Continuing with my challenge to myself to create three Say It For You blog posts inspired by one issue of Saturday Evening Post, I next found an advertorial for ancestry.com.  This title read “How the Barber of Baden Became the Barber of Manhattan.”

Like the mother and son featured in the Royal Jelly advertorial I wrote about in my last post, this one relies on a human interest story to engage readers and to demonstrate the value of the product (the product in this case being the documents accessible on ancestry.com’s genealogy website).

“We may never know if 29-year old Frederick Detering cried as he waved goodbye to his wife and three children from the deck of the Nederland as it departed for American in 1882.  But it couldn’t have been easy to leave them.”
(Below this intriguing introduction is a section of a page from the Nederland’s passenger list of 1882.)

“Yet less than a year later that same ship entered New York Harbor again, this time with Frederick’s young family aboard…”
(Below this is a page snippet from the Nederland’s passenger list from 1983.)

“Within a few years, Frederick and his family settled in and made a life for themselves in America.  And, on a summer day in 1888, the barber from Germany became an American.”
(Below this is part of a page view of Frederick’s petition for naturalization.)

What I think is so important for bloggers for business to understand is that it’s the developing story behind the documents that brings this advertorial to life.

(Imagine an ancestry.com ad listing the types of documents to be found on their website:

• Ship passenger lists from 1800-present
• Naturalization certificates

Informative? Yes.  Engaging? Not in the least.)

The ancestry.com piece concludes with two types of CTA (Call To Action).

1.  A special offer: 
Free access weekend.
Search millions of immigrant records, Labor Day weekend only!
Blog posts are excellent vehicles for promoting special offers and events.

2.  An emotional appeal:

“Three records can tell so much about one life.  And there are billions of other records at ancestry.com, ready to tell your family’s stories, too.”
That would have made a great ending sentence for a blog post, light-years more effective than a mere “Call us at 1 800 ——–.

Wherever possible, turn statistics into stories for your blog!

 

A study about distraction is something business bloggers should pay attention to.

Psychology Science  reports that hearing only one end of a two-person conversation is more distracting than hearing both sides. College students were given minute-long cognitive computer tasks to perform, during which the computers’ speakers played a two-person dialogue, or a "halfalogue", where the student could hear only one half of a phone conversation.

The purpose of the Psychology Science experiment had to do with cell phone use, and findings helped explain why it’s so difficult to ignore the "halfalogues" we overhear people talking on their phones. Bottom line – conversations work only when they are, at the very minimum, dialogues.

While the researchers were quick to offer the caveat that the test results might not apply so neatly to tasks outside the lab, as a business blogging trainer, I think there is a message here bloggers might heed.

There’s been a lot of conversation in online marketing circles about using blogs to create "conversations" with clients.  Now that a host of tools have developed to measure the success of business blogs, as Doug Karr and Chantelle Flannery explain in their book Corporate Blogging For Dummies, it’s come to light that counting reader comments is not an effective measure of a blog’s success.

"One out of 100 or 1 of 1,000 visitors will comment on a blog post, and they’re typically not the type of visitor who is going to buy from you."

In fact, the authors point out, comments to your blog are often generated by industry professionals – your competition. You should meansure the success of your blog, therefore, not by the number of comments visitors leave, but by the effect the blog has on your business!

So are "halfalogues" OK for business blogs? Yes, if they result in conversions. Responding to one of your Calls to Action is your online visitors’ way of holding up their end of the conversation. (Karr and Flannery warn against requesting too much information from readers who click through to one of your landing pages, or putting them through unnecessary navigation.)

What I’ve concluded is that the process in business blogging is very much a two-way street: 

• (Ball in customers’ court): Searchers go online because they want something – information, products, or services.  They find your blog post because it’s a match for those needs.
   
• (Ball in your court): You offer various Calls to Action on your blog site.
   
• (Ball in customers’ court): They respond with questions, information about themselves, subscribing to your blog, etc.
   
• (Ball in your court): You respond with appropriate action.

Bottom line about all this? Business blog posts are not exactly dialogues, but, when they work well, they’re hardly halfalogues, either. I’ve decided to coin the phrase
"Back-and-forth-a-logues"!