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Rubber-Banding the Information in Your Blog

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“Let’s say you need to drink nine glasses of water a day, wear nine rubber bands on your left arm. Every time you drink a glass, move one rubber band to your right arm…Your goal is to get all of the rubber bands onto your right wrist by the end of the day,” womensrunning.com advises.

Hitting precisely the right “advertorial” note is the big challenge in corporate blog writing.  In fact, one point I’ve consistently stressed in these Say It For You blog content writing tutorials is how important it is to provide valuable information to readers, while avoiding any hint of “hard sell”.  Well, providing practical, actionable tips and helpful hints is a way to accomplish that very goal. 

Networking colleague Beth Stackhouse, owner of Stackhouse Interiors in Columbus, Ohio, offered a practical tip for home décor: To add color (as well as spices for the pantry) use indoor plants. Beth’s own peppermint, basic, and parsley plants add oxygen, color and texture to her living. Large plants make a room stand out, and are a great option for those on a budget who want to elevate their interior design.

Leadership coach and author Dow Tippett offers a practical tip for improving mental health – creating a gratitude ledger.

So, as a business blog writing trainer, how would I advise adapting that “helpful hint” strategy to marketing your business or practice?

1. Find complementary businesses or practices.  Ask the owners (or cite their blogs) for tips they can offer your readers.  Pet care professionals can share tips from carpet cleaning pros – or the reverse! If you’re a carpet cleaning pro, you can share tips from allergists. If you’re an insurance advisor, offer tips from car dealers about accident prevention.

2. Of course, you’re going to want to add some tips related to your own products and services. your own.  Fellow network board member Steve Rupp offers tips on cleaning windows as well as tips for buying a house.  A restaurant’s blog might offer hints on tipping etiquette or the temperature of “rare”, “medium” and “well-done” steaks. Whatever the product or service, readers will be hungry for information that helps them gain maximum advantage for buying and using it.

“Rubber-band” your blog content along with your water consumption. Helpful hint blog writing can be very useful to your business or practice!

 

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Knowing What They Want Lets You Give it to Them in Your Blog

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Persuasive presentations move smoothly through four stages, called the AIDA pattern: (A= attention, I= interest, D=desire, and A=action), explains Kenneth R. Mayer in his book Well Spoken.

Calls to Action in persuasive blog posts, as we know at Say It For You, can succeed only if the content writer has tapped into an underlying need or “desire” on the part of the reader. Mayer provides an extensive list of possible “wants”, or persuasive appeals, as he calls them, that might help presenters help listeners be willing to move forward and take the desired action: .

  • appreciation/approval by others
  • beauty/attractiveness
  • cleanliness/comfort
  • convenience
  • health
  • good reputation
  • peace of mind
  • protection/safety
  • savings

“The call to action is where your blog makes money,” asserts crazyegg.com. “All your idea generation, research, writing, editing, posting — it all boils down to a call to action — a CTA.” Blog CTAs are different, the author concedes, but they are still important, and the best ones are unobtrusive, although noticeable.

Neil Patel cites Modernweb, who realized unusual success in their blog because:…”They identified their audience, understood what they were struggling with, then presented them with content that explained how similar individuals handled the same problem.” But in order to understand which of those “persuasive appeals” is most likely to appeal, you have to know your target audience.

No blog – and certainly no blog post – can be all things to all people. Each post must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who are most likely to want to do business with you.  That way, the appeals, as well as the way they are presented, can be chosen specifically for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, even the title of each blog entry.

Knowing what they want lets you give it to them in your blog.

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Are You Putting Red Lipstick on Your Blog?

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This week’s Say It For You blog posts feature more helpful advice based on Brant Pinvidic’s powerful little book The 3-Minute Rule….

“Brant, are you putting on red lipstick?” TV producer and sales coach Brant Pinvidic remembers his mom (herself president of a global organization). asking him whenever she sensed he had been emphasizing presentation over substance in his work.

“Your pitch is a path of information to follow,” Pinvidic cautions, and it’s vital to let that information take the lead. Too much emphasis on style and personality muddies the message. You don’t want to pull your audience out of the story and remind them they’re being sold to, he adds.

It’s true that readers’ first impressions are design-related, as some British researchers found when analyzing online health sites. Those researchers found that readers judged a website by its design, print size, look and feel, and use of color. Simple and familiar page design was the best received. Great design gets people to trust the source and to stick around, writes Peep Laja of the CXL optimization Agency. As Neil Patel points out in hubspot.com, articles with images get 94% ore total views than those without images.

So how does that relate to Brant Pinvidic’s mother’s advice about the lipstick? “When my mom sees me trying to spice up elements of a presentation to overshadow the lack of clarity, “he explains, that’s when she cautions me to get the information and the story at its highest level first, and only then add a little flair.

Keep in mind, Neil Patel writes in Hubspot.com, your blog is a reflection of your company. If there are any issues with the blog, it impacts how people view your product. It’s important that any statistic you state can be verified. Many blog posts will link right to the statistic and the source. Accuracy builds trust with readers.

Leave readers with questions, Patel adds. This doesn’t mean to have an incomplete post, but rather to include questions that make readers reflect on how they can implement the knowledge you provided. When possible, add a story to your blog post. It will make it more engaging and may also help the reader

What Mrs. Pinvidic is reminding her son – and what we teach blog content writers at Say It For You –  is that the meat comes first, then the sauce. The core content of the program – the article, the blog post – comes first, the “showmanship” second.
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Blogs That Go WHAC

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Write less,” advises Seth Godin in the preface to his book The Dip. Now Brant Pindvidic, in his book The 3-Minute Rule, tells us to “say less to get more from any pitch or presentation”.

At Say It For You, I teach the principle of “reading around”, emphasizing the point that business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing. Even after almost a decade and a half creating blog content for business owners and practitioners, I feel the need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my clients offer. But now, both these business authors are making the case for less, not more, when it comes to sales pitches, speeches, and blog posts.

It seems this “reading around” habit of mine has presented me with a dilemma: Godin’s and Pinvidic’s advice to write and say less seems to fly in the face of the latest trend towards long-form blog posts with a word count numbering in the thousands.

Brant Pinvidic’s advice is based on the science of approach motivation. “Every time you make a pitch, presentation, or proposal to try to influence anyone to do anything, your audience’s first impression will be fully formed in less than three minutes”. And it’s not that we’re all dumbed-down, he says, but that people today focus more intensely and efficiently, he explains. The WHAC outline helps organize the key information you need to impart – and dictates the order in which you present that information:

W – What is it? (What is your offer?)
H – How does it work?) work? (Why are the elements of your offer and why are they valuable or
Important?)
A– Are you sure? (This is a fact or figure that backs up your information and establishes
potential.)
C – Can you do it? (Your ability to execute and deliver.

In the first two stages, the W and the H, the audience will conceptualize. In the A stage, they will contextualize, judging whether your offer is true real, and right. In the C stage, the audience will be asking whether this could actually happen in the way being described.

Transferring this model to the arena of blog marketing, I’d suggest that the WHAC sequence could be employed over a series of blog posts rather than using it all in one. One concept I emphasize in corporate blogging training sessions is that blog posts can stay smaller and lighter in scale than the more permanent content on the corporate website or the content in white papers. What helps the separate posts fit together into an ongoing business blog marketing strategy are the blog “leitmotifs” or themes.

Whether Godin’s “Write less” advice is suited for us blog content writers remains a matter of debate. On the other hand, “Read more” continues to be a requirement for imparting bog posts with WHAC!

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In Blog Marketing, Write Less??

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“This book is really short,” writes Seth Godin in the acknowledgments section of The Dip. This is something he’s learned from his readers, he says – Write less. “Seth Godin,” the book jacket explains, is one of the most popular business bloggers in the world. “While Godin doesn’t claim to have all the answers, he will teach you to ask the right questions”.

So, from a blog content standpoint, is “writing less” a good idea? Maybe not, according to these three sources, writes Jasmine Gordon of lean-labs.com.

  • Medium – The ideal length of a blog post is seven minutes or 1,600 words.
  • SERPIQ – Top three Google results are between 2,350 and 2,500 words.
  • Neil Patel – Posts of at least 1,500 words earn the best SEO and social sharing results.

On the other hand, Gordon points out:

  • Data from Write Practice indicates that posts of 275 words are best for eliciting comments.
  • While visual media is not technically part of the word count, it’s an aspect of length,, because it takes time to consume.
  • Some topics don’t need 3,000 words to be covered adequately.
  • If you’re blogging multiple times a week, you can afford shorter, engagement-driven posts.

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

What’s more, Gordon says, if your name is Seth Godin (to whose book, The Dip, I referred in Tuesday’s blog post), all bets are off (Godin’s posts, God bless him, are often 75-500 words long).

“Opinions have always differed on the optimal size for a blog post,” I wrote just a little over a year ago. Having composed blog posts (as both a Say It For You ghost writer and under my own name) now numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to decide on the best length for each post.

From Chip and Dan Heath’s book The Power of Moments, I learned about a phenomenon called “duration neglect”. The basic concept is that when people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length, rating it based on the best or worst moment in that experience. I suspect that principle holds true when readers are experiencing a blog post. They are going to remember only two things – the best part and the ending.

The long-form/short-form debate will no doubt continue for decades to come, but my own instinct is to stick to a central idea for each blog post, then “say it until it’s said”. Along the “write less” theme, Seth Godin once offered a piece on the length of business meetings, in which he observed “Understand that not all problems are the same, so why are your meetings?”

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