Sharing Wisdom from the Greats in Blogging for Business

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How did Chrysler, which not too long before had needed government-backed loans in order to survive, transform itself into a partner coveted by Daimler (the gold standard of European car makers), becoming the most profitable car company in the world? In his book Guts, Robert A. Lutz, Chrysler’s product-development genius answers these questions and many, many more.

For us blog content writers, there are several valuable lessons to be gleaned from this book by a business “great”:

The power of being personal:
Lutz lists his own credentials in the following order: parent, citizen, taxpayer, employer, alumnus. Guts is about Lutz himself as much as it is about his company, and that’s precisely what lends power to the narrative.

One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we are interpreters, translating clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms.  That’s the reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture, but even more so, when they relate emotionally to the people bringing them the message.

  • The power of recounting past struggles
    The very name of Lutz’s book, Guts, speaks to past struggles, to hardships overcome. At Say It For You, I recommend including some How-I-Did-It posts in the blog marketing plan. There are several reasons that sharing secrets and failures helps readers relate to a business or practice:

    True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice.

  • Stories of struggles and failures can be used as a means to an end, using the special expertise and insights you’ve gained towards solving readers’ problems.
  • Blogs also have a damage control function.  When customer complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with publicly (there’s nothing more public than the Internet!), that gives the “apology” – and the remediation – a lot more weight in the eyes of readers.

    Does it help to share wisdom from leaders in your own industry or profession in your blog?
    When you link to someone else’s accomplishments or remarks on a subject you’re covering, that can have two important positive effects: reinforcing a point you want to make and showing you’re in touch with trends in your own field. Obviously, as with all tools and tactics, “re-gifting” content needs to be handled with restraint.

To me, though, the biggest advantage of sharing others’ wisdom in your own content, is that you’re showing that you’re excited by the insights you’ve gained, and you want your readers to benefit as well.

Sharing wisdom? Go ahead, I say. We can never have too much inspiration.

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The 4 Things Your Resume – and Your Blog Page – Should Include

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“There are many different opinions on what information you should and shouldn’t include on your resume. But there are certain basics that must be there,” Zip Recruiter advises in an article reprinted in the Indianapolis Star. “Here’s the good news.” The authors say: “You already have all the answers.”

As a content marketing professional, I found this Zip Recruiter advice highly relevant. What’s so interesting is that, while there are articles galore about what elements should be included in a blog post, there’s relatively little guidance on basic pieces of information that need to appear on a blog page.

Forbes offers a list of 8 must-haves for the blog post content itself:

  1. magnetic headline
  2. compelling lead-in
  3. useful subheads
  4. informative body
  5. appealing graphics
  6. powerful call to action
  7. relevant internal link
  8. good meta description

However (and this is the eye-opening aspect of the Zip recruiter piece), as blog marketers, we’re missing the boat if certain key information isn’t right there, in the same visual field as our wonderful content, quickly accessible to our blog readers:

Contact information
“Include your name along with the proper pronunciation if you find that others have trouble with it,” Zip Recruiter advises. Include the phone number you use most, and your email address. (Sure, your website has an “About” page, but what if a blog visitor is moved to act now?)

Work experience
Your blog is a way to assert your authority as a SME (Subject Matter Expert). You’ve successful dealt with – many times before – the problem with which the reader is dealing now. You’ve got this!

Education
Do business blog readers need to know about educational credentials of a practitioner or business owner? You bet. Today’s consumers won’t do business with someone they don’t trust, and “credentializing” is one way to build trust. Degrees and certifications may be listed or shown as logos, and educational experiences can be woven into blog content itself.

Skills
Demonstrating not only what you know but what you know how to do is a crucial function of any business blog. Specific services offered may be listed on the blog page itself (in addition to offering case studies, testimonials, and descriptions as part of the blog content.

The Zip Recruiter article serves as a reminder to us content writers and the business owners who hire us: The visitors you hope to attract to your website may not be in search of a job, but the same four types of information that belong on a resume belong on your blog page!

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Reify Your Blog Posts

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There are concepts that exist in a purely abstract way, and, in blog content marketing, we have to, as hackernoon.com puts it, “find ways to explain those concepts so that they make sense to as many people as possible”. In fact, as we’ve come to realize at sayitforyou.net, blogging itself is a way of reifying complex information.

To reify is to make something abstract more concrete or real. Sociology textbooks define ‘reification” (which literally means to “turn into things”) as “the process of coming to believe that humanly created social forms are natural, universal, and absolute things”. In the two sayings “You can’t fool Mother Nature” and “fighting for justice”, Nature and Justice, both abstract concepts, are treated as real people, even though we know they’re not, There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, authors Chevette Alston and Lesley Chapel explain in study.com, because reification can turn language abstractions into tangible understanding.

“Concepts like happiness and intelligence and personality are called constructs. We cannot see them directly. They are labels, concepts, literally constructions in our heads. By giving such complex processes a label, we can discuss them, psywww.com explains.

Not everyone agrees that reification is beneficial. “When we assume that a concrete, tangible thing has the quality of abstract concepts, when the thing-in-itself is forgotten and the thing-as-thought-of is mistaken for the thing itself, that can be dangerous, Biznewske.com explains. For example, assuming that someone is an expert simply because they have a degree is a reification fallacy. Assuming that a boxed product such as cereal is a symbol of health and nutrition is a fallacy. Reifying an idea such as “male privilege” means taking it as true when it might or might not be true.

Hacker.com, though, “gets it”. The essential challenge we blog content writers face, they understand, is explaining abstract concepts in the right way, because doing that makes the difference between business success and business failure. Readability is a critical aspect of online writing, in which we business bloggers are out to retain the clients and customers we serve and to bring in new ones.

The products and services we’re writing about can’t be amazing in the abstract, which is why reifying blog content can be just what’s needed to make it engaging and real..

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Using the Cs for Virtual Meetings and Business Blogs

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“Meetings should matter, especially when those meetings are taking place exclusively online,” author Paul Axtell posts in the book Make Virtual Meetings Matter. No one wants to be called in for a meeting that could have been an email.

You can transform those opinions by holding a meeting that is efficient and productive, useful and important, Axell explains. Leadership development consultant Jill Hinrichs tells how to use the Cs, each of which can be applied to business blog content writing:

Clarity
Make clear what the purpose of the conversation or meeting is and the outcome you are committed to producing. Keep tasks short, clear, and actionable.
The job of a blog post headline is to get people to read your article, but you must respect the reader experience. The expectations set up in the title must be fulfilled in the content, which itself must remain focused.

Connection
What is our relationship to each other and what is our shared experience? Who are you and with whom have you been dealing. What is our shared experience?
At Say It For You, I tell newbie blog content writers: “Everything about your blog should be tailor-made for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it.” Since we, as ghostwriters, have been hired by clients to tell their story online to their target audiences, we need to do intensive research, taking guidance from the client’s experience and expertise.

Candor
What is the relevant information we need to have in order to make good decisions? Create trust and share values, Hinrichs advises.
Blog readers want to feel trust in your know-how and professionalism and you won’t be able to help them until that trust happens. Readers who visit your blog are trying to learn about the business owner or practitioner behind the blog. One way to address that need is to use opinion to clarify what differentiates this business or practice from its peers. The blog has to add value, not just a promise of value should the reader convert to a buyer, but real value in terms of information, skill enhancement, or a new way of looking at the topic. Searchers will sense that they’ve come to a provider they can trust.

Commitment
What action will we commit to as a result of the conversation? There should be a clear next step.
In corporate blogging for business, the “ask” comes in the form of calls to action. Offering a reason for the requested action greatly improves the chances of having your request fulfilled. In both meetings and blogs, participants need to know how they can measure success.

If our blogging Calls to Action are going to be effective, I realized, it’s up to us blog content writers to offer workable benchmarks, explaining the “as measured by”.

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Laws of Likability for Bloggers

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In her rare downtime, Michelle Tillis Lederman confesses in her book The 11 laws of Likability, her guilty pleasure is watching TV reality shows. The characters she’s most drawn to, she realized, are being real. Contestants who accept themselves and have a sense of humor about their faults are the most likable, she concluded.

How does that insight apply to networking? Lederman asks. Being authentic is not a permission slip to be rude, obnoxious or inappropriate, but what it does mean is letting your true self show through so that others can connect with you, she concludes.

Can this insight be applied to online content marketing? In-person communication, Lederman explains, is based on three components – verbal (the words you choose), vocal (the tone and animation of your voice), and visual (facial expression and body language). In web-based marketing, we realize at Say It For You, words become our primary tools for transmitting the “true you” of our business owner or professional practitioner clients.

Lederman offers four pieces of practical advice about word-based communication:

  1. Start with the positive.
  2. Choose strong, actionable verbs.
  3. Focus on what can be done.
  4. Translate your own ideas into knowledge and opportunity (for them)

Nothing is more real – and more “likable”, our blog content writers have learned, than citing the real-life obstacles the business owner needed to overcome and the wisdom she’s gained in the process.

A connection is something that requires two, Lederman reminds readers. In the world of blog marketing, it is the visitors who’ve initiated the “conversation” by virtue of searching online for answers to a question they have or a product or service they are seeking. The blog content is there to do what Lederman calls “meeting them where they are – almost”. As bloggers, we’re validating the readers’ “energy state”, showing them we “heard” what they are saying and that they’ve come to the right place.

In relationships, Lederman realizes, when you give freely to others, you increase your likability. Still, you don’t always get something in return. A favor, she reminds readers, is only a favor when someone wants it!

In pull marketing (of which blogging is an important part, you have advice and valuable information to offer freely to all visitors to your site. Yet “what one person finds valuable may be another person’s spam,” the author remarks ruefully. Just be yourself and be there, she concludes. The rest is up to them.

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