Blogging About What They Said, Not What You Heard

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“Anyone can say, ‘I heard”; only a journalist can say ‘They said'”, explains Amelia Dieter McClure in the Indianapolis Business Journal, emphasizing the commitment to the truth as the core tenet of a journalist.

While blog marketing is not journalism in the true sense of the term, commitment to the truth should take two forms in blog posts, we teach at Say It For You:

  1. Using data to back up claims
  2. Properly attributing ideas, images, and text that come from others’ work.

“The best content marketers aren’t afraid to share,” Corey Wainwright of Hubspot explains. (By giving credit in a hyperlink, not only am I giving Wainwright credit for the quote, I’m linking to the Hubspot website where his blog post appears.

With literally trillions of words being added daily to the World Wide Web, the Internet has become the largest repository of information in human history. Blogging for business has become a rapidly growing part of this information swell, and (inadvertently or on purpose) there’s undoubtedly a lot of “borrowing” going on.

As an occasional high school and college level English tutor, I teach my students to avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their proper authors.  The blogging equivalent of citations is links. There are actually rewards to be gained in this arena for doing the “right and proper thing”: Electronic links enhance search engine rankings for your blog by creating back-and-forth online “traffic”.

There’s a second aspect to “truth-in-blogging” when it comes to claims. Most business blog posts make claims.  The claims may be understated, exaggerated, or exactly on the money, but still – a claim is a claim. The problem is, often blog visitors don’t know how to “digest” the claims you’ve “served up”.  They simply don’t have any basis for comparison, not being as expert as you are in your field. What I’m getting at is that every claim needs to be put into context, so that it not only is true, but so that it feels true to your online visitors. Readers must be shown how that claim has the potential to help them with their problem or need!

Anyone can blog about “what “they heard” or “what they think” or “what they claim”, but the best business blog writers are committed to the truth.

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Why Blind Dates With Blogs are a Bad Idea

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Have you gone on a blind date with a book? Lauren Carlton of the American Library Association asks. “The set-up for the display is simple”, Carlton says. “Just wrap books in paper to hide their covers — hence the ‘blind date’ — and decorate the wrapping with enticing facts, hints about the plotline, or our favorite, the books’ first lines”.

To get patrons to want to pick up these blind dates, Carlton advises librarians and book store owners, you need books with attention-grabbing first lines.

  • “Don’t look for dignity in public bathrooms” (Big Machine by Victor LaValle)
  • “It was the day Grandmother exploded” (The Crow Road by Iain Banks)
  • “All stories are love stories” (Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson)

Between Shakespeare’s Juliet asking “What’s in a name?” and father-of-advertising David Ogilby’s emphasis on headlines, there’s simply no contest when it comes to blogging for business – titles matter. Just as those first lines enticed readers to buy “blind date” books without seeing the covers or reading the blurb, blog titles set the tone and arouse curiosity in online searchers.

There are a number of different approaches in choosing a title for a blog post:

  • titles with an agenda (making clear the writer’s point of view)
  • emotional “grabber titles”
  • how-to titles
  • “truth about” titles

Blog post titles have two seemingly contradicting jobs to do – arousing readers’ curiosity while still assuring them they’ve come to the right place, I’ve often explained to blog content writers at Say It For You. Unlike the case with the blind date book promotion, where bookstore customers and library patrons are looking for “a good read”, online searchers are looking for specific answers to questions and specific solutions to problems they have. Searchers who’ve found your blog site won’t linger longer than a couple of seconds if what they see doesn’t reassure them they’ve come to the right place for the information they need.

In a blind-date-with-a-book promotion, the book jackets are covered with plain brown wrapping, so that appearances play no part in readers’ choice of their next read. In contrast, images and photos need to be part of any business’ blog marketing, because, as digital marketing maven Jeff Bullas points out, articles with images get 94% more total views. In fact, at Say It For You, we try to use images the same way, selecting one for each post that gives readers an idea of what to expect in the post.

If you’ve recently gotten out of a long relationship or have lost confidence in yourself, a blind date can really encourage you to get back into the dating arena. Blind dates with books are a fun promotion libraries and bookstores use to attract customers. In general, though, one is forced to conclude, blind dates with blogs tend to be a bad idea.

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To Make Blog Titles Pop, Add a Little Assonance and Alliteration

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This month’s issue of Breathe Magazine was the inspiration for both this week’s Say It For You blog posts….

Titles – they either do the trick or they don’t, I always muse while browsing through the magazine racks at Barnes & Noble or the corner CVS. The current issue of Breathe had an especially appealing array of clever titles, I thought.

To be sure, a number of the Breathe titles were very direct, leaving not an iota of doubt as to what kind of information one should expect to see in the article:

  • Unlocking Your Potential
  • Stand Up For What’s Important
  • Ways to Cope With Change
  • Project Declutter
  • The Joy of Dogs
  • The A to Zzzzzz of Power Naps
  • Say It Loud, Say It Clear

Still other titles evoked curiosity about what stance the authors were going to take or what they were going to advise:

  • When Life Tips Out of Balance
  • Food for the Soul
  • Only Fools Rush In
  • Daydream Believer

I noticed a third grouping of titles, where the authors took advantage of the sound of the words themselves. Although I was looking at a printed page, I found, I was almost reading those titles aloud in my own head:

  • Facebook Fallout?
  • From Chore to Choice
  • Navigating Non-Negotiables
  • Experience vs. Expectation
  • Is the Grass Greener?

Notice the way similar consonants or similar vowel sounds are presented in a sequence. In scanning those titles, your eyes are both seeing the repetition and, in a real sense “hearing it” as well.

Breathe Magazine reminded me of something I’ve been teaching for years now at Say It For You, namely using alliteration (consonant repetition) and assonance (vowel repetition) in blog titles with an eye to making them more “catchy”. It’s one thing to write great content, and quite another to get readers to click on it.

To make blog titles “pop”, try add ind a pinch of alliteration and assonance!

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It’s Easier to Buy Perfume Than Blog

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If you’re involved in any way in marketing a business or a practice, I know you’ll get a kick out of this story from the Reader’s Digest June issue:

  Every year for my birthday, my husband buys me a particular perfume that
                  I especially love. This past year, with money tight, I told him not to bother getting
                  me a gift. Instead, I asked that he handwrite a letter encapsulating our 25 years together.

                  My husband leaned in, gently took my hand, and begged, ”Can I please just buy you the bottle of perfume?”

Every minute of every day, millions upon millions of new blogs come online. Fast forward a few months and many of them quit. Visitors to those websites find content dated months and even years ago. Why?

Bloggingtips.guru.com thinks there are several reasons:

  • They have no patience.
  • They lose motivation.
  • They have a “me too” mentality and don’t know how to be unique.
  • They cannot write interesting content.
  • They fail to promote their blog.

There’s actually a scientific name for what ails that husband in the story. In fact, there are two:
“graphophobia” and “scriptophobia”, Jacob Olesen explains in fearof.net. Fear of writing, he says, usually originates from a negative experience in one’s past (Could it be that the husband was forever scarred by his second grade teacher’s criticism of his cursive??).

Whatever ails the guy in the story, don’t let yourself fall prey to that malady, cautions selectmkt.com. Don’t participate in the neglected websites syndrome. Give your blog some love and it will make a huge difference against your competitors.

Problem is, it’s less work to buy that bottle of perfume. Far too many business owners start out strong with their blogging, but months or even weeks later, begin to fizzle. Daily blogs become weekly blogs, and pretty soon, months go by between blog posts. In fact, my company, Say It For You, was founded to provide professional writing services to business clients, whose attention was constantly drawn away from content creation because they were putting out fires, making sales, and dealing with personnel issues.

Most business owners today know that business blog writing in their area of expertise is important for getting indexed by search engines and getting found by potential clients and customers. Rather than having web visitors find years-old content on their blog page, owners are best off leaving the driving to professional content writing “surrogates

Truth is, it’s easier to buy perfume than blog!

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Blogging to Make Them Want to See Things the Way You Do

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Communicating with pictures and words is what Dan Roam’s little book for speakers, Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations is all about. The purpose, the author says, of creating and delivering a report pitch, or story, is t make it s captivating that our audience wants to see things the way we do.

That’s a very hard thing for speakers to accomplish, Roam admits. (Blog content writers don’t have the advantage of facing the audience in person, using eye contact and gestures, which makes the task even more challenging!).

Dan Roam’s 3 Rules of Show and Tell can help, though, even if video clips are not part of the blog:

  • When we tell the truth in a presentation, we connect with our audience and we have self-confidence.
  • When we tell a story, complex concepts become clear, and we include everyone.
  • When we tell a story with pictures, we banish boredom and people see what we mean.

There are actually three kinds of truth, Roam points out, and as presenters, we need to ask ourselves: for this topic, for this audience, and for myself, which truth should I tell? I particularly like that observation, because at Say It For You, we emphasize the “power of one”, with each blog post having a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice. Roam suggests presenters ask themselves the following question: “If my presentation could change them in just one way, what would that change be?”

There are really only four ways to move an audience, Roam adds:

  1. changing their information, adding new data to what they already know
  2. changing their knowledge or ability
  3. changing their actions
  4. changing their beliefs, inspiring them to understand something new about themselves or about the world

Which one of those four goals we choose determines the structure of our storyline in the content of the speech – or blog post.

Truth, story, and pictures – If we get those things right, Dan Roam assures fearful speakers, everything that follows will be a breeze. “When we trust our ideas and are confident, we will help our audience change.”

Change is what it’s all about, Roam says of presentations, and that’s certainly what it’s all about in blogging for business!

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