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Post How the Pros Do It

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You wouldn’t imagine consulting Golf Digest for tips on content marketing, but ideas are everywhere, as I constantly assure readers of this blog. This week, both our Say It For You posts relate to articles in the March/April issue of Golf Digest. In this second piece,  Mark Blackburn writes about what the game’s best players are looking for when they see a green for the first time….

“A PGA Tour course is like a riddle: It has an optimal way for a given player to make his way around — and it ends with diagnosing the challenges of each green complex,” Blackburn explains, listing things important to notice about a course’s topography:

  • where pins have been during previous events
  • amount of landing area and available run-out
  • grass thickness
  • contours – “banks” and “bowls”

Mark Blackburn is careful to explain why these details could prove important to the reader – “Your scouting report will influence club selection and aim…  Good golf is a compounding of positive, sensible micro-decisions… Just being a tiny bit better in where you leave your approach shots, and a touch closer to the hole with your wedge game, is how you save a stroke here or there.”

In fact, I believe, this article is a near-perfect model of what I call “advice column” content, because the tips Blackburn offers readers are not only highly specific, but practical and do-able. With  no direct tie to any product or services “pitches”, the author is firmly establishing himself as a SME (Subject Matter Expert).

At Say It For You, we sometimes encounter resistance from business or practice owners when it comes to posting content. Owners of personal service businesses, in particular, voice fears of giving away valuable information “for free”. (What happens in the real world, we’ve seen over the years, is that readers don’t want to do it all themselves and turn to the source of the advice they’ve been offered.)

This concept of “soft marketing” is one I keep coming back to: business writing needs to be conversational and informational, not sales-y. Readers understand you’re writing for business purposes. The very reason they have made their way to your site in the first place is that what you sell or what you do is a good match for their needs. It is not necessary – in fact, often it will defeat your purpose as a content marketer – to punctuate the text with Calls to Action – either overt or disguised.

Posting “how the pros do it” (whatever your “it” is), turns out to be a great way to establish trust.

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Comparability Claims in Content Marketing

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In the book Prove It, authors Melanie Deziel and Phil M. Jones teach readers how to use content as a tool to earn audience trust. The authors count five main types of claims owners can make in touting their strengths and comparing themselves to their competitors:

  1. convenience
  2. comparability
  3. commitment
  4. connection
  5. competence

(Prior to detailing precise steps involved in each type of claim, I was happy to note, Phil Jones makes a statement that reinforces a content marketing principle we’ve been emphasizing at Say It For You for the past eighteen years:

“One factor that influences trust more than almost anything else is consistency. How you  show up consistently is how you become trusted to show up.”

Business owners who are able and willing to maintain consistency and frequency in posting content are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most content marketing initiatives being abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. To a significant degree, “showing up” is itself a crucial factor in earning online readers’ trust.

But what happens if you do find gaps between your claims and their provability?  The authors (page 28)) suggest two alternatives:

  1. take steps to adapt and improve your practices and products
  2. adjust your claims to reflect the more reliable and provable truth

In either case, the authors advise using content marketing to “build a body of evidence”. There are three possible approaches:

  • Corroboration – statements by third parties, who might be experts in the field, or actual satisfied users of the product or service
  • Demonstration – stories and case studies
  • Education – informing consumers helps them feel better prepared to make decisions

Truth is, Phil Jones writes, one type of evidence alone won’t “do it” – it’s best to use a combination of the three.

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Titles With Long Tales and Long Tails

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I found lots of “food” for content creation thought in the May/June issue of Reader’s Digest; it struck me that this May/June 2025 issue has even more than usual to teach us about choosing titles….

Surprises: These piqued my curiosity – What hadn’t I heard?

  • Unexpected/ purposely mistaken word use: Have You Herd? (on the topic of the great elephant migration)
  • Simile with a twist: A Tight-Knit Community (on the topic of crafters finishing abandoned knitting and crocheting projects to raise charitable dollars)
  • Slow Your Roll: expecting an article on driving or working out in the gym, instead I found data about how Americans prefer to install toilet paper rolls!
  • Paying Attention to ADHD: Clever juxtaposition – “paying attention” to attention deficit disorder

Sound tracks:

Models, Mistresses, & Muses is an example of alliteration; The Sad Tale of the Soft Sale illustrates both alliteration (repeated consonants)and assonance (repeated vowel sounds)

“Huh”/”Oh!” Titles
Using the element of surprise to lure readers’ attention is a favorite technique of book authors, I’ve found. While titles that pique curiosity can entice readers to open the book, in order to clarify what the subject matter is, authors often use what I call “Huh/Oh” titles. The “Huh?s” need subtitles to make clear what the article is about; “Oh!’s” titles are self-explanatory. For example, one title that caught my eye at a bookstore display was “The Invisible Kingdom”. It might have been about mythology, ESP, or geography, for all I knew. The “Oh!” subtitle read “Reimagining Chronic Illness”, shedding light on the real subject.

Long tail keywords
In online marketing, long-tail keywords (longer, more specific phrases), are used in search engine optimization to attract niche customers. Because “long-tails” often have lower competition, they help make it easier to rank higher in search results.

As marketers, we know that titles, along with their tales – and/or tails – are the way to convey to readers that we’d like to have them “c’mon in”!

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The Importance of Specificity in Content Marketing

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“Many writers rely on generalities rather than absolutes as they craft an article; this is both a cheat and disrespectful to the reader, who is left without the kinds of supporting details that can turn a good article into a great one,” Don Vaughan advises in a recent issue of Writer’s Digest.”There’s a meaningful difference between ‘a couple of centuries’ and ‘215 years’.”

Asked where writers might go to find those supporting details (other than a simple Google search), Vaughan suggests checking:

  • government agencies
  • military agencies
  • universities
  • data resources, both U.S. and overseas,

but also just talking to as many people as you can, expressing curiosity about their knowledge and opinions on the topic.

“Specificity can be your weapon of mass effectiveness,” Jason Cohen once wrote in “A Smart Bear”. Whether for marketing copy, blogging, a sales pitch, be specific. “Generic words are a sure sign of lazy writing.”

In content marketing, we’ve learned at Say it For You, the more specific you are in describing the shortcuts and solutions, the more engaging that content will be. Web searchers are on a fact-finding mission, looking for information that relates to what you do, what you sell, and what you know about.  The more specific the key words and phrases in the title and in the body of the blog post, the greater the chance search engines will direct those searchers to your blog. Then, the more specific the examples you provide and the terminology you use, the more impact you’re likely to have on readers of your content.

As “ghost writers’ for our clients, (our Say It For You contract guarantees that we will not write content for their competitors), we often find ourselves creating content on topics in which we have no prior experience or training. Don Vaughn’s advice about finding supporting details from agencies, universities, and specialty magazines is very apropos. “You don’t have to be a subject matter expert to write on specialty topics,” he says – “all you need is an innovative idea specific to the topic”  – and the willingness to delve into:

  • aspects of the topic’s history
  • profiles of prominent people who’ve benefitted from the product or service
  • news about developments in the industry
  • different opinions on the topic
  • human interest stories.

In content marketing, specificity can turn out to be a weapon of  creative effectiveness.

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Either Way, a Good Bottle is a Good Bottle

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For the average wine drinker, it’s a no-big-deal thing, but for serious aficionados of Champagne and for those in the wine industry, Alison Napjus points out in Wine Spectator, there’s an important distinction:

While small grower producers, or “RMs”, source their grapes only from vineyards they own ,” negociants”, or ” NMs”, purchase their grapes from different villages and subzones. Connoisseurs (“wine snobs”?) might value RM products, but transferring ownership of land among family members is “prohibitively expensive” under French law, Napius points out, and RMs have trouble meeting demand. NMs, meanwhile, have begun paying closer attention to viticulture in their own vineyards.

The result of all this supply/demand push-pull is that the ” perfect” Champagne product today is neither an RM nor an NM, the author explains. Consumers are really just looking for a steady supply of quality Champagne. “At the end of the day, it’s what’s in the glass that matters, not the code on the label,” the author concludes.

The same observation might be made in my field of content marketing, I couldn’t help thinking. “Content marketing works by capturing the attention of your desired audience members and helping them address their informational and task-oriented needs,” Jodi Harris of the Content Marketing Institute explains.

  • Prefer to use straightforward or “Huh? Oh!” titles for blog posts? Doesn’t matter, so long as, in the body of the post, you deliver on headline’s promise.
  • Whether you post content once a week or once a month, consistency helps build trust with your audience.
  • Statistics can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem or to provide data about products and services a company offers. Either way, when presented effectively, numbers can move readers to make decisions.
  • “Jargon”, industry or profession-unique terminology can be used judiciously by content writers for explaining and defining a point, or simply as a way to establish common ground with a select audience.

Either way, a good piece of content is a good piece of content!

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