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Blogging to Offer – and Change – Opinions

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When online readers find a blog, one question they need answered is “Who lives here?” Providing information about products and services may be the popular way to write corporate blog posts, but in terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes opinion, we’ve learned at Say It For You.

Whether you’re blogging to promote a business, a professional practice, or a nonprofit organization, you’ve gotta have an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. In other words, blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations; you can’t just “aggregate” other people’s stuff and make that be your entire blog presence.

The Earth Day issue of the Indianapolis Star included an article by Jacqueline Cutler that represents a collection of different people’s opinions on the topic of environmental threats. Eight different people were interviewed, with each asked to name what they considered to be the most pressing threat and then to describe one specific change individuals could make in their daily lives that could help make a positive difference.

Photographer Joel Sartore, for example, names climate change as the biggest threat, and recommends including native plants in our landscaping. Brian Skerry of National Geographic Explorer is concerned about plastic waste in the oceans, and recommends switching to metal water bottles. Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Choctaw tribal chief says we should look at our children and at our aging parents, and “just start caring” about the impact waste and warning have on their lives.

Very thought-provoking article, yet from a blog marketing standpoint, there’s a piece missing, I couldn’t help thinking. Cutler has done a fine job “aggregating” the statements of others, without presenting her own opinion. But, in marketing a business, practice, or organization, we absolutely must make clear “who lives here”.

In “Ten tips to write an opinion piece people read”, A. Stone advises starting with an attention-grabbing opening line that cuts to the heart of your key message, evoking an emotion or curiosity.  It can be a strong fact, statement or even the beginning of an anecdote that has audience connection, he explains. “The first line is the display-window for all the goodies you have inside,” Stone explains. In opinion piece posts, the, the opener should at least hint at the “slant”.

We must be influencers, I advise clients and blog content writers alike. Whether intended for business-to-business or business to consumer,, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.

 

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Blogging Benefits for Small Business Owners

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Are there any benefits of blogging for small business owners? Sure thing, says Lyfe Marketing. In fact, “Many companies now practice a strategy where consumers come to them for information rather than them pushing sales via outbound strategies to spread awareness about their products”. Importantly, blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%, Lyfe points out, naming no fewer than 11 specific benefits of blogging as experienced first hand by business owners, in each case naming a specific well-known company that uses blogging to its advantage:

  1. Trust: Show that you are an expert in your industry (Airbnb)
  2. Value- add (Etsy Marketplace)
  3. Higher ranking: Search Engine Optimization (Allstate and State Farm®)
  4. Building email lists (beauty blogs)
  5. Cultivate interest through demand generation (Apple)
  6. Lead conversion (Slack)
  7. Visibility (Tesla)
  8. Influencer marketing (Home Depot)
  9. Backlinks – other web pages link to your website (New York Times)
  10. Feedback (Trip Advisor)
  11. Stay ahead of competition (American Express)

“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy,” Marc Prosser, founder of Fit Small Business, writes in SCORE, “but many businesses launch one, not realizing that maintaining it is just as critical.” Prosser adds several items to Lyfe’s list of blogging benefits:

  • Informing customers about the good work you do (85% of customers like companies that give back to the community)
  • Promoting a positive employer brand so employees want to work there
  • Helping business partners grow

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I often remind business owners of a very simple explanation by Corey Eridon of Hubspot of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

As Shane McGeorge writes in CBO. “If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy,”

 

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Reify Your Blog Posts

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There are concepts that exist in a purely abstract way, and, in blog content marketing, we have to, as hackernoon.com puts it, “find ways to explain those concepts so that they make sense to as many people as possible”. In fact, as we’ve come to realize at sayitforyou.net, blogging itself is a way of reifying complex information.

To reify is to make something abstract more concrete or real. Sociology textbooks define ‘reification” (which literally means to “turn into things”) as “the process of coming to believe that humanly created social forms are natural, universal, and absolute things”. In the two sayings “You can’t fool Mother Nature” and “fighting for justice”, Nature and Justice, both abstract concepts, are treated as real people, even though we know they’re not, There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, authors Chevette Alston and Lesley Chapel explain in study.com, because reification can turn language abstractions into tangible understanding.

“Concepts like happiness and intelligence and personality are called constructs. We cannot see them directly. They are labels, concepts, literally constructions in our heads. By giving such complex processes a label, we can discuss them, psywww.com explains.

Not everyone agrees that reification is beneficial. “When we assume that a concrete, tangible thing has the quality of abstract concepts, when the thing-in-itself is forgotten and the thing-as-thought-of is mistaken for the thing itself, that can be dangerous, Biznewske.com explains. For example, assuming that someone is an expert simply because they have a degree is a reification fallacy. Assuming that a boxed product such as cereal is a symbol of health and nutrition is a fallacy. Reifying an idea such as “male privilege” means taking it as true when it might or might not be true.

Hacker.com, though, “gets it”. The essential challenge we blog content writers face, they understand, is explaining abstract concepts in the right way, because doing that makes the difference between business success and business failure. Readability is a critical aspect of online writing, in which we business bloggers are out to retain the clients and customers we serve and to bring in new ones.

The products and services we’re writing about can’t be amazing in the abstract, which is why reifying blog content can be just what’s needed to make it engaging and real..

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Cutesy is for Dolls, Not Blog Post Titles

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Flea Market Home & Living wasn’t the only home decorating magazine I browsed (see Tuesday’s post) in the course of “reading around” to get fresh blog marketing ideas and inspiration. Paging through Modern Home, I couldn’t help but be amused by the clever, “cutesy” article titles:

  • Starting Fresh
  • Sofa, So Good (go ahead, say it aloud)
  • Yay, Boucle!
  • How Do We Love Boho? Let Us Count the Ways
  • Soft Rock
  • Find and Seek
  • Can You Handle It? (decorative knobs and door pulls)
  • From Found to Finished

Unfortunately, when it comes to blog marketing, clever, cutesy titles are far from sofa, so good. The name of your blog post must make clear – to both searchers and search engines – what the post is about, and mystery titles simply don’t get that job done.

In Keyword Research for Magical SEO, Jennifer Lawrence lists different post title approaches:

  • Listicles (10 Ways to….. 15 Reasons to…..)
  • How To…
  • Questions:
  • Mistakes to avoid…..
  • Comparisons (Which is better – ____ or ___?)

Whichever of these you select, Lawrence stresses, it’s important to first do keyword research and then incorporate one of the keywords in the title itself as well as in the body of the article.

Yahoo!small business explains there are three categories of keywords:
Generic –basic words that describe a product or service “( camera”, “accountant”, ”chiropractor”).
Descriptive – these keywords have adjectives to narrow the focus, such as “Indianapolis accountant” or “digital camera”.
Targeted – these keywords apply to only one product or service, such as “tax accountant” or “Samsung Galaxy 8 phone accessories”

Aside from SEO considerations, a blog post title in itself constitutes a set of implied promises to visitors: If you click on this title, you’re telling readers, it will lead you to a blog post that discusses the topic mentioned in the title. (As comedian Jerry Seinfeld put it – the pilot should end up where it says on the ticket!)

Sofa, so good. Truth, though, is that no clever title, even one that incorporates well-researched keyword phrases, can substitute for well-written, relevant content in the blog post itself, content that provides valuable information to your readers.

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Personalizing Blog Content – on Both Ends

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We need to update the definition of the word “personalize”, Stu Heinecke insists in his book Get the Meeting. Why? To differentiate between the two forms “wide” and “deep”. Wide personalization, Heinecke explains, applies readily available data across an audience, while deep personalization applies individualized research findings to produce unique outreach elements, one by one.

Can blogging do both?

Personalizing on the audience end:
At Say It For You, I teach that everything about your blog should be tailor-made for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it. And since we content writers are hired by clients to tell their story online to their target audiences, we need to do intensive research, as well as take guidance from the business owner’s or practitioner’s experience and expertise.

Now, since blogging is part of inbound marketing, it cannot involve researching each individual’s hobbies and preferences, creating and shipping unique gifts in order to “get the meeting”.

On the other hand, as Mo the Blog Coach explains, having an abstract audience in mind when creating content is ineffective, causing you to ramble on, trying to help ALL the people. Instead, she advises, “humanize your reader, singling them down to one specific person experiencing one specific problem.

Personalizing on the blog marketer’s end with I-you language:
In blog marketing, I stress first person writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the person or the team standing ready to serve customers.

It was apparent the editors of Flea Market Home & Living magazine had latched onto this exact secret. Each page featured a designer – or homeowner – statement beginning in first person:

  • “I make things out of what most folks consider garbage and get an inordinate amount of pleasure from it.”
  • “I try not to follow any rules. I really try not to copy anyone and I try to avoid trends.”
  • “I believe your sense of color is like a muscle that needs to e exercised.”
  • “I feel good supporting the local Goodwill. Plus, with the money I save, I feel better about the occasional splurge.”

In blog marketing, customers might be asked for statements like these – sharing stories of unique ways they used your product or service, or describing a problem you helped them solve. On marketers’ end, “I” and “we” statements give readers the feeling that the providers of the services and products are speaking directly to them. In fact, in business blogging, one goal should be to present the business or practice as very personal rather than merely transactional, reminding readers that there are real life humans behind the content on the website.

Blog content with the greatest chance of success is personalized on both ends!

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