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Be-a-Mentor Blogging for Business

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“To gain business with your blog, you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. He wants to help them get ahead and live a more fulfilled life,” Neil Patel advises.

The first way that blogging gets you customers is it shows you’re open for business, Sarah Carnes writes in HubSpot.com. The second way? It educates your prospects. Take your frequently asked questions (FAQs) and turn them into blog posts. Once a potential customer sees you as a resource, they are much more likely to consider you when they are considering buying the product or service you provide. After researching and building your target audience, you know what they care about most – and what keeps them up at night. Using your content to answer those fears means that you can begin to “own” the conversation.

In the book Good People, author Anthony Tjan names five types of mentors. At Say it For You, we realize that in different blog posts, a business owner or professional practitioner can take on one of these mentoring “roles’:

Master of Craft:
Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a content writer, link to outside sources to add breadth, depth, and credibility to the ideas you’re expressing and the advice you’re offering.

Champion their cause
Comfort and connect with compassion and encouragement. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be as important in coming years as technical skills.

Co-pilot
“Collaborate” with readers, showing you understand the obstacles and challenges they face. Encourage them to “vent” by answering the tough questions in your content. But searchers haven’t always formulated their questions, and so what I suggest is that we do that for them.

Anchor
An anchor needn’t work in the mentee’s industry, but is someone who offers insights that readers can use to better cope with issues they are facing.

Reverse mentor
A reverse mentor can be of a younger generation with insights to share that can help older readers make sense of technology or see situations from a different vantage point.

What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts, curating content from many different points of view. In blogging for business, be a mentor!

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What This Blog Isn’t

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This week’s Say It for You posts were inspired by James Marshall Reilly’s book One Great Speech, in which he describes his challenges in locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors.

In the introduction to his book, James Marshall Reilly makes sure readers know exactly what to expect.  In fact, the author provides three checklists:

  1. Who is this book for?
  2. What this book will teach you
  3. What this book isn’t

While it may not be practical for blog content writers to actually provide readers such a checklist for each post, it’s a great self-check mechanism for content creators.

Who is this blog post for?
Not only must a marketing blog be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and towards those who will want to do business with you, each post should have a specific type of reader in mind. That way, the content will clearly demonstrate that the business owner or practitioner and the staff understand the readers’ concerns and needs, but know how to meet those needs and solve those very problems.

What this post will teach you
The title of a blog post indicates what readers can expect to learn. There are two basic categories of blog titles, we’ve found at Say It For You. The first is very direct, using keyword phrases that match up with what a reader may have typed into the search bar. The second category gives only the barest hint of the content to follow and is meant to arouse curiosity A compromise I teach is to use a combination of a “Huh?” title to get attention and then an “Oh!” subtitle to make clear what the post is actually going to be about.

What this post isn’t
Of Reilly’s three lists, this one may be the most important for blog content writers to consider and at least indirectly, make clear in the content:

  • This is not an advertisement or a list of claims about a product or service.
  • This is not a news report (although it may be based on a news report, offering a fresh perspective on that news).
  • This is not a ”put-down” of our competitors’ products and services.
  • This is not a thinly veiled attempt to capture contact information from you.
  •  This is not a mere re-hash of widely accessible information.

Very much like a sculptor who “reveals” the shape by cutting away “excess” marble, blog content writers can craft effective posts by cutting away what the content is not!

 

 

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NASA Isn’t Looking for Astronauts

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As a speaking agent, James Marshall Reilly explains in the book One Great Speech, his biggest challenge is locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors. Reilly is looking for people as yet unknown in the speaking world. But don’t be confused, he cautions – when Bank of America wants to pay for a speaker, they’re not looking for a banker or financial services expert. The State Department isn’t looking for a diplomat, and NASA isn’t seeking a speaker who’s an astronaut. These organizations have plenty of their own in-house experts.

So what are these mega-company meeting planners seeking?’ Reilly says it’s someone with:

  • a unique perspective
  • a new idea
  • new information
  • passion
  • a story that resonates

Reilly’s insights sure resonated with me. As blog content writers, those are the very qualities we’re aiming for in helping our clients’ stories resonate with their target audiences.

Unique perspective
The typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers. In other words, it’s the blog that gives readers context within which to process the information.

But, from whose perspective? We can use blogging to offer searchers the relevant, up to date information they came to find, giving it to them in short paragraphs and in conversational style, then leading them to take action. But it’s crucial to present information from the customer’s perspective, not ours. Where we are is never the starting point!

Passion resonates
When online readers find a blog, one question they need answered is “Who lives here?” In terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes passion, and it takes opinion, we’ve learned at Say It For You. Sharing the obvious slant may be vociferous, but if it’s not passionate, it won’t resonate with readers.

Information
Very much like the folks most likely to be in attendance at a Bank of America or NASA conference, blog site visitors are already interested in the subject at hand and may already know quite a bit of information on that subject. While there’s very little likelihood that the “startling statistics” you offer to capture readers’ attention will be “new news”, facts and statistics need to be “unpackaged” and put into perspective.

No, Bank of America may not be looking for a speaker with a finance degree, and NASA may not hire an astronaut for the keynoter at their conference. But if you can turn information into stories that resonate in your blog posts, online readers may just “hire” -YOU!

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To Make Blog Titles Pop, Add a Little Assonance and Alliteration

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This month’s issue of Breathe Magazine was the inspiration for both this week’s Say It For You blog posts….

Titles – they either do the trick or they don’t, I always muse while browsing through the magazine racks at Barnes & Noble or the corner CVS. The current issue of Breathe had an especially appealing array of clever titles, I thought.

To be sure, a number of the Breathe titles were very direct, leaving not an iota of doubt as to what kind of information one should expect to see in the article:

  • Unlocking Your Potential
  • Stand Up For What’s Important
  • Ways to Cope With Change
  • Project Declutter
  • The Joy of Dogs
  • The A to Zzzzzz of Power Naps
  • Say It Loud, Say It Clear

Still other titles evoked curiosity about what stance the authors were going to take or what they were going to advise:

  • When Life Tips Out of Balance
  • Food for the Soul
  • Only Fools Rush In
  • Daydream Believer

I noticed a third grouping of titles, where the authors took advantage of the sound of the words themselves. Although I was looking at a printed page, I found, I was almost reading those titles aloud in my own head:

  • Facebook Fallout?
  • From Chore to Choice
  • Navigating Non-Negotiables
  • Experience vs. Expectation
  • Is the Grass Greener?

Notice the way similar consonants or similar vowel sounds are presented in a sequence. In scanning those titles, your eyes are both seeing the repetition and, in a real sense “hearing it” as well.

Breathe Magazine reminded me of something I’ve been teaching for years now at Say It For You, namely using alliteration (consonant repetition) and assonance (vowel repetition) in blog titles with an eye to making them more “catchy”. It’s one thing to write great content, and quite another to get readers to click on it.

To make blog titles “pop”, try add ind a pinch of alliteration and assonance!

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Blog Title Questions That Make Them Go “Hmmm…”

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Browsing through the latest issue of Breathe Magazine, I couldn’t help noticing that titles that were in the form of questions were more likely to have me stop turning the pages and start reading the article. I realized that what was giving me pause is wondering of that question applied directly to my own situation.

“Addicted to Work?    Hmmm…am I?
“Are You an Empath?”     Hmmm…am I?
“Are You Playing the Victim?”      Hmmm…is that what I’ve been doing??

The tactic of using questions in titles is one I’ve often suggested to blog content writers. After all, people are online searching for answers to questions they have and solutions for dilemmas they’re facing, and often we can help searchers formulate their questions by presenting one in the blog post title itself. Sometimes the question in the title serves to arouse readers’ curiosity about which side of the issue your opinion is going to represent.

Those Breathe Magazine questions, though, seemed to be taking things to a whole new level, I thought. Sure, in a publication about mental health, readers expect the content to be more “touchy-feely”. But couldn’t that technique of using title questions to make readers stop and examine their own business practices and purchase decisions work for all business owners and professional practitioners, I wondered? Hmmm…

“The purpose of a blog post headline is to convince readers to click on the link, or to scroll down and continue reading the post. A good title grabs attention and compels your target audience to check out what you have to say,” Team Kapost of uplandsoftware.com writes, and “questions create intrigue, serving as an invitation to participate in a conversation”..

Open-ended questions help you create better content, advises Neil Patel. But, before you can successfully convert blog readers into customers, he adds, you have to know what they’re worried about. (Then, as you become aware of their problems, you can have the case studies you need to provide a better experience, Patel explains.)

The specific genius in open-ended questions that make readers go “Hmm” may lie in the fact that one thing people tend to be worried about is – themselves! The blog topic might be plumbing, or hairstyles, or sports equipment, but title questions that force readers to stop and question their own ways, feeling compelled to read what you have to reveal about them – well, those titles can be show-stoppers!.

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