Giving Business Blog Readers Something to Do With their Hands

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I imagine that for film directors, same as for us business blog content writers, finding ways to engage the audience is the Holy Grail.

The other day, though, sitting in a dark movie theater looking at a blank screen and clapping my hands as part of the reverberating applause, I gained a whole new understanding of what the word “engaging” means.

Regular readers of this Say It For You blog are used it by now:  As a corporate blogging trainer, I’m always looking for ideas for blog content in unlikely places – ads posted in bathroom stalls, book, magazines, billboards, speeches, even eavesdropped conversation snatches.  To me, it’s all content fodder to use for the benefit of those who’ve turned to me for assistance with business blogging.

But, really, that particular Saturday morning, I thought I was there just for the movies…

Several dozen of us Heartland Film Festival Society members had been invited to breakfast and a special showing of four award-winning short films.  The films were spectacular, each one deserving of the name Truly Moving Picture.

My favorite of the four, the one that made me want to get out my cell phone and summon every blog content writer in Indianapolis to “get over here – now!” was “The Butterfly Circus”.  Here’s how the reviewer summed it up: “A limbless man in a carnival sideshow encounters an infamous circus showman and is inspired to hope against everything he has ever believed.”

Afterwards, I reflected on the fact that we, the people sitting in the Legacy Landmark Theatre 4, were very much like blog readers.  What corporate blogging does best, I’ve often remarked, is deliver the kind of customers to a business website who are already interested in the product or services that website is touting.  Obviously, all of us Society members already had an interest in art film.  But then what?  In any SEO marketing blog strategy, something needs to happen next.

The standard answer for writers providing blogging services to others is that what’s next is the Call to Action.  In the couple of weeks since I saw “The Butterfly Circus”, I’ve been thinking a lot about CTAs, about what happens when Calls to Action are just not there, and what’s often missing when they are.

Once the basic connection has been established through the blog post title and some attention-getting statement of statistic, we blog content writers have our real work cut out for us – creating the emotional connection with readers.  According to the Content Marketing Institute, you must “use emotions to engage the brain.  It doesn’t matter how well-written your content is if readers aren’t emotionally involved in what you have to say.”

The twenty-minute film had ended.  With no live performers in sight and just a blank screen in front of us, all forty of us in the audience burst into applause.  We needed to do something to express all that emotion the film had evoked in us, and no one was giving us an outlet.

That, in short, is the big insight I wanted to share with freelance blog content writers.  The only thing worse than a lame Call to Action is NO Call to Action. 

Give your blog content readers something to do with their hands – and the positive emotions your content has produced.

 

 

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Beyond Bad Grammar in Corporate Website and Blog Content Writing

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As a corporate blogging trainer in Indianapolis, my favorite recommendation to business owners and the freelance blog content writers they hire to help bring their message to their customers is simply this:

Dress your blog in its best. Prevent blog content writing “wardrobe malfunctions” such as grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors. I counter any observation that most readers won’t catch any errors with this simple question:

 “Can you afford to have even one potential customer noticing your lack of care?”

But as I continue to read hundreds of pages of business blogs and corporate websites each week (a prerequisite for anyone providing business blogging assistance or writing content for websites), I’m noticing something that goes far beyond bad grammar and even beyond lack of care.  I’m finding content on blogs and on websites that’s at least partially incomprehensible.

Here are just four of the many instances of online content I found difficult or impossible to understand. I’ve reproduced each of these paragraphs word for word as they appeared on their respective sites.

 

  1. Supplemental cause to speak over inside using a taxes lawyer is the usefulness it creates.  Not merely might interacting stipulations with an IRS adviser turn into neurologically worrying, yet.
     
  2. Wonderful jewelries.  They were so gorgeous and classy too.  I love those jewelries which is so unique with its design.  Choose best jewelry boxes to secure such amazing jewelries.
     
  3. Despite of being subject to constant ailing condition, Billy Graham managed to serve the U.S. President in the bestest form. It is just like as if he was ready for this small meeting and after it was regrettably over, Obama made his way to West Virginia to offer his condolences and express his views on the loss of those unfortunate 29 miners, who got killed in a coal mine explosion on April 5th.
     
  4. Blogs vary in quality. There are blogs that you can easily label as poorly written immediately after a short glance while other blogs are simply so good that take your breath away. On the other hand, there are those blogs that are good but seem far away to being great – blogs that simply can’t rise from mediocrity.

(This last example is particularly sad, since the subject of the paragraph is poorly written blogs! “Far away to being great”? “So good that take your breath away?”  All I can say is “Huh?”)

I confess that when I began to come across incomprehensible online content, my first “take” was that it must have been created by non-native speakers of the English language. Business owners or professional practitioners had needed content writing help, I concluded, and had chosen to outsource the work overseas to save on costs.

When I learned about “spinned content”, I realized that the “gibberish” effect in some of the incomprehensible text I was finding could well be the work of a computer program, not of some overseas content writer.

Spinned content is reproduced by replacing words with synonyms, for the purpose of re-using content (and repeating keyword phrases) many times with an eye to “winning search”.  As SEO Positive explains, “Since the spinning software cannot discern context or meaning, there is a higher possibility of reconstructing the article into something meaningless.”

Now I have two questions to pose to business owners and professional practitioners:

            “Can you afford to have potential customers noticing your lack of care?”

            “Can you afford to have gibberish associated with your brand?”

 

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Let Freelance Corporate Blog Writing Ring

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Sure, I’m looking forward to the food and the fireworks later on today (aren’t we all?), but July 4th has a way of making me reflect on bigger things, such as what it means to be living here in the United States of America.

While I’m in this reflective mood, I realize I’m grateful that all the business owners and  practitioners who are my Say It For You blog content writing clients are free to grow their respective enterprises by telling others about what they’ve got goin’ on.

I found a wonderful masters’ dissertation by Rikke Frank Jorgensen on the subject of the Internet that sums up some of what I’m feeling about the work I’ve been doing the past five years as a professional ghost blogger and corporate blogging trainer, all made possible by the freedom of the Internet. Especially on this day when we’re celebrating our freedoms, Jorgensen’s remarks describing the awe-inspiring freedom of the Internet really resonated with me.

  • The Internet is open in the sense that no single entity; academic, corporate, governmental or non-profit administers it.
     
  • The Internet has no centralized storage location, control point, or communication channel entity
     
  • The Internet allows any person with access to computer and modem to exchange communication.
     
  • Internet communications can be directed either to specific individuals, to a group of people or to the world as a whole.
     

SEO marketing blogs, by the very nature of blogging, are “free”.  Unlike the case with ads (either in print or “pay-per-click”) or billboards, business owners or practitioners are not “charged” to put content on the Web. 

In an even more important sense, SEO blog marketing enjoys more freedom that traditional websites. Corporate blog content, after all, is meant not only for reading, but for acting and interacting. Readers can subscribe to the blog, get back to earlier posts or use links to other sites to read more about topics of special interest to them.

The Internet, blogs, burgers, and fireworks – what more could any freedom-loving American ask? Let freelance corporate blog writing ring!

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Employee Benefits and Blog Writing

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 “Are you wrestling with the need to increase revenues despite compensation compression?” asks Jack Kwicien in Employee Benefit Adviser magazine. While Kwicien was addressing his question to benefits advisers, he offers two pieces of advice that all blog content writers in Indianapolis can put to good use.

As a first step, says Kwicien, there are some central questions advisers (and bloggers for business) need to be asking themselves, including:

  • What critical client issues am I attempting to solve?
  • What potential solutions are offered by my firm that aren’t available in the marketplace today?
  •  What are the “lightning rod” issues that keep my prospects awake at night?

(When it comes to corporate blogging for business, this sort of soul-searching by the business owner or professional practitioner becomes the basis for the SEO marketing blog writing.

Once you have greater clarity about which target markets to pursue and what the unique value is that your business can bring to those markets, Step Two in your campaign to increase revenue on a limited budget, says Kwicien, is “forming strategic alliances with friendly competitors or synergistic businesses.”

As part of corporate blogging training, I stress “networking” through business blogs.  How?

  • Comment on other corporate blog posts
     
  • Share other blog posts by quoting them in your own blog,  linking to their blog, or posting a comment on their blogs
     
  • Offer to exchange guest blog posts
     
  • Send an email message complimenting another blogger on a post and starting a conversation

And, as Kwicien so wisely suggests, you can do this with synergistic businesses that relate to your own. (In fact, an important part of the work in freelance blog writing for business is “reading around the Web” to search for just those opportunities to create synergy.

“Morph your business to survive and thrive,” concludes Jack Kwicien.  Business blog writing, I’d add, can represent the perfect continuous-run morph-ing tool!

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How’s That Business Blog Writing Working For You?

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Reading a lot is a necessary agenda item for anyone providing business blogging assistance, I learned years ago.  Not surprisingly, as I often share with other freelance blog content writers in Indianapolis, some of my best insights come from ads.  Like ads, after all, SEO marketing blog posts are

a) targeted towards particular audiences and

b )invite readers or viewers to take action.

One of the great benefits I derive from my membership in the American marketing Association is receiving Marketing News magazine. In the June 30th issue, I found several valuable articles, but, as a corporate blogging trainer, I found my attention drawn to one of the publication’s full page ads.

“So how’s that working for you?” is the caption under a picture of a man in full business attire with the spray from a garden hose hitting him in the face. “Consider Capella. It’s the only system that uncovers the nastiest customer issues, and then guides you step by step through the process of fixing them,” the text continued.  “Learn how at maritzresearch.com/capella” is the closing Call to Action.

As a professional ghost blogger, I couldn’t help but admire the efficiency of this particular ad, thinking of several aspects we business blog content writers might emulate:

A captivating visual
Whether corporate blog writers make use of stock art, videos, or original photos, in blogging for business, as in that Capella ad, a spoonful of visuals makes it much easier for the words to go down.

An engaging headline
Optimizing through key words begins with the title, and so does the process of engaging readers’ interest.

Identifying target readers’ issues
The Capella ad focused on a specific set of challenges business owners face – identifying and resolving customer issues.  Individual blog posts are ideal for focusing attention on one specific topic of concern to readers.

Demonstrating uniqueness
“We’re the only system…” explains Capella.  Blogging gives voice to a business owner’s or a professional practitioner’s unique approach, the perfect forum for expounding on just why you’re the only one in your field to do things in just the way you do.

 The question “So how’s that working for you?” has a rather “in-your-face” tone, I thought. However, the ad copy itself retreats from that brash beginning and demonstrates empathy with the customer: “You can now go beyond ‘what-if’s”, Capello assured customers, “and into true action planning.” Meanwhile, Capello reassures readers, they can rely on step-by-step guidance and advice.

For those of us offering blog content writing services, starting out with an “in-your-face” title, then (having succeeded in capturing customers’ attention), offering to lead them by hand through the process may just be a winning corporate blog combination!

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