Statistics Help Your Blog Become More Than A Number

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Nothing speaks quite as loud as numbers.

Career Rookie Magazine says using numbers may be one of the most underutilized strategies in cover letter writing. As a professional ghost blogger who teaches business owners how to create content for blog posts, I think numbers tend to be underutilized in blogs as well.

Like myth-busting in blog posts, which I talked about in my last post, opening your post with a startling statistic can be a way to grab visitors’ attention. Statistics can actually serve as myth-busters in themselves.  If there’s some false impression people seem to have relating to your industry, or to a product or service you provide, you can bring in statistics to show how things really are. Statistics can also serve to demonstrate the extent of a problem.  Once readers realize the problem, the door is open for you to show how you help solve that very type of problem for your customers!

Here are a few examples:

  • CNNMoney offered fascinating tidbits about the 2009 MTV music awards.  If you’re an event planner in Omaha, sharing the fact that MTV crew members needed to arrange for 600 tables, 2,000 chairs, 550 walkie-talkies, and 32 copiers brings out the importance of having a professional (like you) handle event details.


  • “An average woman, over sixty years, can absorb into her bloodstream thirty pounds of ingredients in moisturizers.  She can also consume four tubes of lipstick in a lifetime.” (You’re blogging about the importance of using only all-natural skin care products).


  • “A recent study found that raisins and grapes can lead to kidney failure in pets” (for veterinarian or pet supply store blog).


  • “Around 200 B.C., the Chinese were able to make recycled paper by processing old fishing nets (for recycling company blog).

Statistics add power and focus to your blog posts, giving you the chance to showcase your knowledge and expertise. Skillful use of startling statistics can keep your blog from being just a number!

 

 

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Myths Can Give Blogs A Bang For The Bust

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Myth-busting is a great use for corporate blogs, I firmly believe.  Not only are blogs wonderful for dispensing information, they’re great for addressing misinformation.  In other words, blogs can help searchers by clearing up stuff.

In the process of debunking myths, bloggers for business can:

  • Offer little-known information on their industry
  • Season that information with their own unique slant
  • Demonstrate their knowledge and expertise.

For newbie bloggers in particular, myths are an easy source of content ideas. In the normal course of doing business, every business owner and professional practitioner has come up against common misunderstandings people have about the products and services they offer. Here are just a couple of examples:

Myth:   Brain cells can’t regenerate – if you kill a brain cell, it’s never replaced.
Bust:    In 1998, scientists at the Salk Institute discovered that brain cells can regenerate.
Use:     Blog post by charity raising funds for Alzheimer’s research. 
    

     Myth:  If a pregnant mother’s carrying the baby down low, it will be a boy.
     Bust:   This comes from old English folklore, and is completely unfounded.
     Use:    Blog post for baby clothing store.

        Myth:   Reading in a dark room will ruin your eyes.
        Bust:    Reading in dim light will not, in itself, negatively affect your eyes.
        Use:     Blog post for optometry outlet.

        Shel Holtz and Ted Demopolis, authors of Blogging for Business, debunk a myth about the future of blogging itself: “Many pundits have decreed that blogs signal the end of the mainstream media, press releases, or any number of established communications. Quite simply, they are wrong!  Blogs are complementary to the pre-existing communications channels available.”

When I, as a professional ghost blogger, teach business owners and professional practitioners how to create compelling content for blogs, one of the tried and true techniques we practice is busting myths! 

 

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Blogs Help Customers Tell Themselves The Story Of Your Brand

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Presidential politics is about storytelling, says John Harris of Yahoo!News, commenting that Barack Obama and his team won the 2008 election because they were better storytellers than the opposition.

What’s more, adds Harris, “Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that’s already neatly framed in their minds.”

That’s the way it works in business marketing, too, say Scott and Birk Cooper and Fritz Gruntzner, authors of Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business. “Consumers create their own associations and stories about your brand.”

“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 a part of the story,” is Coopers’ and Gruntzner’s advice to business owners. When it comes to blogs, the Tips & Traps authors recommend using blogs to tell a story. “Engage readers of your blog with fascinating story-like entries.”

In their book The Hero and The Outlaw, Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark demonstrate that brands telling a single archetypal story have better long-term financial performance.  Commenting on this book, Coopers and Gruntzner  say most companies they work with are guilty of telling either no story or of trying to tell multiple stories.

“Always try to create a campaign rather than one ad,” Tips & Traps teaches. “You know you have a great advertising or communication idea when you can easily think of the next ad and the next and the next.” (I can’t help thinking that campaigns are precisely what corporate blogs are!) 

According to Coopers and Gruntzner, the goal in blogging for business is “creating loyal customers who have an emotional engagement with your brand.” Each new blog post is the latest chapter in the ongoing story you tell in your blog. The authors remind us that these customers are creating their own associations with your brand.  “The best you can hope to do is guide this process by giving them clues and by helping them feel something for your brand.”

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Blogs Have A Food-First Attitude

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Take a cue from the new bare-bones restaurant model," advises Amy Casper, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. "Stripping away the layers of white linen and battalions of waiters leaves them with something that people actually appreciate: a restaurant that’s putting its money and effort into what’s on the plate."

Casper might have been addressing business bloggers along with restaurateurs. 

It’s interesting that marketing maven Seth Godin says that most business owners should not want visitors noticing their website, only the "story" on the page.
In this sense "bare-bones" blog posts, shorter, less formal and more personal than websites, win out, showing the effort is gone into the "food", meaning the content of each blog post.  The site itself, says Godin, can’t be too cutting edge, clever, or slick.  On the other hand, it shouldn’t be amateurish, he adds.

In any economy, but especially during a recession, Entrepreneur emphasizes, successful restaurants offer real value for patrons’ money, with good food and good service "trumping" elegant décor and ambience. 

Entrepreneurs who venture into "putting food on the plate" through business blogging marketing will be pleased to find how bare-bones economical blog marketing can be when compared with traditional marketing tools such as brochures, direct mail, promotional events, billboards, and broadcast media.

For online searchers, the blogging equivalent of finding good food in a restaurant is finding up to date information presented in an easy-to-understand, engaging way. For visitors, the blogging equivalent of good restaurant service is convenience of navigation.  In creating your business blog, consider that, at any moment, visitors might be ready to learn more, to ask questions or post comments, to subscribe to the blog, and, best of all, to buy your products and services. You must ensure there’s a smooth path for them to accomplish those actions.

"This economy can work for a business," according to Entrepreneur. "Strip it down to the essentials.  Do what you do best and make it good." 

Bloggers, take heed.  Forget the elaborate widgets, flash, and even video.  Use words and perhaps a photo or two to tell what you sell, what you know about, and what you know how to do to solve problems and "make it good" for your clients and customers.

After getting just a "taste" of your business or professional practice through your blog posts, you want readers to be saying "Mmm, mmm, good information!"

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In Business Blogs, Deliberate Practice Makes Perfect

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The old saying “Practice makes perfect” was never the same once coach Vince Lombardi had pointed out that, no, it’s only perfect practice that can help players achieve perfection.  

Psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson, who has spent twenty-five years analyzing high-flying professionals, draws a somewhat different conclusion.  Elite performers in any field, he says, engage in deliberate practice, an effortful activity designed to improve performance.

For example, Ericsson says, most medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice and then move on, repeating this process thousands of times over many years. The most successful diagnosticians, by contrast, spend time following up on their patients to compare what the physician was thinking at the time of diagnosis with the actual patient outcome. “Just because you’ve been walking for 55 years doesn’t mean you’re getting better at it,” observes Ericsson.    
   
While practice may need to be perfect to win football games or deliberate to excel in medical diagnostics, plain old practice can play a very important role in business blogging. Momentum in the online rankings race comes from frequency of posting blogs and from building up longevity by consistently posting content on the Web over long periods of time.

In Quamat’s The Go To How To Blogging Guide, the authors note that many start out blogging with the best of intentions, but then find themselves unable to keep up the discipline. Tennis coach Spencer Fields might have been talking about business bloggers instead of college tennis stars when he summed up the problem: “Often they start out strong, but fizzle toward the end.”

Playing a game where the rules are constantly changing poses special challenges – the answer to the question “What do search engines want?” might be different next week than it was yesterday. On one thing, though, most mavens appear in agreement: One secret to winning search is consistent posting of relevant content on the Web.

Given the multiple demands on most business owners’ time, the level of “deliberate practice” it takes to win online search rankings might fall, in many cases, to professional ghost bloggers like Say It For You!

 

 

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