Blogging for Business While Inspiring Three Types of Trust

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blogging to inspire trust

“Trust is a powerful intangible asset,” Allen Harris, CEO of Berkshire Money Management Inc. reminds financial planners.  A Knowledge@Wharton special report describes three types of trust between financial advisors and clients:

  1. trust in know-how
  2. trust in ethical conduct
  3. trust in empathetic skills

“Trust is everything in the online world,” writes A.J. Agrawal in Forbes. In fact, Agrawal cites a recent Econsultancy study showing that 61% of customers read and trust online reviews when making a purchase. By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure you yourself become reliable, Agriwal advises.

As business blog content writers, we can work to inspire three types of trust in the business providers and professional practitioners who hire use to convey their message:

Trust in know-how
Sharing know-how, I’ve found, is sometimes a cause for concern to some business owner and practitioner clients of Say It For You – they don’t want to come off boastful and self-serving or be perceived as using hard-sell tactics to promote themselves. But browsers on the Web “stopped” at your particular business blog because they need advice about a subject you know about, I remind them. Those readers want to feel trust in your know-how and professionalism and you won’t be able to help them until that trust happens.

Trust in ethical conduct
The second level of trust addresses the question all buyers ask themselves, “Do I trust you not to steal money from me and to deliver on your promises?” In training blog writers, I often use the example of job interviews. These days, interviewers focus less on the facts (which they’ve already read on the resume), but on how the prospective employee tends to function in various situations.  Employers are trying to discover the person behind the resume. In the same way, readers who visit your blog are trying to learn about the business owner or practitioner behind the blog.

One way to address that need is to use opinion to clarify what differentiates your business or practice from its peers. Primarily, the blog has to add value, not just a promise of value should the reader convert to a buyer, but real value in terms of information, skill enhancement, or a new way of looking at the topic. Searchers will sense that they’ve come to a provider they can trust.

Trust in empathetic skills
In meeting a financial advisor, Tucker observes, potential clients are asking themselves, “Do you care about me?” Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be more important in coming years than technical skills, he adds.. Your content helps visitors judge whether you have their best interests at heart. Even if you’ve come across as the most competent of product or service providers, you still need to pass the “warmth” test.  Does your blog present you as “real people”, with a passion for serving in your field? In today’s click-it-yourself, do-it-yourself world, our content writing needs to demonstrate to online searchers that, in our fields, we ARE smarter than Google Maps, or eHow, or Wikipedia. Most important, we need to make clear, we’re a lot more caring for our customers – they can count on us!

 

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Same Old, Same New Blogging for Business

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“I’ve already covered my products and services on my website – what else is left to say?” is a question I hear a lot from business owners or professional practitioners. Even if they understand the overall value of having a blog, their concern is that, sooner or later, they’ll run out of things to say in their blog posts.

“Good writing doesn’t get hung up on what’s been said before,” advises Ann Handley in Everybody Writes. “Rather it elects to simply say it better.” That piece of advice, I believe, applies not only to what others have written on your topic, but to what you’ve had to say in earlier blog posts. In corporate blogging training sessions, I often explain that it’s perfectly OK – in fact a good idea – to repeat themes you’ve already covered in former posts, adding a layer of new information or a new insight each time.

As we blog content writers create material about a business or a practice, we’re continually fine tuning and adding insights we gain in the process.  I like to think of the “exercise” I’m getting as a professional blog writer as “building blog muscle through repetition.”

My answer to those blogging “doubting Thomases” then, is that rather than asking yourself, each time you’re preparing to blog, whether you’ve already covered that material and how long ago, plan content around key themes. Then, what you’re doing in any post is using the same theme while filling in new details, examples, and illustrations.

Yes, I know.  You’ve already covered your products and services on your website.  That’s what the website is for. What your blog is for, by contrast, is to provide relevant, useful, and timely content to your prospects and customers to help them solve problems, understand industry trends, and make sense of the news and how it relates to them. “Content marketing,” as Josh Steimle, writing in Forbes, explains,” raises awareness of solutions and educates consumers about products they may not have considered before.”

Think of it as same old, same NEW blogging for business!

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Metaphoric Blogging for Business

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“Are you playing with a full deck?” Mensa’s Richard Lederer asks, jokingly referring to the “combination of genetic and environmental roulette” that has Mensans ending up smart as whips, with others at the “short end” of the intelligence “stick”.

In the very funny article “Are You Playing With a Full Deck?” Lederer lists categories of metaphors used to describe those of lesser intelligence.  Lighting metaphors include “He’s a dim bulb in the marquee of life”, “The lights are on, but nobody’s home”, and “She’s so dumb, her psychiatrist carries a flashlight.”  Nautical metaphors include “He doesn’t have both oars in the water” and “She’s a submarine with a screen door.” There are plenty of food metaphors, including “He’s one pickle short of a full jar” and “She takes an hour to cook Minute Rice.” There are building trade metaphors such as “Her driveway doesn’t reach the road”, and “He has a room for rent.”

Metaphors don’t need to be funny to be useful in business blog content writing. Most business owners and professionals can think of quite a number of things they want to convey about their products, their professional services, their industry, and their customer service standards. Still, I’ve found over the years, the problem is those ideas need to be developed into fresh, interesting, and engaging content marketing material.  By adding metaphors, you can help readers “appreciate the information picturesquely”,

In SEO-conscious marketing blogs, one technique to engage readers is building a blog post around an unlikely comparison in order to explain an aspect of their business or professional practice. For one thing, suggesting a totally new way of using your product or service through an “off-the wall” comparison may open up new possibilities for that potential customer to do business with you. Given the short attention span of the typical web searcher, putting elements together that, on the surface, don’t seem related can be a good teaching tool.

The caution with metaphors and other figures of speech, however is this: We can inadvertently puzzle readers is by using allusions where the reference is unfamiliar to them. If we allude to a person’s or an organization’s “Achilles’ heel”, for example, we need to be pretty sure our readers’ level of education will allow them to know what we mean. If we miscalculate their ability to recognize the allusion, the danger is they’ll find our content frustrating rather than illuminating.

The idea behind “metaphoric blogging”, of course is to engage, interest, and even amuse your readers, using metaphors and other figures of speech to “change things up” while at the same time making yourself clear.

 

 

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How-Do-I-Wear-That Blogging for Business

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front view of young woman in a short white dress
A number of years ago, I touted a SELF Magazine article titled “How Do I Wear That?” as a good model for writers of blogs meant to market a product or service. Here’s why I thought so:

The article was written in question/answer format, first describing a “style dilemma”, then offering a “self-solution”. In other words, the article offered valuable information (in this case from fashion experts) which readers could use without having to buy anything. Nevertheless SELF’s style expert was very obviously there to sell stuff, because, under each self-solution, there appears a list of pants, dresses, shoes, and bags that were available for purchase – and in which stores.

The point I stressed was that we blog content writers need not apologize for connecting our content to actual solutions, so long a using the information we offer does not necessitate a purchase.

What made me think about that article now is that I just came across an entire blog called “How Do You Wear That?” by a Caitlyn Warakomski. The blog offers style advice for women and “hopefully a place for others to feel inspired”. Interesting – one of the things I liked so much about the SELF article was that the “solutions” are written in first person: “My buying tip: The more subtle the gradations in the color, the more real your fur looks.” Reading the piece, I felt the fashion director was talking just to me! This blog has the same very personal feel.

Warakomski offers information in the same way as the SELF article. In one June post, for example, she discusses three ways to wear a white dress – classic and casual, boho & funky, and girly and dressy. She offers advice about not wearing white to a wedding or bridal shower, and demos different accessories to change the look. There is a list of products and stores where those are available, but the advice and ideas are free for the reading.

Effective writing for business is very much a matter of tone. That very personal, conversational, “just between us” tone is exactly the one for which every blog content writer should be trying to incorporate in writing for business. And selling stuff by giving away valuable and actionable advice? That’s a good deal all around in blogging for business!

 

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More About Quotations in Blogging for Business

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Chocolate Quotation Marks and Asterisk

Using quotations in blog posts can help create anticipation, suspense, or drama, as we went over earlier this week in my Say It For You blog. Quotations help reinforce points while adding variety and authority, and, so long as they are not overdone, they can be a very good idea in blogging for business. But, in addition to the content writing itself, there are some technical to-dos and no-nos about quotations that bear need mentioning, and that will be our focus today.

On the negative side, Dave Smith of realestatebloglab.com issues a caution about quotations: Don’t use double quote marks in blog post titles, he says.  Double quote marks at the beginning and end of a phrase tells the search engine to look only for those exact words in that exact order, severely limiting your ability to “get found” through category or organic search.

A second crucial caution has to do with plagiarism.  The dictionary definition? “An instance of using or closely imitating  the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author’s work as one’s
own.” Sure, you’re creating value for your readers by curating, gathering information from many sources, but it’s only fair to create a link to the authors’ sites, giving them the attribution or credit, advises Nick Schaferoff of Torque.

While we’re talking about mechanics, there’s benefit to be had in linking back to your own former blog posts. ”I find that when someone views more than a single page on your blog that they’re more likely to remember it, subscribe to it, comment upon it and become a regular and loyal reader,” Darren Rowse of problogger.com observes.

“Quotations can bring your writing to life – the reader imagines someone saying the words,” says Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty, but you have to follow certain rules, depending on what other punctuation marks you mix with your quotation marks. In American English we always put periods and commas inside quotation marks, she stresses.

There are two reasons to use quotation marks in English writing, explains yourdictionary.com.

1.  You are quoting someone; that is to say you are using someone else’s exact words, and you are giving that person credit for having said them.
2.  You are being sarcastic (He can’t get a date, because no one wants to be seen in his “car”.)

As a blog content writer and trainer, I’m not being in the least sarcastic when I say that, in business blogs, quotations can be a very good idea!

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