Using Business Blogs To Show Smart and Fantastic Uses

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Sure, the technique of using lists in ads, articles, and blog posts can be overdone.  Still, there’s no denying – numbers are attention grabbers. When My Yahoo browser served up the titles "40 Fantastic Uses For Baking Soda" and "46 Smart Uses For Salt" – hey, I just had to know if this stuff was for real!

It was.  Melissa Breyer’s Care2 Green blog contained a wealth of information about how baking soda makes a great stand-in for expensive personal care, cleaning, and deodorizing products.

Breyer’s post demystified her topic, explaining that sodium bicarbonate regulates PH, keeping a substance neither too acidic nor too alkaline. How can you demystify YOUR services and products so that online readers feel they understand how the "magic" happens?

Breyer goes on through the full 40 "did-you-know"s about how baking soda is handy for just about everything you can think of (but never did), from helping your hair, to polishing silverware, to cleaning teapots, putting out fires. and sanitizing the septic system. What unusual applications for YOUR product can you use to capture readers’ interest?

Notwithstanding the number 46 in the title "46 Smart Uses for Salt", according to the Salt Institute, I learned to my amazement, there are more than 14,000 ways to use salt (now I was really curious!). Some that inspired an "I didn’t know that!" from me included:

  • Preventing cake icing crystals
  • Treating poison ivy
  • Deterring ants
  • Making candles drip-proof
  • Brightening the color of curtains

As a professional ghost blogger and blogging trainer, I think using numbers in blog posts is less about grabbing attention with a catchy title, and more about demonstrating ways in which your product, your service, and your expertise are useful, perhaps in unexpected ways.

So go ahead – count those ways in your blog!

 

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For Success in Blogging, Stir in Some Failure!

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Thomas Edison refused to think of his more than 10,000 attempts to create a commercially viable electric light bulb as failures. "I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work," he said. This anecdote is one of many author Robby Slaughter uses in his book Failure: the Secret to Success, to illustrate how failure can serve as an indispensible ingredient in success.

Failure can be an important ingredient in blogging for business, as well.

  • Positioning your company as a problem solver
    First, your blog post demonstrates you understand the problems the online searcher is dealing with.  In other words, your success in finding unique solutions probably came through failure. Perhaps you personally went through the same failure stages.  You know how frustrating it was, and your devotion to your business grows out of that experience.

Driving home the other day, I heard a radio commercial for a divorce attorney who deals with male clients.  The professional describes in passionate terms how his own negative experiences had shaped his career, making him determined to help other men avoid some of the heartaches he’d endured.

Or, your blog post tells the story of one customer’s many failed attempts to find a solution, culminating in a happy ending your service or product helped create.

  • Positioning failure as a standard by which to understand how a successful outcome would look and feel

    Slaughter writes about four-star New York restaurant Le Bernadin. When it became known that Le Bernadin chefs use cheap, artificially flavored fake Swiss cheese as one of their ingredients, reviewers naturally jumped to negative conclusions.  All that changed after Bernadin’s executive chef explained to Newsweek that the cheap cheese was not used in food, but as a benchmark. Because its taste remains identical all year long, the Swiss cheese gives the chefs a point of reference. 

Often new customers and clients who have never tried a product or service before literally do not know how good yours is – because they’ve never tried your competitors’!  A blog post can compare the less-than-successful results customers experienced in the past before finding you!

For success in business blogging, try stirring in some "failure"!

 

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Blogs Who Need People

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The true stories of injured construction worker Ralph Orlando and fever-delirious middle-aged railroad dispatcher John O’Connor capture the history of Mass General hospital, along with the role that teaching hospital has played in the development of medical technology, better than any textbook ever could.

In his book Five Patients, best-selling author Michael Crichton uses a teaching technique that bloggers with a business message to convey would do well to imitate. Good business blogs, of course, offer valuable information to online readers. But, the technique Crichton used in his book can be bloggers’ ace in the hole:


People want to do business with people.

People relate to stories about people, not to facts and statistics.  As a professional ghost blogger for business and business blogging trainer, I realize that’s one lesson we bloggers all need to tape to our computer screens: Let stories about people tell the story of your company, your products, and of the services you provide.

And who are the "people" to tell those stories? 
 

  • Your workers and service providers:  
    In blog posts, feature individual boots-on-the ground employees of your company who deal with the customers and solve their problems. 
  • Your customers:
    Use customer stories to show (rather than tell) exactly how problems and challenges were overcome step by step, using your expert advice or with adapting the products you sell to unique situations. 
  • You:
    Tell stories to illustrate how you came to choose this line of work, why you care so deeply about serving customers in this particular way, and showing some of the obstacles you’ve needed to overcome.

    Whether it’s politics or business, there’s no denying the power of storytelling. In Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business, authors Scott and Birk Cooper and Fritz Gruntzner confirm: "Customers don’t want to feel like they are being told a brand story.  They want to tell themselves the story.  They want to be part of the story."

Michael Crichton offers valuable information about the ongoing progress of medical research, including the fact that surgical advance has been in great part dependent on increasing the effectiveness of pre-operative and post-operative procedures.  But he shows us that with people stories, like that of 22-year old Peter Luchesi with the nearly severed hand.

So go ahead – in your blog posts, tell stories people to people.  Get down and human!

 

 

 

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Business Blogs To Reveal and Advance

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“Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action,” is Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to short story writers. Bloggers for business, I think, would be wise to follow that rule as well.

Reveal character:
Author and speaker Debbie Weil says the #1 rule for blogging is: Write from your passion! The whole advantage of blogs is that they’re short, conversational, and, above all, personal. People want to do business with people (in fact, as Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware would say, they want to do business with people just like them!)

Your personality and character need to be revealed in each blog post. There must be no doubt about how much you care – about your industry, your products, your clients and customers – your blog must unmistakably demonstrate to online readers that in you they’ve found the “real deal”. (Just as in a face-to-face meeting, genuine character cannot be faked, but what I’m saying is your blog must let your enthusiasm shine through the screen.)

Advance the action:
The majority of traffic to any business blog comes from first time visitors, who may not, as Weil points out, even realize they’re reading a blog. Now that they’re here, you’re given a chance (very brief but very valuable) to prompt them to take the next step.

Usually we think of CTA’s (Calls to Action) as being a click on a button or widget:”Click here to contact, enroll, order, call, subscribe, etc. To me, though, as a professional ghost blogger and blogging trainer, each whole post is in itself a Call to Action! Your compelling description of how your solution (product or service) makes the reader eager to move to the next step.

Truly great blog posts offer far, far more than keyword phrases strung together in an attempt to “win search”. By revealing character , you advance the action!

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Capture Those Kadigans With Your Business Blog

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If you haven’t heard of kadigans, you probably do know their cousins the "thingamagigs". I used the word thingamagig myself the other day in the hardware store.  I was after a… well, you know, that thingamagig that hangs over the shower nozzle and holds the shampoo and hair rinse? Luckily, the store clerk quickly realized that what I needed was a shower caddy.  What I’d done, not knowing the correct term for the item, was use a kadigan or placeholder name.

Placeholders are words referring to objects or people whose names are unknown, irrelevant, or just temporarily forgotten. "Whatsherface" would be one example of a placeholder. Back in high school, our class performed Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta Mikado.  The Lord High Executioner sings about his "little list";

 ….apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind
Such as What-d’ye-call him, Thing-’em-bob and likewise Never mind.
And St-st-st and What’s-his-name, and also You-know-who
The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.

Anyway, after the shower caddy incident in the hardware store, I realized that I’d learned a lesson about business blogging and about online search.  Even though I hadn’t known the correct term for the item I wanted, only the result I wanted (a neat shower stall), Ace Hardware was able to make a sale and I got my need filled.

As a professional ghost blogger helping my business clients "win search" through business blogs, I realized online searchers are often in the same boat as I was that day at Ace.  Searchers may not know the correct terminology for the product or the specialized service they need, so they may just describe the desired result, or they may resort to kadigans.

So, in order to capture those searches, you’ve got to be able to match up your blog content with kadigans.  Content that describes the end result from using your product or service can snag kadigan-driven traffic. Content that describes how your product is used can capture attention from searchers   Remember, that day in the hardware store, I wasn’t looking for a thingamagig or a whatchamacallit – what I wanted was  a neat and organized shower stall!

Not only is it smart to assume your potential customers don’t know the name of your business, assume they don’t know the "name" of the solution to their problem!  The reader, by using placeholder words, is saying to you, the business blogger, what W.S. Gilbert was saying: "The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you!.

 

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