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Do-You-Know and Can-You-Guess Blog Marketing

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“Do You Know Who Invented These Life-Saving Vaccines?” the editors of Mental Floss Magazine ask readers. (Who created the rabies vaccine?) “How Much Do You Know About Black Cats?” (Are there more male than female black cats?) “How Much Do You Know About Jeopardy? (How many clues are written for each session?)”Can You Guess the Gadgets Star Trek Invented?” (TiVo was not.) (“Can You Define These Colonial-Era Slang Words and Phrases?” (What does it mean to describe something as macaroni?)

“Interactive content creates a two-way dialogue between two parties, seopresser.com explains. Quizzes grow your list in several ways, Chelsea of herpaperroute.com adds, because:

  1. In order for them to see their results, they must sign up to your list.
  2. Readers will be segmented depending on what answers they click on.

At Say It For You, we’ve found, even if readers are not required to sign up for your list, quizzes are a very good strategy in blog marketing. Blog readers tend to be curious creatures and “self-tests” tend to engage and help readers relate in a more personal way to information presented in a blog.

Another aspect of quizzes is that they offer variety. Since one of the biggest challenges in blogging for business over long periods of time is keeping the content fresh, quizzes help vary the menu.

To me as a content writer, there are three even more important aspects to quizzes in blog posts:

  1. People are looking to their advisors for more than just information; they need perspective. In other words, quiz questions and answers can to offer a different perspective on fact sets readers have forgotten.
  2. When readers strain to remember something and then find the answer, they tend to repeat that fact set in their conversations with others.
  3. Our curiosity is most intense when we’re testing our own knowledge, making tests, games, and quizzes hard to resist.

All in all, “Do-You-Know?” and “Can-You-Guess?” are great tactics for blog marketing.

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In Sustained Blog Marketing, Look for the Overlap

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James Marshall Reilly likes to think of the speaking industry as falling into a number of different buckets, including:

  • distinguished celebrity
  • leadership
  • health
  • the economy
  • gender
  • science
  • arts
  • education
  • inspiration
  • authors
  • technology
  • spirituality
  • futurism
  • sports

The key, Reilly tells speakers looking for engagements, is to start thinking about where your topic will fit, understanding that there will likely be overlap.

At Say It For You, we think overlap is an enormous advantage in blog marketing.

1. Years ago, I remember reading a quote from career coach Nancy Ancowitz. “Effective self-promoting,” she taught, “is finding the overlap between what you have and what your audience wants.” Of course, blogging is the essence of self-promotion, allowing business owners and professional practitioners to find the overlap between what they do and what searchers want.

2. Another way to understand and use overlap in blog marketing has to do with keeping on keeping on. Blogging is a perfect example of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. It’s the week-after-week, month-after-month work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing blog posts that gets many down. Just as Reilly explains to speakers that they can “tweak” their material so that their content is tied to some of the popular topics audiences are interested in hearing about, blog content writers can use precisely the same strategy.

You’re creating content to market bedroom furniture. You can relate that topic to:

  • health – lighting, clean-ability, and air quality in a bedroom
  • arts – appropriate artwork to display in the bedroom
  • technology – thread counts in bed linen
  • science – antimicrobial treatment of linens
  • gender – studies proving that men and women react differently to smell, sound, and color
  • celebrities – Elton John photographed amidst fur blankets in his bedroom on a private plane

For sustained blog marketing, look for the overlap!

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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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Easy Martha Stewart-Inspired Updates for Blog Content

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“To invigorate the look of old china on your table,” Martha Stewart advises on the “Easy Updates” page of her latest Living magazine issue, “identify common shapes and details to weave through the new elements.” Stewart suggests three specific updating techniques:

  1. Add new patterns.
  2. Play up one color.
  3. Mix mod materials.

Along with antique tableware, blog content can benefit from updating, as we teach at Say It For You, and each of Martha’s tips can serve as a guide for giving a bygone blog post a freshening-up. After all, as Richard Harding Davis so aptly remarked, “The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way, or an old thing in an old way.”

Add New Patterns
“Stick to the colors of your old china to keep the table cohesive, but mix in a serving piece with another motif that compliments it.” In composing blog content, it’s a good idea to repeat themes already covered in former posts, but the trick is to change the pattern by a) adding new information and b) using a different format – listicle, Q&A, comparison, etc.

 

Play Up One Color
“Choose a shade from your pattern that you want to highlight, and let it fly in accent pieces like linens or glasses.” In a blog post or series, link new information to themes you’ve emphasized in former posts, “coloring” new concepts or information by referring to concepts you’ve introduced months or even years ago. As Martha Stewart suggests, the old and new are unified through “color”.

 

Mix Mod Materials
“Elevate older porcelain with glass, wood, metal, or ceramic items that add texture and dimension to your table,” Finding word combinations that resonate with blog readers is a big part of the challenge involved in blog content writing. Since there is a definite generational factor involved in language, knowing your target audience is key. In different posts, therefore, you can alternate a friendly, even humorous tone with a professional, authoritative one.

 

In table settings or in blog content writing, invigorate the look of the old “china” with new patterns and colors.

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Break Full Articles Apart in Blogging for Business

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When it comes to blogging, we at Say It For You firmly believe in the Power of One:

  • One message
  • One outcome
  • One audience
  • One writer
  • One client

    A very well-written article that appeared recently in the Indianapolis Business Journal reinforced for me an important difference between nonfiction articles and blog posts, with each post having a razor-sharp focus on just one idea or concept, one aspect of a business or practice. With apologies to George Lesmeister, CEO and founder of LGC Hospitality, I’m going to use his article to illustrate how a single topic article can provide the fodder for several very focused, very effective blog posts.

The overall premise of the Lesmeister piece is that a large pool of job candidates till now be actively seeking employment, those job seekers are going to be choosy. The author offers several pieces of advice to employers about ways to provide a good hiring experience for candidates.

Statistics:
“While Indiana’s unemployment rate spiked to 17% during the pandemic, it’s now 3.9%). Our sector (Lessmeister’s staffing firm specializes in the hospitality industry) lost the largest number of jobs.” What’s more, the author adds, “A May estimate shows some 116,000 job openings in Indiana.”

In teaching business owners and professional practitioners how to create content for blog posts, I stress the power of using statistics in blogs:

  • Statistics can serve as myth-busters, dispelling false impressions people may have regarding your industry.
  • Statistics grab visitors’ attention.
  • Statistics can be used demonstrate the extent of a problem opening the door for your to show how you help solve that very type of problem.

My point: This one portion of Lesmeister’s article (the unemployment statistics) can constitute an entire blog post.

Best practices:
The author’s admonition that “Respect is a two-way street” would make for an engaging blog post title. Workers see help-wanted signs, go inside to apply, fill out an application, and never hear back, Lessmeister laments. Certainly an entire blog post might focus on best practices within your industry or profession.

One thing I suggest stressing in blog posts is best business practices.  While a goal of any marketing blog is to help your business or practice “get found”, once that’s happened, the goal changes to helping online readers appreciate the specific ways you choose to run your enterprise.

  • Specific solutions and advice
    “Even if a job candidate does not have experience in one particular area, evaluate the soft skills during the interview process. …Can the applicant quickly be trained to make an impact?”

    Solve a problem, own the customer, sales trainers like to say. That’s because people are online searching for answers to their problems or solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  If your business has been consistently posting content, those people are going to find you, because your posts provide the solutions they need. Providing a powerful online “voice” to solutions to searchers’ problems is the essence of content writers’ work!

    Out of just this one article might come many different, powerful blog posts:

  • busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing
  • offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service
  • describing an unusual application for that product
  • describing one common problem their service helps solve
  • updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession
  • offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Break full articles (your own or others’) apart for blogging for business!

 

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