Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

Are business blog post titles “spoilers”? Maybe, but at least according to the Guardian Books blog, spoilers are good things:  “Readers who know how a story will end will get greater pleasure from it.”

As novelists, know, agents and publishers often require them to furnish a synopsis along with their manuscript.  The synopsis, explains Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest, “supplies key information about your novel (plot, theme, characterization, setting), while also showing how these coalesce to form the big picture.”  The agent or publisher, the implication is, will not take the time to read the manuscript without knowing up front if it’s going to be a good match for the publisher’s target audience.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I can’t help but see a strong parallel here for business blog content writers.  Readers come online searching for information, products, or services, and they are not going to take the time to read your “manuscript” (the full text of your blog post) without assurance that they’ve come to the right place.

In writing any SEO marketing blog, using something on the line of that novelist’s synopsis is essential to doing what I call “blogging downhill”.  In corporate blogging training sessions I teach new freelance bloggers in Indianapolis to address readers’ “What’s-In-It-For-Me?” question at the beginning, rather than later on in each blog post.

Sambuchino explains that, as agents have become “busier and busier”, today “they want to hear your story now-now-now.” That is certainly the case with the online readers of today. Two pieces of advice he offers novel synopsis writers are especially apropos for business blog writers:

• Establish a “hook” at the beginning.
• Make it a short, fast, and exciting read.

The University of California’s psychology department gave subjects 12 short stories to read.  Some were presented with “spoiler paragraphs” that told readers how the stories would end, others had no spoilers.  “Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions.”  Knowing ahead of time how the story would end not only didn’t hurt enjoyment, but actually improved it,” the researchers found.

The lesson for blog writers?  Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em. Do it in the title and in the opening sentences of each blog post. Use a “hook”, but let readers know whether it’s for fishing or knitting. Will you be teaching them to fish or knit or do you sell books on the subject?

We’ve always known that optimizing our online content writing means letting the search engines know what we’re about. Now, we learn, we’d best “spoil” the “suspense” for our readers as well!

I sat in the audience at the Financial Planning Association meeting the other day wearing two “hats”. I reflected on the fact that my present career as professional ghost blogger grew out of my years of language teaching followed by a second career as financial planner and financial writer.  What that meant was that while I was attuned the information about taxes, health care, estate planning, and real estate that was offered, as a corporate blogging trainer, I was analyzing the techniques used by each of the four speakers to engage the audience’s interest.
(Today, I’ll talk about the first two speakers, leaving the other two for a future Say It For You blog post .)

“Chunking refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information,” explains e-learning coach Connie Malamed. “The reason the brain needs this assistance is because working memory, which is where we manipulate information, holds a limited amount of information at one time.”

The first FPA meeting speaker, CPA William R. Owen Jr., offered “Top Ten Tax Planning Tips for 2012”. Owen was using the “list” technique that is very useful in freshening up blog post content: starting with one idea about your product or service, then putting a number to it, such as “2 Best Ways To …,”  “3  Problem Fixes to Try First….”, or “4 Simple Home Remedies for…”
The point of the "lists", of course, is to demonstrate ways in which your product or service is different, and to provide valuable information that engages readers.

The speaker knew, of course, that any of us could have turned to more technical sources, to find information, but that we wanted him to help us make sense out of the ocean of information out there about tax law.

Speaker #2 was Professor William Evans of the University of Notre Dame, speaking about the Health Care landscape”. Out of the 24 Power Point slides Evans used for his very dynamic talk, fully 17 of them contained visuals – either photos or charts.

With more than 15 years of financial planning seminars using pictures and charts under my belt, I heartily approved of Evans’ approach. In training new freelance blog copywriters,  I stress that, whenever you can include an actual photograph illustrating the content of your business blog post, that adds power to the words of the blog. In fact, online readers will not necessarily understand the significance or interpretation of the chart or photo without your help, I explain. (While all of us financial planners could have read the charts, we were looking to Prof. Evans to elaborate on the source of the information in each chart and to demonstrate why that information would be important in our work with clients.).

In every business or profession, there’s no end, it seems, to the technical information available to consumers on the Internet. But it falls to us business blog content writers to break all that information down into chewable tablet form!