“My work is most exhilarating when I help coach speakers on topics about which I know nothing at all,” asserts executive speech coach Patrica Fripp. Precisely because she’s new to the subject at hand, she explains, she is able to force executive speakers to simplify and demystify their subject.

Many of the lessons Fripp teaches corporate executives can be applied in corporate blogging training. In speaking to be remembered and repeated, she emphasizes, it’s important to use:

• Shorter sentences
• Visual words
• Stories

In former Say It For You blog posts I wrote about how writing for business can be used to demonstrate your
(or, in the case of those, who like myself, offer business blogging help, your client’s) special expertise.  All well and good, but as Patrica Fripp stressed again and again in her presentation to my National Speakers Association chapter meeting the other day, it must be about them, not about you. Simplifying your topic makes your blog content reader-friendly. Offering online visitors easy-to-understand, usable information on the subject of their search, helps convert them into customers.

Content maven Meryl K. Evans advice is to shoot for 500 words or less in each blog post; as an Indianapolis blog writer, I like to keep post length between 300 and 400 words. It stands to reason that, the more “visual” the words you select, the greater the impact each will have. The more direct your opening gambit, the fewer introductory words will be needed.

In blogging for business, I think, stories are the equivalent of “staging” in real estate sales. "The buyer must be able to visualize living in this room,” realtors on HGTV reality shows painstakingly explain to house sellers. Each blog anecdote must help online visitors see themselves using your product or service.

My work as a professional ghost blogger is most exhilarating, I realized as I listened to Patricia Fripp, is when I help business owners choose words to express the basics of businesses I’d known very little about. Helping entrepreneurs use their SEO marketing blogs to simplify and demystify their business is rewarding for us both!

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles made headlines, but not the kind to which anyone involved in corporate blogging for business would ever aspire. 

The feature story “Dear BMV: Are you talking to me?” centered around a big fat “Oops!”, because 58,000 people across the state had received postcards urging them to renew their drivers’ licenses.  The postcards arrived, all right, but the intended courtesy of the effort was lost when recipients discovered each card had been addressed with the correct last name and address, but with the wrong first name. 

For every business owner, marketing director, and freelance blog writer, there’s a real takeaway in this communication-gone-wrong story. Blogging for business, as I stress in Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions, is an aspect of “pull marketing”.  That means one of the main motivators for having an SEO marketing blog in the first place is to “get found” by the ‘right people”.  (Who are those? People already interested in what you have to sell, what you know, and what you know how to do.) Until they are matched up with your blog, though, those potential customers don’t know you exist and they certainly don’t know that, in your blog content writing, you’re talking to them!

That’s precisely where “targeting” comes in. Without marketing research, corporate blog writing can all too easily fall into the same Are-You-Talking-To-Me “Oops” as the BMV.  The “postcard” arrives (meaning the search engine delivered the online reader to your blog post or website), but you got the “first name” (the message) wrong.  Your blog might written in too formal – or too casual – a style for your market demographic. The “buzzwords” might strike the wrong note for the age group you’re targeting. Significant “disconnects” between your readership and your business blog content writing can cause the blog visitor to think “This content doesn’t sound as if you’re talking to ME!” 

Ironically, business blogging can serve as a form of market research in itself, as smallbiztrends.com points out. “Start a blog on your company website, tell your customers about it, and post information about your products and services.”  Afraid customer comments might be negative? Just the opportunity to show how you respond to customer concerns.