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Arming Your Blog With the 4 A’s

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“Use the four A’s – Acronym, Analogy, Anecdote, Alliteration – to catch the reporter’s ear and help the reader remember what you said,” Janet Falk of Falk Communications and Research advises business professionals going to a conference.

Acronyms
While Sharif Khan, writing in the American Marketing Association’s Business Writing Tips for Professionals thinks readers might find company acronyms annoying, at Say It For You, our content writers use acronyms to add variety, presenting information to readers in a different way.

Analogies
Matching our writing to our intended audience is part of the challenge we business blog content writers face. Using an analogy to link an unfamiliar concept to something that is familiar can help the reader better comprehend what we’re trying to say. For example, blogging can be compared to a parhelion (an atmospheric optical illusion consisting of halos of light around the sun, showcasing rather than obliterating the shine). Approaching the same topic in different ways can help your content appeal to different audiences, still highlighting the central message.

Anecdotes
Stay alert for anecdotes about customers, employees, or friends who are doing interesting things or overcoming obstacles. Real-people stories of you, your people, and the people you serve are always a good idea in your business blog. Anecdotes and examples lend variety to the blog, even though the anecdotes are being used to reinforce the same few core ideas.

To demonstrate that you understand the problems the online searcher is dealing with, it can be highly effective to relate how you personally went through the same failure stages. Next best to the business owner or professional relating an “I” experience which drives their passion, is anecdotes and testimonials from employees, customers, or vendors..

Alliteration
Using alliteration (consonant repetition) and assonance (vowel repetition) in blog titles has the effect of making those titles more “catchy”. In a sense, readers’ are both seeing the repetition and “hearing it”. Making a subtle but strong impact on readers is is precisely the focus of our content work at Say It For You is all about.

Content writers, try arming your blog posts with the 4 A’s!

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Boxing Day For Bloggers

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Day after Christmas is when Boxing Day is observed in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, a time for retail sales, special sporting events and for making gifts to the poor. In a way, though,  for business people, today, the day after New Year’s, is our “Boxing Day”, our first best chance to put all those resolutions into practice….

Our big challenge
As content writers, our big challenge moving forward is overcoming “content shock”, which, as readable.com explains, is “the experience of being desensitized to perfectly good content by the sheer volume of texts being thrown our way every day due to technological advancement”. The secret is to make content accessible, written in a way that is easy to understand, the Readable authors advise.

Keeping it conversational
Formality may be appropriate for whitepapers, but for blogs, an informal style is preferred. At Say It For You, I stress first person business blog writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the business owner, practitioner, or the team standing ready to serve customers. Still, all content writing in blogs is actually “second person” in that every piece of information offered has to be about the readers. I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”.

Keeping it readable
According to Readable.com, the golden rules for readability are:

  • Write at the correct reading level.(An eighth-grade reading level is recommended for most blogs. Web FX cautions).
  • Shorten your sentences. (Short sentences have “pow!”, and, particularly in titles, can be easily shared on social media.)
  • Reduce the number of long words. (Blog readers are scanners, and their eyes will focus on the most important words, the ones relating most directly to their search.)
  • Scrub your copy of jargon and acronyms. (While jargon is admittedly a handle-with-care writing technique, I believe it’s important to add lesser known bits of information, giving readers a feeling of being “in the know”.)
  • Don’t overuse adverbs.(The shorter and more direct a statement, the more impact it will have.)

Today,  the 2024″blog content writers “Boxing Day”, is the first day we have to put all these writing tips and New Year’s business-building resolutions into action….

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Speaking Their Language in Content Marketing

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“I stepped up to the deli counter and gave my order: “Eight ounces of turkey breast, please.” “We don’t sell by the ounce, only by the pound,” the clerk informed me. “So, can I get half a pound of turkey breast?”  “Sure!” (from Reader’s Digest Dec./Jan issue’s “All in a Day’s Work”)

 “In order to write an effective sales page, it’s absolutely critical to speak the language of your target market,” Joey van Kuilenburg writes in Linkedin. Drafting a list of everything you know about the people you want to reach and constructing a profile, is his advice to content marketers. Pay attention to the terminology they use, van Kuilenburg adds, including phrases and word choices. (By joining social media groups in which they are participating, asking questions, and carrying on conversations with followers, you can get a feel for their ways of expressing themselves.) “Using terms, words, phrases and acronyms that your audience themselves use, will result in your audience feeling connected and included in the conversation,” BrainyGirl Kim Garnett says.

Your own language, meanwhile, can help audience members truly understand and imagine what you are saying, the University of Wisconsin tells students.

As content writers, we know at Say It For You, before we can position any client within the marketplace, we absolutely must study the surroundings of that client’s target audience. Planning content involves thinking about how “they” (those readers, not the average readers) are likely to react or feel about any chosen approach to the subject at hand.

As content marketers, our message to the business owner and practitioner clients who hire us is this:

Your business or practice can’t be all things to all people. Everything about your blog should be tailor-made for your ideal customer – the words we use, how technical we get, how sophisticated the approach to a subject, the title of each blog entry – all must focus on what together we learn about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions. – Only secondarily is it important to discuss how wonderful you and your staff are at satisfying those needs and preferences.

Helping our clients define their audience is the first step in the process. Are they more likely to ask for a pound or for eight ounces of that turkey breast? 

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Content to Win Search, Not the Lottery

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“There’s no shaking it. Your chances of winning the lottery are extremely slim.” The Associated Press patiently explained after the Mega Millions jackpot had climbed to more than a billion dollars, the largest in U.S. lottery history.” (Since the article was published, someone in Florida did, in fact, win the jackpot.)

There’s a long list of rare events that are more likely than winning the lottery, the AP author explains, including the 1 in 15,000 odds of being struck by lightning once in your lifetime . In fact, it’s about four times as likely that you die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery! (Depressing facts to all of us ever-hopeful lottery ticket buyers, to be sure.) Still, the article itself holds a valuable content writing lesson, which is that one very important function served by a blog is putting things into perspective.

When you think about it, 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 function of the blog content to give readers a deeper perspective with which to process the information offered.. For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?” The facts need to be translated into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action.

Blogging helps you build authority in your industry, WP Beginner explains. “It is harder to prove your expertise and authority on a subject if all you have is a five-page website selling your products/services. Adding a blog allows you to regularly publish content on topics related to your industry. This helps you establish authority and win users’ trust.

As content writers, we understand that online readers have access to more technically detailed sources than our blog posts.  Our job, though, is to help those readers (and that includes B&B prospects of our marketing blogs) make sense out of the ocean of available information.

In blogging for business, we’re trying to “win search” and win hearts, not overcome enormous odds and win the lottery. But to truly overcome the still substantial odds against getting noticed, content writers must focus on putting avalanches of information into focused perspective.

 

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Blog to Bring it Home

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One in five media journalists lives in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C., the New York Times reports. “This is a huge loss for regional journalism as local stories—what’s happening in our own communities, towns, and regions, is arguably the most important for our everyday lives,” Alison Hill mourns in Writer’s Digest. 

“One of the most common – and most effective – ways to get consistent hits on your blog is to tie your content to current events,” Ray Access suggests. “If you’re writing about food poisoning, for example, tie that in with the latest headlines about cruise line food poisoning outbreak,” The practical suggestion Ray Access offers to content writers is to get in the habit of scanning headlines of a daily news website, using “newsworthy keywords to get a search engine’s attention”..

When it comes to engaging readers’ attention, at Say It for You, we take the Ray Access general concept a step further, recommending tying blog content, wherever possible to local events and issues.

(Communication policy scholar Christopher Ali explains that “localism” (can be spatial, based on geographic location, or based on shared interests. While many of these Say It for You blog posts have been focused on the importance of understanding your “community” in the sense of your target audience – wherever they may be located – today I want to focus on the home town meaning of “local”.)

Getting personal is a huge element in the success of content marketing. A huge part of engaging readers is reflecting and even directly alluding to current happenings and concerns in the local community. What’s more, people tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who give back to the local community and who are actively participating in home town events.

The more focused a blog is on connecting with a narrowly defined target audience, the more successful it will be in converting prospects to clients and customers. “Leverage your community, Susan Solovic of Constant Contact advises. Blog marketing, we teach newbie content creators, is really nothing more than “meeting” strangers and helping to turn those strangers into friends.  Blogging really is all about community!

Blog to bring it “home”!

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