“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.

Short 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?