Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

Speakers and blog content writers have an awful lot in common, I‘m constantly reminded as I read through my monthly copy of Speaker magazine. And talk about a grabber title! “How to Stay Out of Speaker Theft Jail”, this one read.

After a 30-year business career in sales and marketing, Kordell Norton, Certified Speaking Professional, was shocked when another veteran speaker implied that Kordell had stolen some of that other speaker’s material. (To his relief, Norton discovered he had not, but the scare inspired him to compile a list of practices to avoid in creating content.) As a corporate blogging trainer, I realized that list might very well apply to us blog writers.

Off limits:

• Other people’s stories.
• Other people’s taglines and phrases (Norton gives Zig Ziglar’s famous “See you at the top” as an example.)

“Build speaking around your own life experiences,” advises Norton. That’s perfect advice when writing blogs for a business or a professional practice. One very positive “side effect” is that the very process of formulating stories to tell your “public” helps you clarify the meaning of those stories for yourself and your employees.   

True stories about mistakes, ironically, are very humanizing. I teach freelance blog writers in Indianapolis to include stories of their clients’ past mistakes and failures. Such stories actually have the potential to create feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or who overcame not only adversity, but the effects of their own mistakes!

In what appears at first to be a stunning about-face, Kordell Norton goes on to recommend CASE, standing for “copy and steal everything.” You can, and should, he reminds us, steal great ideas from your environment." That’s on the line of the advice I always give about “reading around for your blog” and “curating” material. 

But the sort of “stealing” Norton’s talking about includes attribution, meaning giving credit where credit is due.  Check origins of work on the Internet, he cautions, and when in doubt, leave it out.

Quoting others in your blog adds value in and of itself – you’re aggregating resources for the benefit of your readers. Still, that’s hardly enough; as business blogging service providers, we need to add our own “spin” to the material based on our own business wisdom and expertise.

 

“Reality TV is actually not, well…real,” observes Michelle Crouch in Reader’s Digest. While reality shows have no script in the traditional sense of the word, Crouch reveals, "We have writers who craft plot lines.” Interesting, I thought, reading Crouch’s “revelation” – while we professional blog content writers certainly think of our work as a craft, our goal is to convey reality, to communicate what a business or professional practice actually has to offer, not to wax inventive or inflate the facts.  

Inflating is a definite no-no when it comes to content creation for blogs, in terms of both quantity and quality:

• Don’t overload any one blog post with words.  300-400 is a good portion-control rule of thumb, I teach newbie Indianapolis blog writers.
   
• Don’t overload any one blog post with information. Select a central idea, one aspect of the business or practice, one product or service and focus on that, leaving other ideas for other posts.
   
• Above all (and here’s where the article about unreality in “reality TV” comes into play), don’t use a business blog to inflate the description of what you (or your blogging client) have to offer.  Under-promise, then let client testimonials tell the story of how you (or the clients) over-deliver.

“We often take different clips and edit them together to sound like one conversation, sometimes drastically changing the meaning. It’s so common, we have a name for it: frankenbiting,” says Michelle Crouch.  As a corporate blogging trainer, all I have to say about that is “Don’t!

If we can’t win trust through blogging, well…that would be “unreal” (meant in the worst way)!