Stories Can Work Two Miracles in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

When Speaker Magazine posed the question, “Why do audiences want more stories, regardless of the topic, in the presentations they attend?”  Robert McKee was ready with the answer: Story fits the mind.  It is how the mind absorbs, sorts, and structures reality.”

As a corporate blogging trainer, I was especially interested in a remark McKee makes as he begins his one-day Business Story Seminar:  “In an age of 24/7 information, nothing dates faster than factual content,” he says.  Story, on the other hand, is both emotional and intellectual, he explains, capturing hearts as well as minds.  

Story, to hear McKee tell it, can work two “miracles”.  Each of these, I think, could be applicable to blog content writing.

Delivering what McKee calls “an immersive experience” around your products, services, and brand assets. What McKee cautions professional speakers to avoid is clinging to one “signature story” and including that in every presentation.  The trouble, he says, is that what is your signature story may not be the audience’s signature story. Better to have lots of stories, he advises, with each one designed for a particular audience.

In a very specific sense, the different-stories-for-different audiences idea is highly apropos for blog writing. Most business owners and professional practitioners will tell you they have more than one target audience for their products and services. While one market segment or demographic may be yielding the best results for them, they also have “outliers” who bring in just enough revenue to matter. Taking advantage of the flexibility of blogging, writers can offer different kinds of information, presented in different “tones”, in different blog posts.

Developing a narrative around which you and your employees can rally. As McKee helps organizations such as Microsoft, Nike, and Hewlett-Packard develop their narrative game plan, he uses story to transform the organization “into a united tribe,” explains Speaker Magazine. In other words, the very process of creating a story to tell your “public” (meaning your customers and clients), helps you clarify your story to yourself!
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

The Seinfeld Strategy in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

I thought “Chief Potential Officer” Kevin Eikenberry hit the jackpot with his latest leadership tip about consistency. Eikenberry calls it the “Seinfeld Strategy”.

The reason I was so taken with Eikenberry’s post was that six and a half years ago, in the process of explaining the way my company Say It For You came about, I talked about the “drill sergeant discipline” needed by blog content writers. What I meant was that, while all my business owner clients knew that writing blogs in their area of expertise was going to be a great idea for them, not very many of them felt they could take the time to compose and post content on a regular basis.  I also knew that, while my own considerable experience in writing newspaper columns was going to be an asset for blogging, that the main key to business blogging success was going to be simply keeping on task.

Eikenberry had picked up on a Forbes Magazine article about Jerry Seinfeld, who consistently earned tens of millions of dollars a year for more than a decade.  Seinfeld was successful because of consistency.  He’d figured out that the way to be a better comic was to write better jokes, and that the way to do that was to write jokes every single day.  Then, for every day he writes, Jerry puts a big red X on his wall calendar, and all that matters is not breaking that chain of X’s.

Novelist  Steven King employs a similar discipline, writing ten pages a day.  Every day, with no exceptions.  Jack Nicklaus went over every possible way to approach each shot.  Until he could visualize the perfect shot, he wouldn’t swing.  Sales and marketing great Dan Kennedy doesn’t go to sleep without completing at least one task that connects him to a customer or moves the sales process along.

Consistency. Discipline.  The Seinfeld Strategy.  No, I’ll probably never make even the tiniest fraction of the money that Seinfeld has raked in, but one thing I do know:  Successful blog content writing is about “getting your frequency on”, as fellow blogger Pat Flynn puts it.  If  a business owner throws in the towel before success has a chance to develop in an SEO marketing blog, she’ll have fallen prey to the biggest single reason most people fail at content marketing.
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

A Delicate Hand’s Required in Business Blogging

/0 Comments/in /by

“I’m all for clear, precise communication,” observes humorist Todd Hunt, “but I think this sign on a garbage receptacle at my local movie theater goes a bit too far:  TRASH ONLY!  (Was there a problem with people depositing ‘non-trash’ items?” Hunt wonders.)

Like Hunt, Caro Clarke advises her beginning writers not to explain too much. “Give the reader the fewest descriptive words necessary to convey the scene,” she says.  “Better to have one piercing sentence than three paragraphs of room-by-room description.”  The ability to develop a dispassionate eye and a sense of pace, Clarke admits, comes only with experience, but at least beginners can recognize the problem of over-wordiness.

The core of the over-explaining problem, thinks K.M. Weiland, is repetition.  That’s usually symptomatic of authorial insecurity – We distrust our ability to explain things well enough the first time around, so we stick in more content just to make sure readers get the point. Don’t, is Weiland’s advice.  As a corporate blogging trainer, I must say I agree. It’s not only that business blog posts be kept relatively short (350-500 words is a reasonable goal) and conversational. We have to assume our online readers are a) intelligent and b) by definition, interested in our subject.

University of North Carolina’s Writing Center is saying much the same thing, telling students to write their essays in a manner that treats their instructors as an intelligent but uninformed audience.
 

 

As I think about all this advice, I realize that we freelance blog writers have an additional challenge to overcome – the short attention span of online searchers, whose sense of pace can be summed up in a word – quick!  I explain to newbie blog writers that it’s best to focus each blog post on one idea. Blogs, after all, are web logs, not web catalogs or web brochures.

In any kind of writing, of course, there’s a trade-off between brevity and detail, as Brandon Royal explains in The Little Red Writing Book. Developing that dispassionate eye and sense of pace Clarke mentions is a challenge for blog writers as well as for novelists. Even as we aim for clear, precise communication that avoids the “Trash only!” over-explanation effect, we’re conscious that engaging readers’ interest and emotional response requires a delicate hand.

Big signs saying “Trash Only!” just won’t do for blogs!
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Why-Do-There-Seem-To-Be Blogging For Business

/0 Comments/in /by

Now there’s an arresting article title if ever I’ve read one, I thought: “Why do there seem to be more baby boys available to adopt?" it read. "Since everyone knows women live long and represent more of the population at large, most clients assume that means that more girls are born. “ Unfortunately, what ‘everyone knows’ often leads to misunderstandings of what is really happening,.” the authors go on to explain.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I'm a firm believer that myth debunking is an important function of blog content writing, simply because, in every business or profession, misunderstandings about a product or service surface in the form of customer questions and complaints. Addressing misinformation in a company's blog shines light on the owner's special expertise, besides offering information that is valuable to readers. De-mystifying matters can make your corporate or professional office’s blog into a "go-to" source for readers seeking information in your field.

In a way, I’ve found, blog readers tend to be engaged, rather than miffed, when your content “proves them wrong”.  Of course, you soften the effect when you acknowledge that their misunderstandings are shared by many other people.  What’s more, the new (to them) “take” on the situation must seem relevant and helpful in solving whatever need or problem motivated those readers’ online search to begin with

The authors acknowledge that several of the reasons more girls are adopted than boys have nothing to do with the U.S. birth rates.  

  • Women, particularly single women, express a preference for adopting girls.
  • The majority of children available for adoption from other countries that are leading sources for adoptive children (think China) are girls.


A justharvest blog  I found does a great job formatting a  mythbusting post about food stamps:  

“I'm going to ask you to do something a little weird. Ready? Ok, close your eyes and try to picture someone on food stamps.” Was the person an adult? Because at most half of food stamp recipients are children. Was it a white person? Most people on food stamps are white. Were they spending the day sitting around unemployed, on welfare? Only 8% of food stamp recipients receive cash welfare benefits."

Ask yourself: How could I, as an Indianapolis blog content writer, adapt this mythbusting template to my own business or profession?
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

If It’s Not All Right, It’s Not the End in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in /by

A rather wry, yet strangely encouraging statement I came across the other day reads:

“Everything will be all right in the end.  And if it’s not all right, it’s not the end.”

From a blog content writing point of view, I asked myself, how do we judge whether it’s “all right” to “have done” with today’s post, leaving further elucidation for another day, another blog post?

The simple, but not-so-simple-to-implement answer, I think, is this:  Stop when…

When you’ve said what you set out to say.  When you feel readers will have “gotten it”.  When you feel that the one concept you’ve chosen to convey today  has been explained.  When you’re satisfied you’ve offered a clear call to action.  When you’re sincerely convinced you’ve offered the kind of information that will appeal to your target audience.

“As you compose – think who will read what I write? With your target reader in mind, express why your message is relevant and important, ”comments  Bob Coss on writingtips.com.

Then, tell the readers what you think they need and want to know about only the topic of today’s post and no more. Attempting to cover too much ground in a single blog post, we lose focus, straining our readers' attention span. Gary DeAsi and Evan Stone advise financial planners not to be afraid to write in tried-and-true blog genres including

  1. Collections and top lists
  2. Reviews
  3. Predictions
  4. Motivation
  5. Trouble-shooting
  6. Interviews
  7. Editorial/ Personal reflection

Done that? Then it’s all right and it can be the end (for today, anyway).
 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail