Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

My friend and fellow blogger Karl Ahlrichs, as usual, is offering excellent advice to employee benefits professionals, and, as usual, I’m finding that his advice works for blog content writers.

“People want the answer in a few, short, well-thought-out words, with a long answer to follow if requested.”

Karl complains that he’d sat in a workshop on voluntary benefits trends that went on for the first five minutes without speaking plain English. “We need to promulgate the histogens and project profitability based on actuarial calculation….yadda, yadda” sort of thing is what he heard.

I’ll tell you – after six years writing blogs and web page content for businesses and professional practitioners of every type, I’ve come to conclusions very similar to Karl’s.  Simply put, our challenge as content writers lies in finding the sweet spot between the informative and the yadda yadda.

“We need to get good at the power of summary,” says Karl. He used to think the average adult attention span was three minutes, but then learned from a presentation coach that he had a mere six seconds to make his point with a modern business professional before they mental shut him off. “Yikes!” was Karl’s reaction, shortening the phone message he leaves for prospects to the following: “Hi, I can explain all of Obamacare in 30 seconds.  Call me, and I’ll do it for you.”

Given that Karl was making an outgoing “cold call”, while our blog marketing draws inbound traffic based on an already existing interest in our topic, we Indianapolis content writers don’t need to keep our posts to 30 seconds’ worth of reading..

Still, let’s keep reality in mind: people want their answers in a few, short, well-thought-out paragraphs, with longer answers to follow if requested (that’s why we have CTA’s or Calls to Action as part of business blog writing).

Thanks, Karl!  We promise not to promulgate the histogens in blogging for business!
 

Having a good title such as “duke” or “baron” meant everything in 18th century England.  According to Jacob Appel of Writer’s Digest, for fiction writers, choosing the right title for a book is just as crucial.

As part of corporate blogging training, I teach business blog content writers they have to address both readers and search engines in their choice of title for each blog post.

One day each week, I tutor in the Writing Lab at Ivy Tech Community College. I find my students have difficulty, when planning an essay, knowing the difference between the topic of a paper and its thesis. Suppose they were instructed to write about graduation cap tassels.  That’s the topic.  But what about tassels?  Are they silly? Important? Should we hold on to that tradition? (The answer is the thesis, or the “slant” the paper will take.) The title of their essay, I explain, needs to convey both the topic and the thesis.

What if the headline for a blog post were “Blog Titles”, posits brickmarketing.com.  That headline doesn’t sound interesting and also doesn’t really convey what the post will be about. (It has no thesis.)  Blog post titles might include “Learn How To… “, “Best practices for…” , or “Two Reasons Why Blog Writing Works,” brickmarketing advises, so the readers can be assured of gaining some benefit by reading the post.

Writer’s Digest’s Jacob Appel offers three tips to writers to help them craft strong titles that are “distinctive, yet not distracting”. Each of these can be applied to the efforts of Indianapolis freelance blog content writers:

Google it.  To ensure you have an original title, simple Google it, says Appel.
In business blogs, keyword research is one important part of the “prep” for optimizing the blog title.

Don’t forget voice and point of view. “If you’re writing a story in third person, don’t call it “My Summer Vacation”.
Translated into business blogging terms, this means setting the tone for each blog post in its title – readers should be able to discern if this post will be humorous, sarcastic, informative, or emotional – “What will I find if I click?”

Craft Two Meanings. “Most readers consider your title twice – once before they read your work, again after they finish…Successful titles gain hidden meanings after the book is read.”
In blog content writing, that new insight effect can be amplified with a “tie-back” last sentence that recaps the main theme of the post. (See the following paragraph for an example of a tie-back.)
 

Having a good title such as “duke” or “baron” was important in 18th century England, Today, for blog content writers, choosing the right title for each post can be just as crucial!