Approaching “the Big Reveal” – from Front or Back?

February 25, 2025/0 Comments/in 3 kinds of proof to offer in blogs, content marketing, content writing/by Rhoda Israelov

To create a compelling story line in a novel, one with maximum impact, Writer’s Digest editor Tiffany Yates Martin explains, you need to understand when and how to reveal crucial information to readers. On the one hand, it’s important to give readers enough information to feel invested, but you have to keep back enough to keep them “hooked”.

There’s a case for having the information revealed sooner: readers need enough information to give them a reason to care. Vague hints at a “dark secret” can feel manipulative, Martin admits. What’s more, “sometimes you gain more narrative mileage by spilling the beans sooner, so readers see the … impact of the secret on the characters and story.”

Nathan Ellering of coschedule.com translates this very piece of advice for creators of content marketing articles. The pro tip he offers is this: “Write your blog title before you write your blog post. This practice will help you define the value proposition so you can connect it into the blog post, which guarantees your blog title will deliver on its promise.”

At Say It For You, one compromise I’ve discovered is often used by book authors is the “Huh?” and “Oh!” title. The “Huh” title startles and arouses curiosity; the “Oh!”subtitle clarifies what the focus of the book will be. For example, the book title Notes from Scrooge entices, while the subtitle Why Gift Giving is a Lousy way to Demonstrate Love – At Least According to Economist reveals the financial counseling nature of the book.

In content marketing, the “reveal” may take the form of a personal story that showcases the unique slant of the business owner or practitioner, even describing the biggest mistake made in starting that business or practice and what was learned from that mistake. Precisely because it is so very human to act inconsistently, revealing seemingly out-of-character aspects of the people involved in the business or practice is a way to foster empathy and engagement.

Still, content marketing cannot succeed if our messages don’t break through the clutter and deal with online readers’ very short attention span. “You’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it,” Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book Made to Stick.

Speaking the Silent Language Through Content

February 20, 2025/0 Comments/in the Say It For You blog/by Rhoda Israelov

“An important and often overlooked aspect of culture is that, despite its subliminal nature, people are effectively hardwired to recognize and respond to it instinctively. It acts as a silent language.” For us content marketers, that provocative statement, part of a fascinating article in the Winter 2024 special issue of Harvard Business Review, raises a number of issues.

In the book The Silent Language, Edward T. Hall discusses the impact of non-verbal communication, which includes a speaker’s gestures, facial expressions, posture, and personal distance. Even when communicating with fellow Americans, Andrea Jones explains, your body language can account for 55% of the message you’re communicating, with 38% of the impact coming from your tone and voice.

Whether we want to admit it or not, communication is strategic, Tim Sullivan says.. ”Any salesperson worth his or her salt knows this intuitively. It’s all about getting others to buy what you’re selling, whether it’s a widget, an analysis of a situation, a proposal, or just an offer of friendship. In all cases, it’s about releasing a desired response.”

In her guest blog post (published on our Say It For You blog just a year ago), Candace Sigmon of At Home Helper tells how important it is to know your target audience’s values, interests, and lifestyle in order to understand how and why they buy.

In content marketing, we don’t have tone of voice, facial expressions, or gestures, but we can use cultural allusions, referring to a fairy tale, the Bible, a TV character, or an expression to put ourselves on the same page as the readers – a sort of “You know what I mean!”

By knowing your target audience , you can speak their silent language through your content.

Be a SME, Not a Salad

February 4, 2025/0 Comments/in content marketing, content writing, CTAs in blogging/by Rhoda Israelov

Both of this week’s Say It For You blog posts represent my reaction to Ryan Law’s very provocative piece “The Four Forces of Bad Content”. The first big negative “tell” of poor quality content, Law asserts, is a “bait-and-switch” approach, in which product Calls to Action are ‘smuggled” into an ostensibly informational article….

The Think eBiz Blog agrees with Law’s point about CTAs. “The blog should not be sales oriented… Provide good useful information and establish trust and credibility – sales will follow.” In this Say It For You blog, I keep coming back to the idea that business writing needs to be conversational and informational, not sales-y. Readers understand you’re writing for business purposes. Ironically, 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, it will defeat your purpose as a content marketer – to punctuate the text with a “salad” of Calls to Action – either overt or disguised.

According to About.Com, “a Subject Matter Expert is an individual who understands a business process or area well enough to answer questions from people in other groups who are trying to help.” Actually, the term SME (pronounced “smee”) is not new to me.(When I was a developmental editor for Pearson Education, the course writers would turn to the SMEs for specialized knowledge to put into student textbooks.) At Say It For You, “SME development” is all about presenting our business owner and professional practitioner clients as experts in their respective fields, a way of translating the bad advertising “noise” to which Ryan Law refers into well-considered courses of action for readers.

The “salad” concept, on the other hand, need not be considered a “force for bad”. “Cutting” or “chunking”, breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information is a very good teaching technique, as e-learning coach Connie Malamed explains. Still, Ryan Law is absolutely correct in that a “salad” garnished with poorly disguised CTA s represents a bait-and-switch approach doomed to fail.

In their fact-finding mission, online readers have arrived at a particular site, looking specifically for information about what that business or that practitioner does and knows about. The tone of the blog content should assume that with complete information, readers will translate that information into action.

Plainspoken Content Marketing

January 30, 2025/0 Comments/in B2B blog marketing, being specific in business blogs, blog readers/by Rhoda Israelov

I always enjoy Richard Lederer’s columns in the Mensa Bulletin; the author’s “Stamp Out Fadspeak satire in the January 2025 issue was particularly relevant to content marketing. English parlance is in a “cringeworthy state”, Lederer complains, all because of “fadspeak”, consisting of clichés and way-overused terminology. “Work with me on this,” Lederer mimes. “I’ve been around the block…I’m not the elephant in the room or the 800-pound gorilla.” Lederer ends his rant with “Now that I’ve been able to tell it like it is in real time, I’m outta here.”

When writing web content, the Bureau of Internet Accessibility advises, the best option is to avoid jargon. If you’re using a professional term, is it giving your audience essential information, or are you using it to make your content sound more important? Plain language is usually the best tool for getting your message across.

“At one time, the cliché you’re using was likely a creative and precise way to make the point, but no more,” says Megan Krause of clearvoice.com, listing 35 of the most overused phrases in content marketing, including “low-hanging fruit”, “circling back”, “in a nutshell”, and “at the end of the day”. Ask yourself what you’re really trying to say and then say it with dynamic, decisive language, Krause recommends.

But what about using jargon in blog writing for business? In general, jargon is a “handle-with-care” writing technique, because readers are impatient to find the information they need without any navigational or terminology hassle. On the other hand, we realize at Say It For You, industry or profession-unique terminology can be used as a way of establishing common ground with a select audience of readers, increasing their sense of being part of a group sharing specialized knowledge.

Marketing clichés can be so overused that you’d be hard pressed to know what company is offering to “take you to the next level”, Brooke Sellas writes in BSquaredMedia. Instead of touting how “efficient” or “effective” your product or service is, she advises, “get real” with case studies, testimonials, or other outcomes or results. Stop saying you’ll “go the extra mile” or “above and beyond”, which just makes you sound like every other provider on earth. Instead of presenting your company as “outside the box; say something that actually describes how you’re different.

“Business cliché’s were fresh and meaningful once upon a time,” concedes Dave Baker of Super Copy Editors, “but their best days are long behind them.”

As content marketers, we often find industry terminology to be useful and informative. Cliches, in contrast, should be “outta here”.

Spicing Up Content Using Word Story Tidbits

January 23, 2025/0 Comments/in content marketing, content writing, framing in blogs/by Rhoda Israelov

Just as spices can be used to enhance a standard meat-and-potatoes meal, at Say It For You, we’re always on the alert for ways to “spice up” content marketing text. Explaining the origin of unusual words and expressions can enhance content, making the information which providers of goods and services “serve up” to their readers a tad “tastier”.

“Ghost words”:

Some words that appear in the dictionary actually originated from typos or linguistic errors, and marketers can describe these happy mistakes as part of their web page or blog post content. Apparel vendors, for example can share with their readers the tidbit Angela Tung explains in Mental Floss: the word “tweed” may have come from a misuse of the Scottish word tweel, which was how the Scots pronounced “twill” (woven fabric).

Content marketers for tutoring or for academics programs might want to explain the mistake that resulted in the word “syllabus” – Roman philosopher Cicero wrote about sittybas, referring to the label on a papyrus roll. Somewhere along the line, this was misprinted as syllabus.

Expressive expressions:

“All that and a bag of chips”, an expression from the 90s (meaning that something is especially impressive or attractive), first appeared in a 1994 issue of People magazine, WordSmarts explains. Grocers, fast food restaurants and snack food companies might use this tidbit in their marketing materials. A second expression that food providers might want to include is “spill the beans”. In the ancient Greek process of voting, putting a white bean in the jar meant “yes”; black or brown ones signified “no”. If someone spilled the beans, Melanie Curtin writes in Inc., the election results would be revealed.

Sales trainers and networking advisors might explain the origin of the expression “break the ice”. Before road transportation was developed, ships were the means of trade. When ships got stuck during the winter, small ships would be sent to clear a path by breaking up the ice, as Anais John explains in Grammarly.

Spice up your content marketing using some of these word history tidbits!

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