There’s something some still find scary about ghost-blogging.  Very much like the apparitions from which we professional ghost bloggers derive our name, doubts about the legitimacy of our pursuits return periodically to haunt online conversation spheres.

In One Ghost-Blogger’s Manifesto, a piece which I composed a number of months ago as part of an online debate "moderated" by Jason Falls, I made several points about blog marketing for business using the help of professional writers.

1. Business blogging is a form of advertorial marketing, not a personal "op ed" forum meant to gain converts to a political, religious, or personal view of the world.  Blog marketing is meant to win search so that the client company can do more business. Understood in that context, hiring a professional writer is no less ethical than hiring an advertising copy writer.

2. Most sports figures, music stars, celebrities, and politicians don’t write their own books.  As blog strategist Mikal Belicove remarks in the book What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting, it’s not only books and songs that are composed by ghost writers, even most quotes from corporate CEOs represented in press releases are never actually uttered by the quoted officials.

3. In the close to three years since founding Say It For You to provide professional writing services to business clients, I have seen, again and again, blogs begun by business owners and then soon abandoned for lack of time, the owners’ attention drawn to putting out fires, making sales, and dealing with personnel issues.

4. As a ghost blogger, I’m part of an elite group of specialty writers for hire, "new" in the sense that blog marketing itself is a new phenomenon.  Ghost writing, of course, has a very long and proud history, in our own country going back all the way to presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton.

(After I and several other blogging professionals had weighed in on the issue, Jason Falls maintained his stance that the principle of social media transparency is being violated by ghost bloggers. Still, he concluded,"These professionals who work hard to deliver the company voice and value through their writing are nothing if not responsible, professional, first-class individuals who provide valuable service to their clients.")

In the blog posts for each business owner client, I (and the writers under contract to me) are out to accomplish the following:

• Provide information that is valuable to readers and which satisfies the need that brought them online to search for answers
• Demonstrate the particular expertise and history of that company or that professional, and how he/she/it differs from competitors in approach, product, expertise, or price point.
• Provide a clear navigation path through calls to action that bring the searcher closer to becoming a client or customer of that business.

Supernaturalists refer to "channeling".  The role of a "medium" or "channeler" is to facilitate communication with spirits who have messages to share with living people. It’s the spirit doing the speaking, but the channeler who conveys the message in language recipients can understand. 
 
I cannot think of a more fitting metaphor to describe the services a professional ghost blogger provides!

If anybody’s got a keen sense of what an audience wants, it has to be singer/actor Mel Tillis, who’s been onstage for the past fifty two years.  Now age 77, Tillis is still going strong, performing 100 or so live shows each year, according to a recent article in Speaker Magazine.

Today Tillis performs at the speaker’s lectern, giving motivational talks about how humor helped him through his career. In fact, I’m going to hear Mel Tillis speak at the National Speakers’ Association Winter Conference in Nashville, Tennessee next month.

There are two points Tillis emphasized in his interview with Speaker Magazine’s contributing writer Jake Poinier that I believe are worth sharing with all my Say It For You readers and clients, in fact with anyone using blogging to market a business:

         1.  Talking about the twenty different performances he’d done last November alone in the Branson theatre he used to own, the singer/comedian remarked "I’m always coming up with new anecdotes and stories, so it seems to work."  
   
This lesson is one bloggers need to learn, for sure.  Since maintaining consistently high rankings on search engines means maintaining the discipline of posting blog material by putting content on the Web over and over again over long periods of time, what makes the tactic work is finding new anecdotes and stories to keep the material fresh.

        2.  Tillis, Jake Pointer stresses, empathizes with one of the main challenges facing 
professional speakers.  "Sure, I get tired, like if I have to sing ‘Coca Cola Cowboy’ one more time, I think I’m gonna die. But what you need to do is act like it’s the first time you’ve ever done it."

Whether composing blog post #17 or #577 for that business, the blogger needs to write as if it were #1. In fact, since blogging is a form of "pull marketing", attracting only searchers who have a need relating to what you do, what you sell, or what you know about, for most of those searchers, it will be the first.time they’ve ever read your blog posts!

"Every time I walk out there, it’s a different audience," says Mel Tillis. 

Every time you step up to the blog "lectern" (or hire a professional ghost blogger like me to do it for you), that Tillis mantra can serve as the inspiration to deliver your blog message – in every single post – with gusto and panache!