The #1 Sales Coaching and Business Blogging Blunder

/0 Comments/in /by

As a business blogging trainer, I fancy myself something of a coach. Plus, over a decades-long financial services career, I’d been through my share of sales coaching sessions.  For both those reasons, the title on the latest enewsletter from Propelis Consulting was an attention grabber for me. Could it be that telling vs. asking is the biggest blunder we blog content writers need to avoid as well?

While each Sales Manager will have his or her personal coaching style, Mark Thacker, principal at Propelis, believes the top mistake Sales Managers make when coaching Sales Reps is that they tell instead of ask.

“Telling” is a highly directive and subservient form of communication that makes salespeople feel like robots and produces mediocre performers.  Instead, Propelis recommends,  the Sales Manager must develop the skill of asking thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. The goal is to help salespeople develop their ability to self-direct and solve their own problems.

How can that sales training insight apply to the content business owners and professional practitioners offer their online readers?

  • We can get readers to ask themselves the question about how the information we’re presenting applies to their situation. The goal is to guide clients to decisions, but even as we business content writers suggest specific outcomes, we acknowledge it is the client’s decision, not ours.
     
  • We can offer facts and data. Online searchers arrive at your blog on a fact-finding mission, looking for information about what you do, what you sell, and what you know about. Give them the information they came to find – and quickly. The tone should assume that rational buyers trusts they have complete information will translate that into action.

Whether you’re a business or practice owner or a freelance blog content writer, ask yourself?  Are you telling instead of asking?
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Numbers Tell the Story in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

“If you haven’t already heard, blogging is big (like really big – tyrannosaurus rex big),” says Jordan White in the Inbound Marketing Blog. At Say it For You, we know that, but White’s enthusiasm bears sharing with readers and especially with the new Indiana blog content writers I train.

The numbers White compiled from BlogHer, Hubspot, and MyMarketingDept tell an impressive tale, to be sure:

  • 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs.
  • Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links.
  • In 2013, 128 million people in the U.S. are blog readers.
  • 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog.

What can you achieve with a blog?  Attract new customers, engage existing customers, connect with journalists and with potential new hires, to name a few, says Lee Olden of Toprank. To realize those goals, though, takes some effort, Olden explains.  You must understand your audience, prepare keyword lists, grow social networks to promote your content, and above all, share useful content.

There’s a dark side when numbers get big: “When I started doing it, there wasn’t nearly as much news,” observes Neil Hughes of the Apple blog. “Now everybody is in a rush to be first, and nobody is really concerned about being accurate.”

Blogging can be big business for small business, but authenticity and accuracy are what will add value and provide utility, Emily Ferrar reminds blog content writing wannabes.

Numbers do tell the story in blogging for business.  The bottom line about  it is this: the numbers are there to be had, but only when you create content that engages numbers of people.
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

The Why of Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

What is a Blog? When a business owner recently posed that question to one of my Say It For You blog content writers, I realized that sometimes we get so used to doing something, we forget why we’re doing it.

“A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically – like a what's new page or a journal," Darrell Zahorsky explains in About.com Small Business Information. “The term is actually weblogs coined by Jorn Barger in 1997,” he adds.
 

What does blogging provide to a small business?  Zahorsky lists three advantages:

  • Low-cost alternative to having a web presence.
  • Easy and quicker to update.
  • A chance to share your expertise with a larger audience.


For those who haven’t made the jump or are having trouble getting started, fellow blogging trainer Jordan White compiled a list of his best blogging tools to help “kick your inner muse into gear”.

Save ideas on the go. The idea, White says, is to capture creativity in moments when it naturally occurs.  I agree. Many of us who provide business blogging assistance keep “idea folders”. Those folders could be actual paper folders in which newspaper and magazine clippings are collected, or they could take the form of little notebooks to carry around, or even digital files on phones or tablets.

Pick topics.  “Broad topics lead to confusing posts; specific topics are actually far easier to write,” White cautions. Couldn’t agree more, which is precisely why I teach content writers to focus on the Power of One when it comes to their message.  Each business blog post should impart one new idea or call for a single action..

Silence the inner critic and just write. “The key to blogging success is to do it often,” White reminds bloggers. “Waiting on brilliance gets you nowhere – the Muse honors the working stiff” (Stephen Pressfield). For professional practitioners or business owners, allowing the blog to become “inactive”, with weeks and even months elapsing without posting fresh content is ultimate death blog.. It's crucial to maintain frequency and consistency in posting content on the Web.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Chunking and Inverted Pyramids in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

This week, all three of my Say It For You blog posts are devoted to elaborating on Debbie Hemley’s 26 tips for writing great blog posts,

Can users not only find the content, but read it? Is one of the five questions on the Ahava Leibtag essential checklist from which Debbie Hemley quotes. Readable content, Leibtag explains, includes an inverted-pyramid writing style and chunking.

Chunking is one way business bloggers can offering technical information in “chewable tablet form”, because it refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest it. Needless to say, whatever your business or profession, there’s no end to the technical information available to consumers on the Internet. Our job then, as business blog content writers, is to do all we can to help readers absorb, buy into, and use the information.

Chunking works in reverse as well. Blogging can take individual units of information and show how they are related, perhaps in ways readers hadn’t considered. Probably the most common example of chunking occurs in phone numbers, as Kendra Cherry points out. For example, a phone number sequence of 4-7-1-1-3-2-4 would be chunked into 471-1324. “By separating disparate individual elements into larger blocks, information becomes easier to retain and recall.”

Purdue University’s Owl website discusses the “inverted pyramid” structure, which for decades “has been a mainstay of traditional mass media writing. The “base” of the pyramid—the most fundamental facts—appear at the top of the story, with the rest of the information in descending order of importance.

Even in the media, not everyone agrees that the inverted pyramid is right for every story.  When it comes to blogging for business, not everyone likes the concept, either. In fact, Ginny Soskey of Hubspot titles her post “Why the Inverted Pyramid Doesn’t Work for Business Blogs.” She quotes studies showing that participants who actively read content online read (or at least scan) 60-77% of a story. “When reading business blog posts, people need to be hungry for more content after reading the introduction, not satiated with the information from a few sentences,” Soskey cautions.  “There should be valuable information presented again and again through the entire article, all the way to the call to action at the bottom,” she asserts.

Since at Say It For You, our freelance blog content writers are trained to keep post length between 250 and 400 words, some of Soskey’s concerns might not apply. Variety being the spice of life, my own conclusion is that writers might experiment with different formats for different posts.
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

What Pictures Add to the Picture in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

Out of Debbie Hemley’s 26 tips for writing great blog posts, there are a few that I think will be particularly useful for the new freelance blog content writers I train, and I’m devoting this week’s Say It For You blog posts to elaborating on those.

Using photos in business blog posts, Hemley explains, is critical, so she sends readers to a great Judy Dunn article on the subject (great example, by the way, of how curating material from other writers helps us elaborate on points we want to make to our readers).

What is it that pictures add to the picture?

  • Interest.  Words alone are boring, says Dunn. Plus, she adds, “Let’s face it, we’re all attention-disordered.”
  • Aids learning.  “At least 60% of your readers are visual learners,” Dunn observes.
  • Photos create analogies and metaphors.
  • Photos evoke emotions. (Henley advises choosing a photo that conveys the overall feeling or emotion of your post.)


Since there have been almost 850 separate Say It For You blog posts published thus far, each with a photo or clip art component, I performed a “thumb-through” to find examples for each of Dunn’s list of advantages.

Capturing interest:  In my post “Business blogging – Royal Pronouns in the Post?” The photo of the royal trumpets draws interest and connects with the topic of discussion, which is the way the use of pronouns sets the point of view and tone of a blog post.

 

 

As a learning aid:   The entire post “Raise Your Hand if You Read Blogs” is a commentary on a poster I’d seen on an Ivy Tech bulletin board, using that poster as a tutorial for blog content writers to demonstrate the importance of headline content, targeting the audience, and including calls to action in their posts.

 

 

 

As a metaphor:  For my post “Expand Your Blog Content Writing With Adjacency”, I used the photo of two pairs of shoes set out on the floor with the toes facing to symbolize using topic “adjacency” to expand the range of content for a business blog.

 

 

 


 

To evoke emotion: In “Blog More What You Believe Than What You Are!” I emphasize that the giving online readers a feel for the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs about their industry.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail