For SEO Marketing Blogs They’ll Want to Eat and You’ll Want to Serve

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Nutella® hazelnut/chocolate spread has a taste I love (hazelnut/chocolate), but, alas, the delicious confection is way off my diet.  As an Indianapolis blog content writer, though, I can enjoy the Nutella® slogans and website, ingesting a number of SEO marketing blog tips without exceeding my caloric intake limits.

Nutella® in its earliest form, we learn, was created back in the 1940’s by pastry maker Pietro Ferrero.  During World War II, cocoa was rationed, so Ferrero used hazelnuts, plentiful in his region of northwest Italy to extend the chocolate supply.

1.  Give readers a “history lesson” – Online visitors want to feel you understand their needs, but they want to understand you as well, I explain in when training corporate employees and business owners on how to write a blog. Telling the story of how your company or practice evolved helps create an emotional connection with them.

There are over 50 hazelnuts per 13 ounce jar.
 
2.   Serve up statistics –   Statistics can help demonstrate the extent of the problem or dilemma your product or service is designed to solve.  In this case, Nutella® is using statistics as a testament to the high quality of the product.

Adding Nutella® to your family’s breakfast can make mornings a whole lot easier…Spread it on multigrain toast or even whole-wheat waffles, add a glass of milk and a serving of fruit……

3.   Offer advice tailored to your target audience. Nutella® is talking to moms who want to serve the right breakfast to their children. The Nutella® website answers questions such as “How should it be stored?” and “How can I tell the freshness of my Nutella® jar?”

In a single day, how much would all the Nutella® made all over the world weigh?” (I had to choose among three multiple choice responses.) The answer: 790 tons, about the weight of 4 blue whales or 99 elephants.

Including quizzes and surveys in a business blog is a great way to engage readers’ attention. (Our curiosity is most intense when we’re testing our own knowledge, so rather than serving up statistics, try to involve readers with questions.) “Do you know which…?  Do you know who…?  Do you know what…?” Learning that Nutella® sells 400 million jars a year isn’t nearly as interesting as finding out that, if you arrange all the jars in a line, it’ll go around the moon four times.

Because it focuses on the end result consumers of the product want to achieve, I see Nutella®’s slogan “For a breakfast they’ll want to eat and you’ll want to serve” as a near-perfect model for those who want to learn blogging for business!


 

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If They Found You, Would They Call? Bloggers Help Answer the Question

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Here’s the critical question,” says Dave Grant in Financial Planning magazine – “If he found your website, would he give you a call?”  “Your website,” Grant tells financial planners, “should tell prospective customers a number of things:  firm services and philosophy, investment management methodology, as well as blog posts about different financial planning topics.’

As a blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer (with a background in financial services), I especially appreciated Grant’s specifying that a website “shows whether your firm is on the cutting edge and how it values technology.” Grant tellingly adds, “Your site needs a blog at a minimum.”

The author describes a situation in which a prospect is seeking a financial planning firm.  

  • Firm A has a template website and says the planner has been in the profession 25 years. His bio photograph shows him to be about 40 years old.  Why is that photo so out of date?
  • Firm B has exactly the same template (instant turnoff, says Grant), with a “latest update” that is 18 months old.

  • Firm C has dynamic graphics, blog posts only days old talking about current topics, with fresh, interesting bios.

So why don’t more financial planners update and improve their websites and include fresh, relevant blog content writing? It’s interesting that, in general, financial planners often work with their clients to create an overall financial plan, then hire professional money managers to implement those plans with specific investments. "If were spending a lot of time on investment selection, reported one Certified Financial Planner® in the Journal of Financial Planning. “I couldn't do the premier job that I want to do for my clients. There just aren't enough hours in the day."

“Outsourcing tasks lets companies focus on growth,” reads a recent USA Today headline.

Blogging for business, as Grant is trying to communicate to his financial planning colleagues, is an essential customer acquisition tool in our increasingly web-based world. Yet the creation of effective SEO marketing blog posts is no mundane task, and few business owners, even with the help of talented employees, can spare the time to post relevant, new material with enough consistency and frequency to improve search engine rankings.

The critical question remains: “If they find your website, would they be likely to give you a call?” Fact is, blog content writing services can be a big, big part of the answer.

 

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Who Else Is Doing It? Business Blog Readers Will Want to Know

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“The Best Way to Filter Coffee” could have been a classic SEO marketing blog title rather than an article in Mental Floss magazine. Why do I say that?

Business owners, professionals – and those of us who provide blog writing services to them – need to include more usable advice, more about the core beliefs of the business owners, more “how to” and less “we do” than the website might include.

But, at the bottom of the page with the coffee-filtering history and advice, Mental Floss has a chart titled “The National Buzz”, which answers the question “Who hogs the United Nations’ coffee pot?” This mini-article is an example of a blog content writing technique I recommend – it provides some startling statistics.

There are several ways statistics provide value in blogging for business:

  • Grabbing blog visitors’ attention.
     
  • Mythbusting: (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.)
     
  • Demonstrating 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!)

In this case, Mental Floss lets readers know the annual per capita consumption of coffee in different nations.  Finland is highest at 26 ½ pounds of coffee consumed by the average person over the year.  Norway is next at 21.8 lbs., and the US is next to last at 9.3lbs. a year average consumption per person.

Remember when we were kids, and we wanted to get our parents’ permission to do something “all the other kids” were supposedly doing? Grown-up blog readers still look at what others are doing when making a purchase of a product or service.  That’s why, in corporate blogging training sessions, I encourage content writers to include statistics about “all the other kids”.

“When buying products, consumers are influenced by references,” choosing products that appear to have a “higher status”, explains Professor Nienke Vlutters of the University of Twnte.

In blogging for business, don’t forget to tell them “who else is doing it”!

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Share New Thinking With Business Blog Readers, Then It’s Their Move

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“Reading around” for my blog is a habit I’ve developed, one I highly recommend for all blog content writers. Having found a gold mine of ideas in the latest issue of Mental Floss magazine,  I’ve been sharing those insights over the past week and a half with Say It For You readers.

Today, though, I’ve some thoughts to share based on a gem I found in Women’s Health Magazine based on myth busting. One very basic strategy I teach business bloggers, is, in fact, myth busting. No matter what field you’re in, there are sure to be misconceptions about what you do and what you sell, and getting the word out about the real story is a fine application for business blog writing.

The Women’s Health article that caught my eye, “Healthy Dose”, used a three part format I hadn’t seen before, one that could lend itself very well to SEO marketing blog content:

  • Old thinking
  • New Thinking
  • Your move

Flossing one’s teeth is one example.  The old thinking is that there is a link between periodontal disease and hear disease, and that bacteria that collect between the teeth could enter the bloodstream, increasing the risk of heart attack.

The new thinking is that there’s no solid evidence to support the idea that poor oral hygiene causes heart disease. One condition doesn’t cause the other.

Your move, Women’s Health informs readers, is to floss on!  Why? Flossing reduces the risk of gum disease, and prevents foul breath.

It’s the Your move” part that I think can be a great technique for writers to include in the content of SEO marketing blogs. By gathering information on their topic and presenting it as part of their blog, online content writers are providing a valuable service, but to go the next step, each blog post has to offer some perspective. WHY is this information important to the reader? What can that reader “do about it”? 

As a college career mentor, I have students write “Reflections”, summarizing an experience they’ve had, using a “What, So what? Now what?" format.

The “Your Move” is the “Now what?” part of the blog content writing.  It offers the reader a new way of looking at things based on the knowledge and experience business owners or professionals have shared in their blogs.  Most important, it gives readers a road map for using that information.  It’s their move!.

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Is It Smart to Make Your Blog Readers Into Maltsters?

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In Mental Floss magazine’s “In Praise of Light Beer”, Jed Lipinski may have taken things a bit far, at least where blog content writing is concerned.

On the one hand, I’m quick to assure business owners and professional practitioners that writing about what they do almost never leads readers to want to “do it themselves”. On the contrary, the valuable, detailed information they offer in their SEO marketing blog showcases their own expertise and specialized knowledge.

The other side of it, though, is that effective blog posts keep things short. Lipinski’s “Let There Be Lite: A Step-By-Step Guide” is, itself, 150+ words long, within a five page article – hardly “lite” fare!  One detail of the article is interesting: Lipinski introduces the term “maltster”, describing a person who makes beer professionally.

Blog content writing, I believe, is at its best on the middle ground between over-simplification and maltsterdom. In reading business blogs about a product or service, online searchers want to:
 

  • Find out what they’ll get if they buy
  • Discover whether the product is a good match for their needs
  • Gain perspective about how the pricing and the quality stacks up against the competition

In short, your blog content needs to address the “Why you?” and “Why now?” questions. What those readers really don’t need to – or want to – know is that in order to make beer, they must steep barley in water, dry it in a kiln, boil malt together with hot water and hops in a copper kettle to produce wort, add yeast and let in spend weeks fermenting.

Indianapolis blog writers (and the business owners and professional practioners who hire freelance bloggers) can be reassured: Readers want to know you’re the maltster – they just need to relax and enjoy the end result!”

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