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Post-It Note Blogging For Business

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Several years ago, while serving as an English tutor at Ivy Tech Community College, I created a writing guide for my students, urging them to complete the first three steps before sitting down at their laptops to write an assigned essay. They were to use Post-It® Notes to jot down ideas. That way, the order of the different paragraphs could be switched around. Blog content writers can follow an identical process in organizing their thoughts…

Step One: Select your topic. (Hint: Your TOPIC is not necessarily the same as the title for the post. Your topic is also not the same as your thesis statement. Your topic IS the answer to the question I might ask a person who’s just finished reading your blog post: “So…what was the subject of that piece?

Step Two: Compose your thesis statement. Another way to think of your thesis statement is your “one-sentence speech”. The thesis statement tells the reader what your particular “slant” is on the topic. Are you out to explain how to use a product or service? Are you intent on raising awareness of a problem you know how to solve? Are you aiming to demonstrate your involvement in your community?

Step Three: the three-legged stool
Just as a stool will not stand firmly without having at least three legs, you should plan to have three “legs”, or points to use in proving your thesis.

Step Four: Support your points
This is where students would find statistics, or articles by authorities who have opinions that support their ideas. (Even in this digital age, I used to advise students to print out pages they were going to quote, so that they could highlight specific passages they might cite.) On a Post-It®, which they’d affix to the page, they’d capture the information needed to cite that source on their References or Works Cited page).

Step Five: Outline your paper (or blog post)
With your tools now “lined up”, you are ready to decide in what order you’ll present the ideas. (This is where you experiment by moving the Post-It notes around). Once you’ve settled on the order, it will be easier to see which element is best for capturing attention at the start, as well as which makes for a powerful ending statement. This can also be the ideal time to select a title to arouse readers’ interest.

Try Post-It® blogging for business!

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Authenticity Blogging

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Get personal on social media, is Justin Mack’s advice to financial advisors – to demonstrate that you’re unique, you need to explain what you care about and what it’s like to work with you. “The right mix of personal, educational, and corporate brand content can add great value to an advisor’s social media page.” What resonates strongly with prospects, Mack says, is “personal character, culture, and behind-the-scenes content. “Both current and potential clients want to see the people who power the firm more than the firm’s latest earnings success.”

Authenticity is powerful in blog marketing. “You can talk about your goals, background, mission, and products by simply writing and publishing posts,” Livia Ryan writes on.eonetwork.org. Ryan is talking about personal posts, but at Say It For You, we think her statement very much applies to business blogging: “Readers will be provided an intimate view of your journey and what goes into developing your products and services. Connect with readers, and you create potential customers.”

Real people are the key to authentic relationships, sproutsocial agrees. Consumers want to learn more about the people behind their favorite brands. Surveys show 72% of consumers report feeling sloser to a company when employees share information about a brand online. For that very reason, thehartford.com explains, “Your employees need to understand your company, its values, its goals and its priorities.”

Company employees’ contribution to blogging
At Say It For You, when I’m working with a company to set up a business blogging strategy and I’m training that company’s employees to post blogs, quite often I hit resistance, with employees seeing blogging as just one more task in a series of duties that makes their work load heavier. Still even if my team is going to be composing the posts, it’s crucial for the business owner to enlist the support of the employees.

  • Employees are the ones in the field and on the phone with customers and clients.
  • Employees know the strengths and best uses of their own company’s products and services.
  • Employees are the best people to , in conversation with customers. to elicit testimonials and anecdotes that can be used for blog content.

One combination tactic that quite often turns out to be just right is having professionally ghostwritten posts (to maintain the regularity and research needed to win search engine rankings), but with employees providing their very special touch when time and their regular duties allow.

Blogging for business represents an ideal tool for “getting personal” and earning trust, allowing business owners to express who and “what” they are – What makes them tick?  What “ticks them off” about their own industry? In short, business blog writing needs to be real. Being real, though, doesn’t mean being sloppy about grammar and spelling – or about properly attributing quotes and ideas to their sources.

There’s a balancing act between authenticity and brand, but there’s little doubt – authenticity is powerful in blog marketing!

 

 

 

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Blogging Your Claim To Fame

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“After reading this,” is Stephen Lang’s hope for his Big Book of American Trivia, “you may consider yourself a little more knowledgeable, maybe even a little more appreciative, of this vast, enchanting land.” With over 3,000 questions and answers, this book certainly allows readers to self-test, which is one way in which readers tend to initially engage with the content in business blogs. In fact, content writers, we teach at Say It For You, can use trivia in different ways:

  • for defining basic terminology
  • sparking curiosity about the subject
  • putting modern-day practices and beliefs into perspective
  • for explaining why the business owner or practitioner chooses to operate in a certain way

    You can use trivia to help readers get to know the people behind the business/practice:
    – What Oscar-winning actress announced in June, 2011, that she was homeschooling her children? (Angelina Jolie)
    – What man said “I don’t know anything about cars,” then ended up being head of General Motors? (Edward Whitacre, Jr. )
    – What songwriter donated an Oscar he’d won to his hometown? ) Johnny Mercer)

In his book Tell to Win, Peter Guber points out that people want to do business with people. One important function of a business blog, we teach at Say It For You, is helping online visitors get to know the people behind the business (or the professionals behind the practice). Why did those owners choose to do what they do? What are they most passionate about?  What are they trying to add to or to change about their industry? What community causes are they involved in?

           Sharing failures as well as successes:

  • In April, 2009, Barack Obama caused controversy by bowing. To whom? (The King of Saudi Arabia)
  • What famous astronaut was cut from the TV show Dancing With the Stars”? (Buzz Aldrin)
  • What one-name pop singer declared “The Internet’s almost over”? (Prince)

“There can be success in the stories, but they have to be grounded in failure.” Stav Ziv said in Newsweek, talking about The Moth nonprofit dedicated to the art of storytelling. So how does all this apply to blog marketing for a business or professional practice?  It brings out a point every business owner, practitioner, and business blogger ought to keep in mind: Writing about past failures is important.
True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business. What tends to happen is the stories of failure create feelings of empathy and admiration for the entrepreneurs or professional practitioners who overcame the effects of their own errors.

Why share tidbits? Your blog readers may consider themselves a little more knowledgeable, maybe even a little more appreciative, of your value proposition – and of you!

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Business Blogging With Adjectives

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Pay attention to proper spelling and grammar, Joanne Adams says in Grammar, and “people who read your writing will know, without a sliver of doubt, that you are somebody who really knows their $h*t”. One thing Adams thinks we ought to know about adjectives, for example, is that they come in three flavors: absolute, comparative, and superlative. In describing a team of runners, for example, you’d probably describe them all as “quick” (absolute). Two might be “quicker” (comparative) than the others, while one outstanding runner is “quickest” (superlative).

Making comparisons, in fact, is an important function in blogging for business. An effective blog clarifies what sales trainers like to call your “unique value proposition” in terms readers can understand. One excellent way to do that is by making comparisons with things with which readers are already comfortable and familiar. Effective blog posts, we’ve learned at Say It For You, must go from information-dispensing to offering perspective.  Before a reader even has time to ask “So what?” we need to be ready with an answer that makes sense, blogging new knowledge by presenting it in a framework of things readers already know. (Telling me that Moringa leaves are healthy isn’t as powerful as telling me they have four times the calcium of milk.)

“Everything isn’t awesome,” Cristine Struble observes in Fansided. Using one adjective to describe all types of events, experiences and things degrades both the adjective and the object described. Some words can better define an experience, emotion or action better than others. Why use one word over and over when a dictionary is filled with descriptive words? The lesson – when it comes to using adjectives in your blog to describe your products and services, don’t overuse the superlative.

Blogging maven Neil Patel teaches “How to Avoid the Destructive Power of Adjectives in Your Marketing Copy”. In fact, Patel observes, “adjectives are a copywriter’s nightmare. With the right adjectives, you’re persuasive and memorable. With the wrong ones – you lose your readers’ attention, he warns. If you’re trying to paint a picture with words, you need adjectives, Patel admits, but flowery or bombastic words make you sound insincere. Is what you’re offering really second-to-none, state-of-the-art, and unparalleled?

Patel’s practical suggestions:

  1. If the meaning of your sentence doesn’t change when leaving out the adjective, leave it our altogether.
  2. Use stronger nouns if that means you can leave out an adjective.
  3. Avoid adjective modifiers such as “very” and “really” – use specific adjectives.
  4. Offer specific technical details telling the real benefits of the product or service (what pain does using it avoid? )

Business blogging with adjectives can be a good idea, but stick with the absolute and the comparative, never overusing the superlative.

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How Not to be Passive in Your Posts

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In “The Tyranny of the Verb To Be”, Tobias Buckell describes how, as a new writer, he “almost destroyed himself” trying to eliminate passive verbs from his material. What’s so terrible about the passive voice? Buckell asks. Isn’t it time to stop worrying about “staying active”? Some of our overuse of passive voice, he believes, comes from academic writing, which removes the narrator from English papers.

“While tense is all about time references, voice describes whether the grammatical subject of a clause performs or receives the action of the verb,” grammarly.com explains. It’s the difference between “Chester kicked the ball” (active) and “The ball was kicked by Chester” (passive). “If you’re writing anything with a definitive subject who’s performing an action, you’ll be better off using the active voice,” rhw grammarly author advises. “Using active voice for the majority of your sentences makes your meaning clear for readers, and keeps the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy,” the Purdue Online Writing Lab agrees. .Sometimes, though, the active voice is simply awkward, Alice Underwood of grammarly explains, as in “People rumor Elvis to be alive”, as opposed to “Elvis is rumored to be alive”.

As writers, we teach at Say It For You, we need to decide (in each sentence and phrase) what – or who – matters most in each particular sentence – do we want to emphasize the action itself or the doer of the action? When it comes to actual “voice” in terms not of grammar, but of messaging, in a business blog, it’s important to have “voice variety”. That can come from writing some of the content in I-you format, with other posts written in third person. If a company person or a customer is being interviewed, the content can be written in the “voice” of the interviewee or that of the interviewer. “Third person narratives so often mimic the ‘beige voice’ of an objective reporter,” William Cane says in Write Like the Masters. With first person, he advises, “it’s usually easier to be intimate, unique, and quirky.”

In the grammatical arena, the most important thing, Bucknell concludes, is to test each sentence to see whether its SVA (subject, verb, object) arrangement could be written in a more interesting way. Achieving interesting writing is not as simple a matter as changing all the verbs to active, he realizes. “But looking carefully at all those ‘to be’ sentences might not be a bad way of diagnosing places where we have the opportunity to push ourselves a little more artistically,” he says.

Of course, as blog writers, we want to come across as passionate, never passive, towards our topics and towards our readers.

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