Using Business Blogs to Tell How and Why

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There are two types of big questions, remarks @jessanne, editor of Mental Floss magazine. There’s the really, really big kind, The ancient Greek philosopher Socratesthe philosophical questions Plato fretted over, and then the ones we’re driven to Google to find out.

These “how?” and “why?” questions are at the very heart of blogging for business. Online searchers arrive at your business blog needing to know how to find products and services, how to do something, how to solve very specific problems. Readers also want to know why: Why should they choose product A over product B?  Why is C a better course of action than D? And, as Jessanne so aptly points out, these may not be Aristotle-level existential questions, but they are the very sort of questions that bring magazine readers and online visitors to our pages.

Blogging for business has the potential to reach different groups:

  • New (recent transaction) customers
  • Repeat customers
  • Other companies’ customers
  • Potential customers
  • Strategic partners (vendors, colleagues, professional associates)

All of them are asking “how?” and “why?”. And, when you provide the answers, remember that they’re still thinking, “So what?  So what’s in it for me?”

In other words, people are online searching for answers to questions they have or for solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  Or, they might need a particular kind of service and aren’t sure who offers that.  Or maybe they need a product to fill a need they have.  That’s when, if you’ve been consistently blogging, they find you, because your blog post gives them just the information they’re looking for.

Generally, 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

But, just because blogs deal with relatively simple “hows” and “whys”, I caution business owners and their blog content writers alike, don’t shy away from the really, really big, “philosophical” questions. One point I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions is that you’ve gotta have an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. Who are you? People are attracted to and want to understand the person behind the business.

Get at least a little ways into the big, big questions, inserting a little Plato along with the Google…The business owner’s or professional’s own “voice” is a real power source for blog content!

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Try a By-the-Numbers Business Blog Post

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The editors of For the Record Magazine (a publication for health professionals) have latched on to a good I page is decorative, with seven 7 numbers (in color) heading up the seven short paragraphs of text.

While the basic information in your blog will be served up in work form, visuals add interest.  What’s more – (our grade school teachers used Show and Tell for a reason), people absorb information better when it is served up in more than one form.
For the Record’s writing about seven statistics, each having to do with health care.

Earlier this week, I described a “one-tank template”, based on a Columbia Club magazine article about places its members could visit using less than one full tank of gasoline. In the health magazine article, the” template” is the numbers:

  • 8
    Only 8% of primary care phy6sicians reported being “very dissatisfied” with their Electronic Health Record system’s ability to lessen their workload.
  • 72
    This is the percentage of physicians who said technology was helping them make more informed health care decisions.
  • 94
    This is the percentage of patients who prefer video visits to telephone-only consultations with their doctors.

The point of using numbered lists in business blogs, I explain to blog content writers, is to demonstrate ways in which your product or service is different, and to provide valuable information that engages readers, helping them see you as a go-to guy or gal to solve their problem or fill their need.

A gem of a quote I found in the book “Dance First, Think Later”, is this: “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you.  But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.”

Numbers are valuable tools in corporate blogging for business because they add both interest and credibility to any factual material.  So, in order to freshen up blog post content, I teach in corporate blogging training sessions, start with an idea about your product or service, then put a number to it:

Whatever your business or professional practice, the real point of the numbers is to offer valuable information, showcase your expertise, and demonstrate ways in which your product or service can help problems.

 

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One-Tank Templates for Business Blogging

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As a member of the Columbia Club, I get to enjoy the club’s monthly magazine. In fact, one article from last month’s issue sparked a great idea that I want to pass along to business blog content writers.

The feature “One Tank Destinations” describes three interesting places to visit in Indiana, all of them close enough to downtown Indianapolis (Columbia Club is right on Monument Circle) so that you can get there and back on a single tank of gasoline.

Think about it – the Club’s providing interesting information to its members, adding value, yet not selling them anything. Of course, that’s one of the purposes of any blog presented by a business or professional practice – adding value to the relationship existing customers have with that business or practice, and demonstrating what a good idea in would be for prospects to get on board.

The “trick” is in the title.  It would’ve been ‘blah” at best to call that page “Three Places to Visit in Central Indiana”. The expression “one tank”, on the other hand is catchy and makes the reader “figure it out”. What’s more, One Tank becomes a template unifying the three different mini-feature stories, one about Bluespring Cavern, one about the Culbertson Mansion, the third about Scribner House.

Whenever you have several pieces of information to impart, consider ways to “unify” them under one umbrella or category. The Writing Center calls this “glueing our ideas together”.

Actually, every blog post will probably need some “glue” in the form of transitions. As The Writing Center explains, whether you’re joining single words, phrases, sentences, or even paragraphs, transitions tell readers how to organize their thoughts as they read.

“One-tank templates” are perfect for business blogging!

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Why I Crave Clip Art for Business Blogging

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No doubt about it, the words you use to tell the story are the most important part of blogging for business. Where visuals come in, whether they’re in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, is to add interest and evoke emotion.

Personally, in blogging for business, I like clip art.  Sure, those commercial images are not original to my client’s business or practice and they don’t actually depict the products, the services, the colleagues, or the customers of that business or practice. Clip art can’t show the “before” and the “after”.
What clip art does accomplish, better than anything else, in my opinion, is capture concepts, helping me as the blog content writer express the main idea I’m articulating in the post. You might say that any form of visual can reinforce a point made in the text of a blog post, summarize a set of statistics (as in a chart or graph), or add emotional impact. But I particularly like to use clip art as metaphors for concepts I’m discussing in the blog.

Crisis communication:  Any business or professional practice can exercise journalistic crisis control through blogging.

“The No.2 is definitely No. 1 in the pencil market”. When you’re blogging, you’re talking to a friendly and interested audience about things that might help them.. Let the useful and interesting information you offer to readers of your blog bring out the specialness of the product or service.

 

 

Consumers want different content at each stage of their research. For prospects at this beginning stage, content should be light, educational, and product-neutral. Blog posts can focus on industry-relevant topics rather than on product.

 

 

 

In corporate blog posts, focus on one story, one aspect of a business, using three examples, rather like a stool that has three supporting legs.

 

 

 

 

One company I personally use to buy clip art is Getty Images’ istockphoto.com. Last month istock’s marketing department “turned the tables” on me by emailing me a concept photo to remind me to buy more stuff from them. The picture showed the front part of a truck with no back half to it, and the caption read “Don’t Get Caught Short”. Well, they got the point across…..

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The Second Hardest Aspect of Business Blogging

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The second-hardest part of writing is cutting your own work, says Don Fry in Writer’s Digest “Novel Writing. (What’s the hardest? Deciding what to say and how.)

Cutting your own work is no easy task, Fry admits – it’s less like cutting your fingernails and more like cutting off fingers. Still, editing and revising are essential steps in writing. (Fry’s next sentence might have been addressed to us business blog content writers:) “Ask yourself what the piece is about, and then examine each section.  Does it contribute to the point of the whole thing? If not, cut it. Then read through where it used to be, and you’ll probably find you didn’t need it”.

In blogging for business, I teach, a good principle to keep in your mind’s eye is The Power of One. Blog posts have a distinct advantage over the more static website copy, because you can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business in today’s post, saving other topics for later posts. As a natural result, posts will be shorter and have greater impact.

I especially loved this part of the Fry article: “You’re reading along and say to yourself, ‘What a gorgeous sentence! Man, I’m good.’ Cut that part. It’s probably self-indulgent, written for yourself and not for your readers.”

In answer to the specific question “How Long Should My Blog Posts Be?”, Susan Guenlius has this to say: “A range between 400-600 words is commonly used as the length that most readers will stick to from start to finish and most writers can communicate a focused message with supporting details.”

At least in theory, editing blogs should be much easier than editing a novel or even editing brochures ads for the company. Since blog content writing should be conversational and informal, are second drafts even needed when it comes to blogs?

Ummm…….yes, I’d say to bloggers: More important than the SpellCheck and GrammarCheck go-around is checking to make sure you’ve visualized your target readers, the customers that are right for your business and that every line of this blog post is addressed to them.

What do you think? Is that really the second-hardest part or the hardest?

 

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