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Blogging to Get Remembered

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Brag Better: Master the Art of Fearless Self-Promotion
“You can always get attention by being the loudest in the room,” admits Meredith Fineman in her book Brag Better, but being loud while lacking strategy will do more harm than good. There are ways to get remembered, Fineman teaches, by describing your personal brand in ways that earn respect and recognition. True showmanship, she says, means showcasing what you’ve done in a way that feels fun and true to you.

Better bragging better begins with making a list of facts about yourself and your successes, Fineman teaches. Learn to be loud, proud, and strategic by:

  • Using super power words
  • Avoiding invisibility
  • Avoiding verbal qualifiers
  • Considering your audience

Brant Pindivic, author of the book The 3-Minute Rule, speaks about ways to consider your audience: “To succeed, you must be able to capture and hold your audience’s attention with only the quality and flow of your information,” The audience must be able to:

  1. conceptualize your idea
  2. contextualize it (understand how it will benefit them)
  3. actualize it (engage with interest)

One tip that Pinvidic offers to sales people is particularly worth noting by blog content writers: “It’s not just who you pitch to, it’s who they have to pitch to, that matters.” How will readers rationalize their decision to buy when speaking to others?

Better bragging is about shining a light on the work you’ve done, having confidence in yourself and your voice, and speaking up, Fineman stresses. At Say It For You, there are three models of business blog posts that we’ve found are particularly helpful in getting readers to remember the content and its provider:

1. Helpful how-to hints
Find complementary businesses or practices, asking those business owners or practitioners for tips they can offer for you to pass along to your readers. The best tips and hints, I added, are related to some a topic currently trending in the news and practical.

2. Personal stories
Research done by questioning Stanford University graduates showed that shows that graduates were more likely to remember commencement speakers who told stories. In one experiment, students were asked to give one-minute speeches that contained three statistics and one story. Only 5 percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63 percent remembered the stories.

3. Fascinating tidbits of information
When business owners or practitioners present little-known facts about their own business or profession, those tend to be remembered. If you notice a “factoid” circulating about your industry, a common misunderstanding by the public about the way things really work in your field, a little-known tidbit can reveal the truth behind the myth.

Learn to do better bragging in your blog!

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It’s OK to Post a Blog With a Chip in It

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“This book is as messy as life,” writes Matt Haig in the intro to The Comfort Book . The book has short chapters and longer ones. It has lists and quotes and case studies and even an occasional recipe. It has moments of inspiration taken from movies, quantum physics, and ancient religions, Haig says. You can start at the beginning and end at the end, or the reverse, he says, or you can just dip into it.

Reminds me of my own Say it For You blog, where my “reading around”, taking ideas from magazines and movies, joke books and cookbooks, articles about pop culture and philosophy, has inspired close to two thousand different posts. Keeping up with a blog over the long haul is messy, I agree.

Without a doubt, conveying business owners’ passion for what they know how to do and for what they sell is the big challenge for any freelance blog writer.  Success in blog marketing depends on sustaining the discipline of content creation over long periods of time, keeping the spark of passion going all the while.

One of Matt Haig’s many deceptively simple, yet very deep, statements is that it’s OK to serve coffee in a chipped cup. It’s OK to be broken, is the concept, to wear the scars of experience.

I think this statement is a good one for blog content writers to keep in mind when creating content introducing business owners or professional practitioners to readers. Why? Writing about past failures is more than OK – it’s important. True stories about mistakes and struggles are actually very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business, the entrepreneurs and practitioners who overcame the effects of their own errors.

Ironically, I’m the one who spends a lot of verbiage on the importance of avoiding grammar and spelling errors in blog writing, to the point of being labeled a “grammar Nazi” and similar epithets. I don’t want blog errors to call attention away from the impression we’re trying to make.

Matt Haig’s remark about the chipped coffee cup, though, reminds me of something Susan Gunelius wrote in Blogging All-in-One for Dummies: “A blog is for seeming “real and human in the consumer’s eye, rather than as an untouchable entity.”

Looked at that way, I guess it’s OK to post a blog with a chip in it!

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Blogging Can Bring Dead Horses Back to Life

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This week my Mensa Bulletin is sparking some thoughts about content and content marketing. In “Politics Aside”, Editor Chip Taulbee explains that, while the Mensa organization itself strives to be apolitical, it’s perfectly OK for any Mensan to express his or her own political views. The important thing when writing about any topic, Taulbee stresses, is to come up with novel thoughts. “We’re not trying to be part of the echo chamber. We don’t serve dead horses.”

There’s no doubt about the fact that business bloggers face originality challenges. First of all, as Susannah Gardner and Shane Bailey, authors of Blogging for Dummies, point out, “Anything and everything you see on the Internet is protected by copyright.”  Blog content writers can avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their authors in any of several different ways:

  1. direct quotes
  2. paraphrasing others’ remarks (and explaining where the idea came from)
  3. creating links in your blog posts to other websites

In order to move higher in search rankings, blogs must provide fresh, relevant content. Perhaps even more important, though, bloggers need to introduce fresh ideas simply in order to engage readers’ interest.  But, with the sheer volume of information on the Web on every topic under the sun, how do we keep providing new material in our blog posts week after week, month after month, even year after year?

Almost a decade ago now, in a totally unexpected way, I was fortunate to discover an answer to that very question. I had seen – and absolutely loved – an old TV movie about Marie Antoinette. On the surface, historical film making in general seems the very antithesis of fresh content-centered blog writing for business. As a viewer, I knew how the story would end before it began! Why, then, I asked myself, did I find “Marie Antoinette” so riveting?  Why did I hang on every word of dialogue, waiting for what I knew had long ago already taken place? It wasn’t about the material itself being “fresh”; it was about the “fresh“ point of view. Sure, in high school and college I had studied the events leading up to the French Revolution, but I’d never experienced those events through Marie Antoinette’s eyes.

Readers may know some or all of the information you’re presenting in your business blog, but they need your help putting that information in perspective.  In fact, that’s where blogging for business tends to be at its finest, helping searchers with more than just finding information, but helping them understand its meaning and significance.

“Fresh” doesn’t have to mean “new” facts.  If our content is “fresh” in that it offers a new perspective on familiar information, we have a chance at having our online readers find value in every word.

 

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Reading and Writing – for Blog Content, You Can’t Have One Without the Other

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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” That advice from none other but bestselling author Steven King is perfect for blog content writers. In fact, I’ve been teaching at Say It For You, in order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing.

Reasons “reading around” is so important for bloggers:

  1. You need to keep up with what others are saying on your topic. What’s in the news? What problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to your industry or profession (or that of your client).
  2. You need a constant flow of ideas. Yes, ideas for blog content can come from everywhere, but those ideas aren’t going to jump right onto your page!
  3. You can improve your own writing skills by reading books about writing (duh!). One favorite of mine is Brandon Royal’s The Little Red Writing Book.

  4. “Tidbits” liven up content. These are nothing more than pieces of unusual or little-known facts that you can use to explain your own products, services, and culture. Again, I have a favorite – The Book of Totally Useless Information, by Don Voorhees.
  5. You’re in the business of blog marketing, so books about selling and marketing are important. Remember, there’s almost no end to information available to consumers, so our job is to help readers absorb and “buy into” that information. New fave? The Challenger Sale, by Neil Rackham.6. In reading around, you gain insight into your customer base and their motivations for reading your blog in the first place. A scholarly article on the motivations recent college grads’ have to read blogs reminded me, of example, to keep tailoring individual blog posts or series to different segments of the client’s customer base.

For all of these reasons, at Say It For You, we teach blog content writers the importance of “reading around” and then “curating” others’ material for the benefit of readers.

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Blog to Put Objects into the Conversation

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“Florist Larry Becker and architect Roger Crowley are educators as much as antiquarians,” Martha Stewart writes about the two men who, last year, opened an antique shop in Hopewell, New Jersey called Welbourne Robinson. Crowley describes his partner’s artistic instincts in putting together collages by saying “Larry puts objects into conversation with one another.” In turn, Crowley strives for a “balance of lightness and heaviness” in his own floral arrangements.

When it comes to blogging for business, different “objects”, or types of posts, can present a pleasing and informative overall impression. James Parsons of contentpowered.com. for example, has determined that there are as many as12 primary types of blog content that can be juxtaposed or “collaged”, including press releases, personal content, news content, local content, roundups, and evergreen posts.

Shaun Pinney of Hubspot likens blog posts to cooking, describing:

  • Raisin Bran posts (basic, everyday posts that are educational)
  • Spinach posts (healthy and thoughtful establishing you as a thought leader)
  • Roasts – big projects with extra research r analysis
  • Chocolate Cake posts – humor t diversify your blog
  • Tobasco – controversial statements and opinion pieces

    At Say It For You, I’m always on the lookout for different “templates”, not in the sense of platform graphics, but in terms of formats for presenting information about any business or professional practice. Here are just a few possible “templates”:

    How-to Post
    This type of post aims to teach the reader something, taking them through a step-by-step process. Variations include “How I _____and How You Can, Too.” And “Why ____ Matters and How To Do it”.

  • List Post
    The list post offers readers a selection of ideas, tips, suggestions, or resources.
  • Review Post
    Review posts offer an informed opinion about a particular product or service.
  • OpEd Opinion Post
    This post states a point of view about a particular topic (the blog author can then add his or her own commentary.)
  • Interview Post
    The author interviews a client, an employee, or an outside source.

One way to put these different “objects into conversation with one another” is to refer back and forth among different posts through internal linking. In fact, Neil Patel advises, “Your old posts are the key to growing your blog.”

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