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Taking a Tip from the Texas Anti-Littering Campaign

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Mental Floss March April 2016

“Slogans are powerful marketing tools that can motivate customers to support your brand,” says Dustin Betonio of Tripwire Magazine, citing examples of highly successful word combinations:

  • Harley-Davidson – “American by birth. Rebel by choice.
  • Walmart – “Save Money, Live Better”
  • McDonalds – “I’m lovin it.”
  • Hallmark – “When you care enough to send the very best.”
  • Nike – “Just Do It”
  • Kentucky Fried Chickin – “Finger lickin good”

Like slogans, blog titles can serve as powerful marketing tools. In fact, as blog content writers, one big challenge we face is selecting the best title for each of our blog posts. One very good example is the billboard the Texas Department of Transportation used as the centerpiece of their highly successful anti-littering campaign:

Don’t Mess With Texas – Up to $1000 fine for littering!

 

What are some of the elements in this billboard that blog content writers can use in titles?

Alliteration and assonance
Those are literary devices that help make sentences more memorable because of repeated sounds. “mess” and “Texas” are not a perfect sound match, but the “ess” and “tex” sounds are close enough.

Numbers
Having the billboard read “Up to one thousand dollar fine” wouldn’t have packed nearly the punch of the $1,000 in digits.

Strong language
Strong phrases (and quite frankly, negative ones) have more of an effect in titles.

Definitive
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.

Don’t mess with business blog post titles – make them strong and definitive!

 

 

 

 

 

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Striving for Online Marketing Stardom

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success secrets

 

“You need writers even if your content is primarily video or audio,” asserts Mitch Meyerson in Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars. Why? Even what looks like free form content, he explains, needs a solid, well-crafted structure of words.

What does Meyerson define as effective content structure?

  • A headline that instantly commands audience attention
  • An introductory few sentences that pull the audience in, making it tough to turn away
  • Useful information that solves a problem the audience genuinely cares about
  • A single, focused point or “moral”
  • Stories, metaphors, and examples to teach that point
  • A  Call To Action that rouses the audience to take the next step

As a blog content writing trainer, I loved this question/response in Meyerson’s  book:

                                                                          “How long should your content be? Like a skirt, short enough
                                                                               to maintain attention, long enough to cover the subject.’

It’s important to understand, really understand, the difference between features and benefits, the book stresses.

  • Features tell us two things:  What it does and what goes into it.
  • Benefits tell us two different things: what it does for the customer and what they get out of it.

A point that I’ve long emphasized to newbie blog content writers is well-stated in the book:

“Content that attracts attention also tends to have a strong, well-defined point of view.  This is no place for wimpy, wishy-washy musings.” Your readers will want to hear a clear “voice” in your blog posts.  Allow your passion – and your (or your business owner client’s) point of view – to shine through, making it very clear how problems can be solved using these services and products and what principles and beliefs drive this business or practice.

Striving for online marketing stardom? Tap dancing around the issues is a no-no.

 

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Blogging From a Top-Floor Hotel Room

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People often assume he shoots his beautiful images with a drone or that he creates them on a computer, but that’s not it at all, says Virtuoso travel photog Gray Malin. What you see in the magazine is the result of him going up in a helicopter and leaning out the side to find timeless imagery. The idea of shooting from above came to Malin, he says, when he was somewhere in a hotel with a birdseye view of a giant swimming pool filled with people and realized he could create tableaus of beachgoers and beaches from a new and different perspective.

Perspective is everything when it comes to business blog content. Whether a business owner is composing his/her own blog posts or collaborating with a professional content writer, it’s simply not enough to provide even very potentially valuable information to online searchers.  Think of the facts – about the business, the services, and the products offered  – as raw ingredients which must be “translated”. For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?”  

Many business owners and practitioners make use of statistics in their blog posts, and that’s a good thing for a couple of reasons:

  • Numbers help debunk myths and dispel false impressions relating to your field or product.
  • Numbers help demonstrate the extent of the problem your business or practice helps solve.

But statistics, too, need to be put into perspective for readers. Before a reader even has time to ask “So what?” we need to be ready with an answer that makes sense in terms with which readers are familiar. I call it blogging new knowledge on things readers already know.

Photographer Gray Malin understood that content (in his case pictorial) offered to readers must “own” a unique perspective. There’s certainly no lack of content in either print or online media, and no lack of experts (at least purported experts) in the travel field or any other. Malin understood that he needed to go beyond presenting photos and offer a unique perspective.

In fact, what Gray Malin says of his top-floor style of travelogues is a great example for business blog content writing: “It all goes into creating something that’s unique to that location, but still universally appealing.”

 

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Your Blog Has Three Jobs: Solve. Excite. Speak

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Frong Prince lipstick

“Things aren’t always what they seem. Sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince!” Those rather unoriginal observations are attributed to Poppy King, founder of Lipstick Queen, the company that gets heads turning with Frog Prince, “a remarkable lilypad green lipstick that transforms lips into a pretty rosebud pink”.

I’m not exactly into the green lipstick thing, but I do absolutely love the statement I heard Poppy make during an Evine TV promotion:

“Every company,“ Poppy said, “has three jobs to do:

  • Solve the problem.
  • Excite the imagination.
  • Speak the truth.”

As profound a statement as I believe I’ve ever heard in a sales pitch, Poppy’s words certainly apply to the work we do as business blog content writers.

Solve the problem.
People are online searching for answers to their problems and solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  If your business consistently posts content offering valuable information and advice, those people are going to find you and  at least some will want to become your customers..

Excite the imagination.
Readers came online searching for information, products, or services, and they are not going to take the time to read the full text of your blog post without assurance that they’ve come to the right place and that this will be a short, fast, exciting read. Use the title to establish a “hook” to excite visitors’ imagination.

Speak the truth.
Myth debunking is a great use for corporate blog content. That’s because in the natural course of doing business, misunderstandings about a product or service often surface in the form of customer questions and comments.

Your blog has three jobs:  Solve. Excite. Speak.

 

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For Kazoos and Blog Marketing, Don’t Blow – Hum!

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childs red gazzooWant to pick up the kazoo?  Start with Rule No. 1, advises Barbara Stewart, a classical musician who took the humble instrument all the way to Carnegie Hall. What is Rule #1? Hum, don’t blow.

Always on the hunt for interesting trivia to use as business blog content writing fodder, I was fascinated to learn that the first documented invention of the kazoo was in 1883, but it was not until 1902 that the version we know today was patented by George D. Smith.  One of the original kazoo factories is still in business today in Eden, New York.

Barbara Stewart was an anomaly among serious musicians; the kazoo had lost popularity among professionals, who recognized its serious limitations (although the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix each used it in certain of their songs).

Point is, there’s a lot of similarity – and symbolism – in the kazoo for us business blog content creators.

1. Blogs are not “serious literature”.
“It’s important to distinguish between creating multimedia content and writing in a pure literary sense,” Timothy Bowers tells authors who use blogs to promote their books. “A writer’s blog should deliver the text, and as little else as possible,” is his advice. Strategies and techniques used by other bloggers (hyperlinks, images, embedded videos) do not fall under the category of writing in a pure literary sense, he adds.

2. Like Kazoos, whose musical range is limited, blog posts are, by definition, short pieces, which limits the quality of character and theme development possible in longer works.
While the Internet marketing mantra proposed by digitalmarker.com, “Every piece of content should be as long as it takes to convey the message, and no longer” may be applied to writing of every ilk, blog posts, unlike, say novels, are best when focused on a single message or theme. Novels in contrast may effectively and purposefully meander into character development and even philosophical musing. What each blog post does is focus on just one aspect of your business, so that online searchers can feel at ease and not be distracted with all the other information you have to offer.

3. Blogs, like kazoos, should be hummed, not blown.
The secret of successful business blogging, I found, lies in not “blowing your own horn”, in other words coming on too strong.  A blog is not an advertisement; you might say it’s an advertorial,. staying in “softly, softly” mode. As a content writer for a business or practice, you’re answering readers’ questions and “humming” solutions, not blowing them in readers’ faces!

 

 

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