News and Feature Posts – There’s Room for Both in a Business Blog

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The Ivy Tech Community College textbook by the name of “Breaking Through College Reading” has some interesting things to say about how, in newspapers, news stories are treated differently from feature stories.

Like newspapers, business blogs can contain “news story” posts and “feature story” posts, and I thought the explanation given in the text could be useful for freelance blog content writers.

“Feature stories differ from news stories in their timeliness, style, and length,” textbook authors Brenda Smith and LeeAnn Morris explain. Whereas news stories cover breaking, time-sensitive matters, feature articles would have similar impact if you read them days or weeks later, Smith and Morris add.

Unlike the inverted pyramid style of news stories, (with facts presented in decreasing order of importance), the style of features is characterized by a beginning, middle, and end.

When it comes to blogging for business, not everyone likes the inverted pyramid concept, even when it comes to newsy blogs. Ginny Soskey of Hubspot quotes studies showing that participants who actively read content online read (or at least scan) 60-77% of a story.  “There should be valuable information presented again and again through the entire article, all the way to the call to action at the bottom,” Soskey asserts.

The point I think it’s important to stress to business owners, practitioners, or to freelance blog content writers is that varying the type of content in a business blog is a good idea. Readers need to know about any new products or services they can now obtain through you, about any new partners or employees, and about your recent activities in the community. You can also bring news about recent developments in your industry or profession.

Other (in fact most) of your blog posts, will be in the line of “feature stories”, offering helpful hints about ways to use products, questions consumers should ask, and your opinions on the best way to approach customer needs. Business blog posts need to include stories about how you solved client problems, and what lessons you’ve learned through your experiences, wisdom you’ll be applying in your dealings with them should they choose to become your customers. These feature stories are generally non-time-sensitive.

News and feature stories – there’s plenty of room for both in a business blog!

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The Biology of Baleens and Blog Post Titles

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Leafing through an Ivy Tech Community College textbook by the name of “Breaking Through College Reading”, I noticed an exercise designed to teach students how to become better readers by differentiating among topics, main ideas, and supporting details. Since, as blog content writers, one big challenge we face is selecting the best title for each of our blog posts, I thought the exercise I found in the reading textbook would be very relevant. 

The lesson quotes the following passage from Biology, by Neil Campbell.

“Humpback whales strain their food from seawater.  Instead of teeth, these giants have an array of brush-like plates called baleen on each side of their upper jaw.  The baleen is used to sift food from the oceans.  To start feeding, a humpback whale opens its mouth, expands its throat, and takes a huge gulp of seawater.  When its mouth closes, the water squeezes out through spaces in the baleen, and a mass of food is trapped in the mouth.  The food is then swallowed whole, passing into the stomach, where digestion begins.  The humpback’s stomach can hold about half a ton of food at a time, and in a typical day the animal’s digestive system will process as much as 2 tons of krill and fish.”

Students are asked to label each of four possible titles for this passage as being either correct, too broad, or containing only a detail (versus a topic).

I invite my blog readers to take this “test” and to choose the best title for the Biology piece from among the following:

  1. Humpback Whales
  2. Baleen for Teeth
  3. The Digestive System of the Humpback Whale
  4. How Whales Filter Food

Now, before you label any of the four as your “final answer”, consider the following definitions offered in the textbook:

A topic is a word or phrase that describes a subject or a general category. “The main idea, in contrast, is a complete sentence that states the topic and adds the writer’s position or focus”. The supporting details are the specifics that develop the topic and the main idea.

In composing business blogs, we need to keep several goals in mind.  We want to write engaging titles, we want to include keyword phrases to help with search, we want to be short and to the point, and we want to use power words.  The overriding goal, though, in composing a title has to be making promises we are going to be able to keep in the body of the blog post itself.

Did you choose title #3, “The Digestive System of the Humpback Whale”? That’s the one that includes the writer’s focus in the paragraph.  #1 is too broad, #2 far too specific, and #4 limited to only a portion of the paragraph’s content.

There’s a “biology” to selecting effective business blog post titles!

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Why Your Business Blog Deserves Better (Titles, That Is)

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This week I’m devoting my Say It For You blog posts to poor headline prevention tips collected from many different sources.  As Ginny Soskey of HubSpot so aptly put it, headlines are so crucial to our content’s success, we really need to stop messing them up.

Earlier this week, I discussed Bait-and-Switch, Over-Promise-and-Under-Deliver, and Stale-Conclusion headlines, all ways to disappoint and mislead online readers.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I loved Thomas Umstattd’s list of “Top 5 Blog Title Mistakes Authors Make”, with its very humorous and on-point examples.  One very good point Umstattd stresses is that descriptive titles are boring.  In school, he ways, your teacher probably taught you the purpose of a title was to describe your writing.  That’s wrong, he says.  The purpose of a title is to tell readers why they should bother to read your writing!

Umstattd says the title should describe not the content, but the value of the content!

     (Bad title: Baby boomers & Social Security Better title:  Why Baby Boomers Don’t Deserve Social Security)

When blog content writers try being too clever, too general, or too cliched, that’s not good, either, says Umstattd.

   ( Bad title: Who’s Your Daddy?   Better title: Is Satan Your Daddy?  Bad title: Shock and Awe   Better title: 5 Things That  Shocked Me Senseless)

“A good title makes all the difference in the world,” says Nolan Wilson of benchmarkemail.com.  In his list of tips for writing engaging blog post titles, Wilson includes:

  • Using keyword phrases
  • Being short and to the point
  • Using power words
  • Delivering on your headline promise in the body of the post

Does your business blog deserve better (titles, that is)?

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Fresh-Conclusion Blogging Begins With the Headline

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On watch for OPW (Other People’s Wisdom) that can help the business blog content writers I train do a better job for themselves and their clients, I found quite a number of posts on the topic of blog post headline Do’s and Don’ts. As a result, I’m devoting this week’s Say It For You posts to curating and commenting on those poor-headline prevention tips.

Copybogger’s Henneke Duistermaat cautions writers against a common blog-writing mistake:  stale conclusions. In fact, he suggests writing your conclusion first, then filling in the rest of your blog post. Serving up an uninspiring conclusion, she says, is like presenting the cheapest supermarket ice cream after a lavish home-cooked meal.  Once you’ve thought through your conclusion, you can reflect focused enthusiasm in the title you select for your post.

As a long-time blog content writer, I agree.  Effective blog posts must go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic. And the more technical the subject, the greater the importance our “translation and interpretation” function becomes. The title should help focus our readers’ attention on the very aspect of our topic we’re about to discuss, helping them make sense out of the ocean of available information they can find on the Web.

“We live in a world full of cheap information,” laments Dustermaat.  “It’s hard to remember when information was a scarce resource. But time is a scarce resource.  It always will be,” he says. 

The harsh truth, he concludes, is that your readers don’t need another blog post.  What they need is you – your wisdom, your ideas, and your unique stories on your chosen area of expertise. The point Dustermaat is making is that fresh-conclusion blogging has to begin with the headline.

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Don’t “Meh” Up Your Blog’s Headlines

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 “We really need to stop messing them up,” warns Ginny Soskey of HubSpot, referring to blog post headlines, because those headlines are “so crucial to our content’s success.”

Always on the prowl for OPW (Other People’s Wisdom) that can help the business blog content writers I train do a better job for themselves and their clients, I found quite a number of posts on the topic of blog post headline Do’s and Don’ts. As a result, I’m devoting this week’s Say It For You posts to curating and commenting on those poor-headline prevention tips.

Among the most egregious blog header errors, Soskey names Bait-and-Switch and Over-Promise-and-Under-Deliver, two variations on a failure to accurately describe the kind of content readers can expect to find in the piece. 

One popular misconception that I think leads to this kind of misdirection in headlines is that blog titles need to, above all, be “cutesy”. Cute is good, engaging readers’ curiosity even better.  Yet, above all, when readers click, they need to end up “where it says on the ticket”. In other words, when readers click on the link on the results page, they need to find material that is congruent with what the title promised would be there!

In fact, as I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions, when it comes to blog marketing, there’s more than good writing practice at stake; there is real danger for business owners and professional practitioners in using misleading blog titles. After all, it would hardly be a good idea for readers to perceive that this company or practitioner is not likely to keep its promises and deliver promised results.

But when it comes to titles, “honest” doesn’t equate to “boring”.  You’re shooting for accurate, SEO-friendly, AND enticing, concludes Soskey.  If you find your headline is kind of “meh”, she advises, keep on pushing until it’s something you’d go out of your own way to read!

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