How-To Blog Content is Harder to Write Than First Appears

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giving directions

 

Giving directions is a lot harder than first appears. That point was brought home to us at a recent tutor training I attended at Ivy Tech Community College. An instructor may believe he’s given clear instructions to his class for completing a particular assignment, but different students interpret those directions… well, differently. Working together in informal study groups, students can help each other arrive at the correct interpretation, was the point.

We tutors were divided into small groups (3-4 people each) and given the following set of directions:

  1. Draw a circle about an inch in diameter.
  2. Draw a square so that each side of the square touches the circumference of the circle.
  3. Draw an equilateral triangle, making sure that one of the triangle’s sides is touching one half of one of the sides of the square.

Sounds fairly simple, doesn’t it? (After all, every one of us in that room has several college degrees!) Well, it wasn’t – it took much discussion and interpretation to comply with those “clear” directions.

There is no end to the technical information available to consumers on the internet. Therefore, as business blog content writers, our job is to help readers understand, absorb, buy into, and use that information. At Say it For You, I’m fond of saying that in blogging for business, teaching is the new selling. One way to empower customers to make a decision is to help them understand the differences between various industry terms, as well as the differences between the products and services of one business compared to those offered by another.

As bloggers, we’re giving readers the raw materials to think about, and even the how-to instructions. We need to go one step further, demonstrating ways different customers and clients have “figured out” how to interpret and use the “instructions” and “directions” we’ve offered for their own benefit.

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Acing Your Next Blog “Interview”

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blog posts as interviews
“Want to ace your next interview and land that open job you’ve been seeking? experisjobsus asks job seekers. Go in prepared with five key selling points, along with examples of how you used those skills in real world situations.

At Say It For You, I’ve often remarked that business blogs are nothing more than extended interviews. Searchers are evaluating your content to judge whether your know-how, products, and services are a good fit for their needs.

The overriding message a successful interviewee wants to convey to a prospective employer has three elements:

  1. I understand the challenges of the job.
  2. I have the experience and expertise to take those on.
  3. I would like to start doing this important work.

While all the “data” about the candidate is to be found on the resume, what interviewers are trying do is understand what makes that person “tick” and decide if he or she will “fit in’ with the company culture. Often interviewers will ask candidates to “describe themselves”. Behavioral interviewers don’t focus on facts about the candidates at all. Instead, the purpose is to reveal the person behind the resume.

For that very reason, we encourage Say It For You clients to include “Who’s Who in our business/our office/our industry” blog posts. Apart from the typical “Our Team” landing page on your website, which introduces people by name with a brief bio, the blog might offer close-up views of the functions each person serves. And, if you’ve kept in touch with your “alumni”, I advise content writers, it would be a great thing to let your readers know you’ve kept in touch with them and their doings.

One important thing to remember is that, while a website presents the company’s or the practice’s “big picture”, in business blogging, each post is like one question at an interview. With many blog readers tending to be scanners, they need to find very targeted content showing they’re come to the right place to get precisely the information, products, and services they were seeking.

“Acing” your next blog interview can depend on showing you’re ready, willing, and able to start doing “this important work!”

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Give ‘Em a Glimpse of the Guiding Principle

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guiding principle in blogs

The opening speaker at a recent Financial Planning Association Study Day was talking about recession. Are we “due” for a recession, given that we’ve been experiencing the longest period of economic growth in our country’s history?

Seated in the audience, I was listening with “two ears”. Now retired from my financial planning career, I continue to keep up with the educational requirements for my CFP® designation, and very much enjoy the lectures and the discussions with former colleagues.

My other “ear”, though, caught something very important for blog content writers. Brandon Zureick of Johnson Asset Management was there to “bust a myth”, contradicting widespread financial media “hype” about the recession lurking around the corner. “Some believe the Federal Reserve will save the day through cutting interest rates, while some think additional stimulus cannot combat the looming downturn,” writes Yun Li of CNBC.

Every one of the financial planners in the audience had clients reading, listening, and watching talking heads repeating the same so-called “rule” – a recession is “overdue”. Telling their clients they are “wrong” to believe that so-called rule isn’t going to work. Zureick knew what would work – arming the planners with a “guiding principle” to share with their clients in order to replace the framework within which many investors have been operating.

Here’s the new guiding principle Zureick offered: Economic recessions aren’t time-driven; they are factor-driven. Recession isn’t “due” or “overdue”. When and if we experience the next recession will relate to employment, consumption, and trade levels, not to timing.

Business blogs are wonderful tools around facts.  That’s why business owners and professional practitioners can use corporate blog writing as a way to dispense information, but, even more important, to address misinformation.

Why is that important to do? False beliefs about products and services often stand in the way of customers taking action. You might say that the de-bunking function of business blog writing is owners’ way of taking up arms against a sea of customers’ unfounded fears and biases.  Blog content writing is a way of “cleaning the air”, replacing factoids with facts, so that buyers can see their way to making decisions.

To do that, however, requires introducing guiding principles that offer readers a way to organize the barrage of information. Guiding principles allow readers only to move forward with buying decisions, but to explain those buying decisions to others.

Give ‘em a glimpse of the guiding principle!
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Blog With the Rendezvous Search Problem in Mind

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A famous logistics exercise, called the Rendezvous Search Problem, involves two people who lose each other while wandering through the aisles of a large supermarket. If they want to find each other, should one decide to stop moving while the other continues to search, or will they meet up sooner if both move through the aisles?

This problem has been debated in many a college classroom on logistics, and published in many a magazine as an amusing mental exercise. For us blog content writers, though, this is serious stuff.  One of the purposes of our work is to help our clients’ businesses and professional practices “get found”, and get found as quickly as possible. When business blogging works, in fact, they call it “winning search”.

Only problem is, the people in the ”other aisles” of the Internet not only don’t know where our clients are;  they don’t even know the business’ or the practice’s name!  They don’t know that our clients have exactly the information, the products, and the services they’re looking for, and they won’t know that until they’re “introduced” by the search engine through the blog.

Years ago, NewScientist Magazine offered advice to the lost supermarket shoppers: “Walk along the edge of the supermarket where the cash registers are, looking down the aisles for the person you seek.”

For blog marketers, that advice might translate as follows:

1.  The more relevant content you can post on the blog, the quicker the “find time” is likely to be. You can’t get to the “front of the store” without consistent content creation.

2.  Just as in the supermarket story, you need to know what you’re looking for. The blog content must be perfectly focused on your target market.

3.  The blog content must humanize both “shoppers” and providers. Content writers should imagine one specific person who’s experiencing one specific problem, suggests “Mo the Blog Coach”.

One thing we know for sure at Say It For You – whether at the supermarket or the blogosphere, you can’t just stand in place and hope to get found!

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Blog Reader Encounters of the Right Kind

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client encounters

When it comes to blog marketing, there’s a lot of talk (too much talk, in my opinion) about traffic. Yes, blogging is part of business owners’ or professional practitioners’ “pull marketing” strategy, designed to attract readers’ eyeballs. At least a percentage of these readers, the hope is, will become customers and clients.

In a sense, however, fewer might well prove better when it comes to the numbers of online searchers who find your blog, then click through to the website. Remember the 1977 movie about aliens called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”? I like to remind both the blog content writers at Say It For You and the clients who hire us that the goal of a business blog is to bring in customers “of the right kind”. These are customers who have a need for and who will appreciate the services, products, and expertise being showcased in the blog.

Long-time friend and fellow blogger Thaddeus Rex had it right, I believe, when he said: “If your marketing is not getting enough people into the pool, you’ll find the problem is in one of three places.  You’ve either got the wrong story, the wrong stuff, or the wrong audience”. Rex recommends filtering: the audience by differentiating your own business or practice in some way:

  • Your product or service can do something your competitors can’t .
  • Your product/service is more easily available relative to your competitors’.
  • You offer a better buying experience.
  • You’re less expensive.

Years ago, I remember a speaker at a wine-tasting event explaining that, when a customer finds a product or service that appears to be the exact right thing, it’s as if a light pops on. By offering a “content-tasting” on your blog, and doing that regularly and frequently, I tell business owners and professionals, you’ll have put yourself in a position to attract those “encounters of the right kind”.

Getting it “right” takes planning and thought, to be sure. Are you selecting the “right” keyword phrases? Are you establishing the “right” clear navigation path from the blog to landing pages on your website? Are you blogging for the right reasons and with the right expectations?

Remember, the goal is not lots of blog reader encounters; it’s blog reader encounters of the right kind!

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