

When you’re writing for business, readers must be able to tell!

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Above-the-Fold Blogging For Business

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newspaperJust how important is it to keep business blog posts short enough so they fit above the “fold”, meaning short enough so that the reader has no need to scroll down the page? At least one commentator, Kelly A. Meyers, doesn’t think that’s something about which blog content writers need be concerned.

The expression “above the fold” derives from newspaper publishing, with editors careful to put the most important stories and photos above the crease of the newspaper so they would be visible in a face-up stack of papers.  Meyers questions whether there’s any validity to this form of content presentation when it comes to websites and to blogs.  “In a world gone mobile,” Meyers points out, “where iPhone and Android users spend their time touch screen scrolling,” she adds, “it really doesn’t matter whether the content is “above the scroll” or not.  

FutureNow’s Brendan Regan says a good part of success in writing for business comes from getting the mechanics right, including sparing readers the “inconvenience” of scrolling. In providing business blogging help and corporate blogging training through Say It For You, I advise making blogs as long as they need to be to get the point across, but not a single sentence longer.

Since the whole point of business blog writing is to engage readers and spur them to action, in offering business blogging assistance, I stress the fact that online searchers tend to be scanners rather than readers.  That means the most important task is, as early on as possible in the content of each blog post, to convey the message to those searchers that they’ve come to the right place for the products and information they need.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization , use of key words and phrases in the title and “above the fold” makes a lot of sense. Having said that, I agree with Kelly Meyers: if a visitor has come to your site for a reason, and if your blog appears to be a good match for that reason, “they aren’t going to mind scrolling”.

OK, readers, you’ve already gone below the fold on this one – what are your thoughts?



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Don’t Get the Blogging Math Problem Wrong – special guest post by Ryan Cox

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Today’s post is by friend and fellow blogger Ryan L. Cox.

sprinterI’ll be the first one to admit it: writing was not my strength in academia.  I come from a math bloodline. My father was good in math, like perfect-math-portion-of-the- SAT’s good. "In math, Ryan, everything is black and white; there is always a right answer," I was taught.

Often times I find myself comparing the three L’s, Life, Love, and Law, to math, searching for the right and wrong, black and white. For this the math kid to find a natural fit in writing is simply preposterous, but it happened. And my advice to every business professional out there is plain and simple: if you are not blogging for yourself or having someone blog on your behalf, you are getting this math problem wrong.

We’ve sprinted, not walked, into a do-it-now-or-be-lost-forever Internet-driven business world. Technical innovation has swung the pendulum far past the point where business can remain entrenched in handling consumers. Does anyone remember near-time consumption?  Anyone? Bueller? We dove into the deep end of real-time. Consumerism can be described in one word: NOW!  If I think about something, I turn to Google and search for it. If you do not show up to give me information, I’ll have already given third party authority and my interest to someone else. If you do not have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, I’ll consider you old and outdated. If I cannot find that your website uses “flash”, or if your contact information is hard to find, I’ll forget your business exists.

The moral of this story: blogging is important to the marketing message.  Here are 5 easy-to-understand reasons why:

            It’s free.  
WordPress and Blogger are both free blogging platforms.  Even if you don’t have a website (you should have fixed this yesterday!), you can have a blog.  Heck, a well-customized free WordPress blog can be turned into your website!

            It gets people talking.
With the social sharing plugins that are available for a blog: (Facebook Like, Twitter RT, Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg, Share This, Add This, etc..) you give your consumers the ability to share your message. From your standpoint as a business owner, that’s free marketing from unpaid workers.

           It’s expected.
Plain and simple, consumers expect you to have something that at least resembles a blog, providing new content on no worse than a weekly basis.

            It has search engine optimization (SEO) value.
Save for another conversation the debate of how much value.  The “low ceiling” explanation is that a blog sends signals to Google to constantly crawl your website for new content. The more history in the search engines, especially around the keywords associated with your business or product, the better.

         People are going to talk about your service or product.
         You might as well increase the chances that you can capture the conversation. 
         There is nothing stopping me (a competitor or consumer) from slamming your
         company everywhere I see fit.  However, if I know that you have a website and
         a blog, it’s more likely I will come directly to the source to complain giving you a
         better chance of putting out the fire.

The marketing budget for a business owner has been turned upside down by the emergence of social media, blogging and real-time communications. No one has perfected the dissemination of messaging from business to consumer. The pricing market for these services is still very fluid. Regardless, their importance has been made quite clear. So what is the takeaway from this post?

The right answer to this math problem is: You need to have a blog. Whether the “your own gun” or the “hired gun” method is better for conveying your particular message is dependent on your individual situation.ch individual. At the end of the day, a blog needs to be part of your marketing message.

I’m living proof: excuses are meaningless.  Shut Up And Do It Already.

Wow, Ryan – you’ve made quite a compelling case for blogging. Say It For You, of course, comes at business blogging from BOTH the "your own gun" (we offer business blogging assistance) and the "hired gun" (by serving as freelance SEO copywriters) angles. Blogging for business is not a be-all and end-all – it’s part of any company’s marketing strategy and tactics development.
Thanks for the reminder (warning?) that we all continue to sprint into a do-it-now internet-driven world. Business blog writing is one brand of "running gear".
 – Rhoda

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You’ve-Seen-One-Farmer Blogging

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Since blog writing for business is all about marketing a company’s branding and farmercorporate identity, when I heard the Farm Credit Services radio ad, it made me stop and think.

The tag line started out, "When you’ve seen one farmer…".  Of course, I expected to hear the sentence conclude "..you’ve seen them all."  But instead (and this was the whole point of the ad), the sentence went, "When you’ve see one farmer, you’ve seen one farmer." The message here, as the announcer went on to explain, was that each client of Farm Credit Services has different needs, and that therefore, in dealing with Farm Credit, you could expect to be listened to and to receive individual care.

It occurs to me this "you’ve-seen-one-farmer" idea could be powerful stuff when it comes to corporate blogging training. I’d start by having blog content writers make lists of ways their business individualizes and personalizes services to customers and clients. Sure, it seems as if every business says it offers personalized services, but if ever there was a concept to drive home to readers in a corporate blog, this one’s it. Drill down, I’d say to everyone offering blog writing services, to actual cases of clients’ personalized customer service, recalling times when unusual problems got solved, and when standard procedures were put aside to get the job done for that one customer..

Now that I think about it, the very best business blogging assistance  – or professional ghost blogging – I could ever provide to any business owner would need to be in the area of getting this one-farmer concept woven as a "leitmotif" into the fabric of the business blog posts. Even the calls to action in the blog should convey the message that readers may have different needs, offering lots of choices for interaction. 
 
True, the reason readers found your blog in the first place is that what you offer is a match for what they typed into the search bar on their computer. Now they’re here, it’s crucial to convey a two-part message:

  • You’ve come to the right place to find what you need.
  • We plan to treat you as an individual – we know you’re unique!

In other words, the message is: we’ve seen many customers, but we’ve never seen you!

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