Blogs As White As The Meat Of A Coconut

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To get your point across effectively, advises Dale Carnegie, "compare the strange with the familiar."  Carnegie tells the story of some missionaries trying to translate the Bible into the dialect of a tribe in equatorial Africa.  The missionaries came upon the line "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow."  Realizing the natives had never seen snow, the missionaries changed the line to read "They shall be white as the meat on a coconut."

Even if the target audience for your business blog isn’t African natives, Carnegie’s advice is apropos.  Searchers come to your blog to find answers, but, remember, they lack your knowledge and expertise.  To help readers relate your products and services to their own needs, you must communicate with them in their terms.  Drawing a comparison with something familiar is a great technique, all the more useful if you’re in a highly specialized profession or line of business.

I found a perfect example of this is a blog about a bioceutical product that helps calm fear of public speaking. In explaining the human fear mechanism, the blogger compares the human brain to the central post office. "From this shipping hub, millions of messages are transmitted to the cells of our bodies, directly and powerfully influencing our emotions and our physical reactions. These neurotransmitters are inborn and unconscious.  In fact, while our cells are "reading the mail" from the brain, our minds ‘turn off’, to allow our bodies to obey brain orders automatically." The familiar image of a post office and reading the mail makes it easier for readers to understand the unfamiliar – neurotransmitters.in the brain.

Going from the simple to the complex, and from the familiar to the unfamiliar is a perfect strategy for business blogs.  It sets you up as the expert, yet allows your potential customers to feel smart as well as understood.  Readers understand they’ve come to the right place!

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Time In The Kitchen Saves Big In The Blogosphere

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F.C. Tucker Company’s Realty News offers tips on smart spending, listing ways of getting the most out of every dollar without sacrificing quality. Several of these shopping and cooking tips can be applied to business blogging, which, properly used, can be a small business’ most cost- effective marketing tool.

As just one example of old vs. new marketing, a recent “white paper” from Compendium Blogware Company concludes, “The Yellow Pages are out, and search is in.” Not only are business blogs “in”, they are startlingly less costly than business print ads of any hue. Blogs win with content, not cost, and with frequency, not size.

“If you’re willing to put in a little bit of time in the kitchen”, says Realty News, “you can save big at the checkout,” adding that veggies cost less when you peel and cut them yourself.  With some small businesses, that’s where the parallel with blogging ends, since many small business owners (see “More Brain, Less Drain With Professional Ghost Blogger”) lack the time to blog for business and run their operation as well.

Measuring costs in terms of dollars puts blogging ahead of almost all other aspects of a business’ marketing plan, but blogging demands two other “D’s” – devotion and discipline. With frequency and recency playing such important roles in search engine rankings, what a professional ghost blogger adds to the marketing mix is the consistent posting of blogs on behalf of the business.  “A detergent like Tide may not be the least expensive product on the shelf, but because the next leading detergent can contain up to 80% water, you may end up having to use two or three capfuls to get your clothes clean – and that isn’t a bargain”, according to Realty News.

One of the very first business owners to blog was Paul Woodhouse, leader of Tinpot Alley, a British metal-working shop. Woodhouse is quoted in Blogging For Business: “We’re seeing an increase in inquiries which are more targeted in terms of what we do as a business,” says Woodhouse.  “We don’t advertise and everything has been done in-house. It’s proven to be better than sliced bread.  It’s sliced bread and jam.”

Whether it’s bread with jam or sliced veggies – you can start in the kitchen and end up in the blogosphere!

 

 

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Don’t Let Your Blog Get Lost In The Aisle

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Popular science magazine NewScientist poses this question:

Two people lose each other while wandering through the aisles of a large supermarket.  The height of the shelves precludes aisle-to-aisle visibility.  One person wishes to find the other.  Should that person stop moving and remain in a single visible site while the other person continues to move through the aisles, or would they meet up sooner if both were moving through the aisles?

For some, this supermarket story may be just an amusing mental exercise. For me, though, this is serious stuff.  The whole point of my work as a professional ghost blogger is to help my clients’ businesses get found, and get found as quickly as possible. When business blogging works, in fact, they call it “winning search”.

In blogging, we’re not talking about just two people trying to find each other – we’re talking millions and millions of people.  Could some of them be trying to find you?  No doubt about it, the people you want to reach for your business are out there, looking. (Statistics from the Pew Internet Project tell us that search for information on the Internet is outstripping search for news and weather information and even surpassing email!) 

Posting content on the Web is the best form of marketing there is, says David Scott in his book Cashing In With Content. With blogging, Scott explains, content is not forced on people – they access it because they want to.  Search engines organize the content, and direct people to it.Your business blog is targeting this “organic” search.

Only problem is, the people in the other aisles not only don’t know where you are, they don’t know even know your name!  They don’t know that you have exactly the information, the products, and the services they’re looking for, and they won’t know that until they’re "introduced" to you by the search engine through your blog.

NewScientist‘s advice to the lost supermarket shopper is, “Walk along the edge of the supermarket where the cash registers are, looking down the aisles for the person you seek.” David Scott tells bloggers to put content out there.  Search engines, he explains, organize that content and direct people to it. The more content – and the more relevant content – you can provide, the quicker the “find time” is likely to be. 

One thing I know for sure:  whether at the supermarket or the blogosphere, you can’t just stand in place and hope to get found!
 

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Fast Readers Count On Key Words In Your Blog

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Count the F’s are in this sentence:

      “Finished files are the result of years
       of scientific study combined with the
       experience of years."

The New Scientist explains that most people can see three F’s, forgetting the three times the word “of” appears in the sentence.  As we learn to read faster, we select the most important words, permitting our brain to fill in the gaps in meaning.  Speed readers focus on the most important words, which are nouns and verbs.

There’s a lesson here for bloggers:  Blog readers are scanners, by and large, not readers, and they came online to search for information.  Like the speed readers in the New Scientist experiment, searchers will select the most important words, the ones relating most directly to what they came online to find in the first place. 

Those are your “key words”.  Just as those words were key to searchers finding your blog in the first place, key to whether those searchers “bounce” away from your blog or keep reading, key to whether they click through to your website, and key to converting searchers to customers and clients. Just as in the sample above, the little connecting words like “the” and “of” won’t make much of a difference to the results of your blog-based marketing efforts.

Key words, as Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos explain in their book Blogging For Business, are just what the term suggests – words that important to your materials and which searchers use to find your blog. Choosing the right key words, then using them naturally but in very determined fashion, is very important to the success of your blog.

Just a couple of Do’s and Don’ts for key words:

Do:

* Use key words in the titles of blog posts.  “Search engines assume that if text is in a heading, it must be important”, says Demopoulos.

* Use key words in the first or second sentence of each post.

* Use key words in links.  Say you’re referring people to a related article or book.  Rather than link using the name of the book or article, use your key words.

Don’t:

* “Stuff” key words into a blog so that the content sounds awkward and “sales-y”.

* Make blog posts so short they won’t “matter” to search engines and there won’t be room for much use of key words. (250-400 words is just about right, is my advice.)

* Make blog posts overly long (remember, these are scanners, not readers).  If you have a lot to say, spread it across two or three blog posts.

Experienced readers and online searchers select the most important words.  With business blogs, if those are well-chosen, appropriate key words, searchers might just come on in to your website to fill in the gaps!
 

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Bozos Miss “Bang” From Professional Ghost Blogger’s Work

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Indianapolis business consultant Robby Slaughter uses medical doctor Scott Haig as an example of how entrepreneurs and professional practitioners can make best use of consultants. Since, as a professional ghost blogger, I’m a consultant for each of my business owner clients, I found Dr. Haig’s remarks very relevant, particularly the things the good doctor had to say about what he calls "Googlers" and "Bozos".

At one end of the spectrum, Dr. Haig found, were patients who were annoying know-it-alls.  These patients had gathered a mountain of medical information on Google, and came into the office rattling off theories about their own condition.  Lacking the medical training and experience to properly interpret all this information, these patients think they know more than the doctor.

In the field of marketing through business blogging, I encounter plenty of do-it-yourselfers who, rather than finding out what I have to share with them, are eager to show off their own misinformation.  Typically, their blog and website are going in two different directions, with different styles, different key words, and different target markets.  Even though "Googlers" are using search engines themselves, they don’t use analytics to find what searchers want, and are not using their key words in their blog titles and links. In my earlier blog, "Would You Find You?", I described the challenge I pose to potential blogging clients – "Assume you don’t know the name of your own business, go ahead and type into Google (or Yahoo or MSN) what you as a customer need.  Does your website come up?  On what page?"

Dr. Haig describes the other extreme in patients – "Bozos".  "Some patients are non-compliant Bozos who won’t read anything longer than a headline.  They don’t know what’s wrong with them, or what medicines they’re taking….’Just get me better, doc’ is all they say."

The term "Bozo" is rather blunt, but, I believe what Dr. Haig’s getting at is that, for a medical strategy to be effective, it takes active participation from both patient and doctor. Ghost blogging isn’t a matter of "just get me better business", either.  Effective blogging for business takes a blend of ideas and talents, and a professional ghost blogger becomes part of your marketing team..  As the owner of the business, you may well lack the time to compose and post regular blogs, but the blog is still your message for your business to your customers. As I remarked in one of my earliest blogs, "My clients and I – we may not be making history together, but, by golly, with great blogging (and great cooperation), we can sure make business!
 

 

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