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Is the Size of Your Blog Post Inflated?

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For the second time this week, an article in the Indianapolis Business Journal caused me to consider some of the unique challenges of blog content writing…

“Looking for signs of inflation? Check the sizes of the goods you buy,” observed Cecil Bohanon & Nick Curott in the Indianapolis Business Journal. “Sellers of many consumer items resorted to reducing the quantity of the product to obviate explicitly increasing the dollar price of the product.” In other words, the package of cereal or cookies, or gum, stayed the same size; there was just less stuff in the box!

“Why are cereal boxes half empty?” Well, ABC Packaging admits, “bigger boxes give the impression that there is a lot of cereal inside”. “Large packaging is misleading and not fair, consumer campaigner Fred Isaac was saying back in 2016.

Well, duh….But economics aside, as a blog content writing trainer, I caution against “inflating” the length of blog posts. What’s the current wisdom on the subject? Brightedge.com offers the following advice in favor of longer posts: “If your piece does not provide enough depth or if it only gives a cursory treatment of the topic at hand, it may not be deemed high-quality content. You will want to dive deeper and provide more information as well as have an optimal blog post length.” “While attention spans may be going down, the average word count of blog posts is on the rise,” observes blogtyrant.com.

At Say It For You, we tend to agree with the checklist Jasmine Gordon offers. We blog content writers will know we’re done with a particular post IF:

  1. we’ve covered the topic in depth
  2. we’ve offered more value than the competition
  3. we’ve incorporated high-quality visuals
  4. we’ve verified our research and facts

My take is similar to that of Fred Isaac: Honest packaging should mean that longer posts deliver more information and a deeper dive into the subject. Having composed blog posts (both as a ghost and under my own name) numbering in the tens of thousands, I’m finding it difficult to fix on any rule other than “It depends!”  I think maybe Albert Einstein said it best: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In blogging, I’ve found that as long as you stick to a central idea for each blog post, you need to “say it until it’s said”, making your post as short as possible, but not shorter.

Ask yourself – Is the “package” filled with necessary, useful information, or is the size of this blog post inflated?

 

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Blog Posts and Bradford Hill Criteria

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blog metrics

Back in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill published a paper about the dose-response relationship. If X causes Y, the more of X you have, the more Y will result, is the concept.. While Bradford Hill’s original work related to disease causation, his methods are often used to evaluate cause/effect links in other fields.

Why is causation such an important research activity? “Causation influences decisions related to prognosis, diagnosis and treatment,” researchers found, and “findings also teach us about the functioning of healthy systems”. The authors point out that even though a condition may be found to respond to a certain treatment, that does not necessarily uncover the cause. Of that your headache!)

At Say It For You, our blog content writers know that consistently posting content that is accurate, dependable, and actionable attracts new customers and clients and keeps them coming back. But knowing whether, and how well, your tactics are doing in terms of accomplishing these goals involves verifying the “dose-response relationship” between the content and the results.

Three of the nine criteria Sir Bradford Hill proposed are:

1. Strength (effect size).
2. Consistency (reproducibility)
3. Specificity: (Causation is likely if there is a very specific population at a specific site)

Sometimes, Chief Marketing Officers forget to use the techniques they rely on with other forms of marketing when it comes to blogs, Heidi Cohen of the Content Marketing Institute observes. Metrics are needed to determine whether you’ve achieved your goals. Things worth “counting” include:

  • Visitors (where do they come from? Where specifically do they go on your site?)
  • Page views (where do visitors click to and where do they leave?)
  • Time on site (shows how engaged they are)
  • Signups for an RSS feed or newsletter

Different topics and different blog formats (even days of the week for publishing your blog) can then be tested Bradford Hill-style for strength, consistency and specificity.

To what extent, exactly, is your marketing blog “causing” marketing results? Bradford Hill can help you be in the know!

 

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With Business Blogging, “Owned” Leads to “Earned”

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Digital strategies that can be used for inbound marketing can be split into three main categories, explains SR Mailing, a UK manufacturer of sustainable e-commerce packaging. When all three categories are working in harmony, blogger Horne explains, the result is media convergence (obviously a much-to-be desired state of affairs).

Owned media
This is marketing over which you have complete ownership and control; you are free to use and re-use this content as you see fit. (In fact, at Say It For You, we give our clients the copyright to the materials we create for them, so that their blogs, web page content, and brochures become their owned media.)

Precisely because you own your blog content, it can continue to build audiences and brand recognition, as SR Mailing explains. Not only can business blog writing help you build awareness, credibility, and trust, but the content in blogs is a natural centerpiece for your social media marketing, and can be repurposed for press releases, white papers, and emails.

Earned media
This is content generated by your audience – comments, queries, social media links, and referrals. Earned media includes feature stories about your business or practice or noting your community involvement. Earned media is goodwill in tangible form.

Your own site on your own domain is where you publish new media content. You then help “earn” more exposure by posting attention-grabbing snippets on your social media and commenting on related blogs. At Say It For You, we help clients “help themselves”, leveraging their blog content through social media sharing.

Paid media
Paid media, true to its name, includes ad copy you pay to have included in newspaper magazines, postcards and flyers, or on others’ websites.

When measured against the costs of paid media (print, radio, TV, and billboard advertising, trade show booths), blogging is certainly the most cost-effective, true. even after factoring in the cost of hiring a professional content writer.

With business blogging, OW (owned media) – PW (paid media = EW (earned media) can be your formula for messaging success.

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Blogging the Way things Used to Be

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Whether or not you’re into home remodeling and décor, the new “Reveal” magazine by two of my own favorite reality show personalities, Drew and Jonathan Scott, is a great source of ideas for blog content writers. Last week in this Say It For You blog, I noted that the brothers had offered no fewer than five full articles about, of all things, tile, each one informative and imaginative.

Even the advertisements are uniquely creative in  “Reveal”, I discovered to my delight. A painting of a 19th century woodsman sitting in his shop with his dog’s face turned towards him takes up the bulk of the page, with an art-museum-style plaque that reads “Things dogs used to smell- their owners”. At the bottom of the page is a second plaque reading “Things dogs smell now: chicken”, positioned over a box of Cesar dog food.

“When it comes to business, trends come and go. This is particularly prevalent when it comes to marketing strategies,” Metova posits, noting that as technology becomes increasingly available to the general public, people are more receptive to marketing tactics when the material is formatted directly for them.

One really important point Metova stresses is that today, product comparison is an outdated and unnecessary marketing strategy. With trust in U.S. companies in general having dropped to 50% this year, now is not a great time for brands to be making lofty claims or taking potshots at competitors. Instead, Metova says, now is the time to be building trust and relationships.

This takes me back to the “Reveal” magazine ad for dog food. While making comparisons with competitors’ products and services may be passé, comparisons of “now” with “then” always hit the spot. Sharing memories of the “good old times” that weren’t really so good in terms of efficiency and convenience, you have the ability to share with blog readers a sense of look-how-far-we’ve-come togetherness.

The Business Dictionary definition of the term “product innovation” is “the development and market introduction of a good or service that is:

  • new
  • redesigned
  • substantially improved

What that means is that if you have taken something already there and made it better, that “innovation” is the most powerful thing you have to share in your blog marketing. After all, Drew and Jonathan Scott didn’t “invent” tile, and the Cesar company didn’t invent dog food. It’s probably true, we tell Say It For You clients wondering how they can come up with new ways to present their products and services through content marketing, that you can’t claim to have “invented” those products or services “from scratch”!

On the other hand, history-of-our-company background stories have a humanizing effect, engaging readers and creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame adversity. Most important, tracing the “then” calls attention to the modern solutions that grew out of those past attempts and failures.

Blogging “the way things used to be” is a great way to help prospects and clients savor the way things are!

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Yips and She-Cessioning for Blog Content Writers

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One would be hard-pressed to view the Coronavirus as a positive development, but in one way, the pandemic has added a lot to our lives – via the dictionary. The new term “doomscrolling”, for example, refers to the practice of obsessively checking online news for updates. Just the other day, in Employee Benefit News magazine, I was fascinated a headline using the coined phrase term “she-cession”, alluding to the fact that, during the pandemic, nearly three million American women exited the workforce, accounting for more than half the overall job loss in the country.

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “yips” was referenced by many journalists to describe a state of nervous tension affecting an athlete during the no-spectator Olympics. In fact, the Coronavirus has led to an explosion of new words and phrases, and new vocabulary helps us cope, the conversation.com comments. WFH (working from home) is disorienting (isn’t today “blursday”?).

Since for us blog content writers, words are our tools, we want to use words that capture attention, and often coined phrases do the trick nicely. One reason for this is that people are always look for new things, Neil Patel explains – new software, new techniques, new ways to make and save money. New phraseology commands attention.

Writeonline.io actually compiled a list of “grease-slide phrases” that help create smooth transitions between sentences and between paragraphs. One type of grease-slide is a conjunct. “Similarly”, “first off”, “for starters”, “to top it all off”, and “needless to say” are all grease slide conjuncts that keep the momentum going. “Here’s the scary part” and “It all boils down to this” are phrases that lead to the conclusion…

Prior to the pandemic, word combinations such as “contact tracing” and “essential businesses” weren’t part of our vocabulary, Miami University points out. “Bellyfeel” (blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea) and the verb “blackwhite” (accepting what one is told) are both part of “Newspeak” vocabulary, deliberately ambiguous and contradictory language.

While, at Say It For You, we use words to clarify and edify, never to confuse or mislead, we know that the ways in which people express themselves is constantly changing. When a newly minted expression captures a mood or a concept, using that phrase to make readers overcome their “yips” and take notice of your content – all I have to say is “Yippee”!

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