Blogging – The Value of Branding in an Online Community

Blogging is branding. Branding allows your audience to see your expertise through your own unique blogging personality. It also shows your business’ uniqueness in the market place and clearly demonstrates how you are different from your competitors. The value of blogging:

·         Builds a sense of community

·         Positions you or your company as informed about the community and their unique needs or perspective

·         Provides a great platform for introducing new ideas or material

·         Gets your name and contact information out there in yet another visible location

·         Provides a forum to present all that great content you had to cut from your book 

When customers become familiar and comfortable with a particular brand they gravitate toward it when in need of that good or service. By creating this helpful community in your blog, your company and your name become known for its value. People buy from those whom they know, recognize, and make an emotional connection.

Sticky Secrets of Blog Headlines and Blog Titles

Blog titles, blog headlines, and blog sub-headlines need to be ”sticky” for SEO spiders to crawl in and out of your work and catalog the content. Becoming a master of stickiness is much like become a master of yoga…you better be ready to put in the effort, study, and practice or you won’t make the cut!  

Creating sticky titles and headlines takes a little bit of familiarity with the key words and ideas that are popular search terms in your niche on the web. This is not really a closely guarded secret. With a little research in Google and other Search Engines you will find what works best for driving traffic to your blog and expanding your audience.

Sticky Headlines:

1.   Incites interest – Titles that are provocative or controversial stimulate the reader’s interest. They act to inflame the emotions of the reader who feels compelled to stay and read.
2.   Questions and Queries – Headlines that ask questions and raise uncertainty keep the reader hooked.  They will continue to read until resolution is achieved. These readers want answers and will hang around as long as they think the writer is working toward one.
3.  Benefits – Readers want to know that they will gain some kernel of information or knowledge from your work. They will hang around as long as there is something in it for them that promotes, assists, or gives them an advantage in their world. 
4.  Power Words – Certain types of words appeal to readers who are looking for a bargain, a particular benefit, or are trying to solve a problem. Words like ‘benefits,’ ‘rewards,’ ‘secret’ and ‘free’ all make readers pause. If you reveal a secret or provide breaking news you will capture reader attention.

Accurate, clear and concise titles that truly relate to your main topic are crucial to the success of your individual blog entries. Think of each headline as a definition of your article. If you stick to that and use keywords that define your article’s content you will attract readers and search engines.

Longer titles are often more persuasive giving readers the extra “hook” that gets them to stick around and read the content. Make sure the title is not so long that the keywords are lost on the reader. People scan headlines they don’t really read them carefully. Make the title jump out and grab the reader, holding their interest.   

Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction.

7 Blogging Rules to Live By

1. Subject – Determine your primary theme for each entry and stay on it! Never stray or your readers will jump ship like rats leaping off the Titanic. If you are not clear on the topic discussed in a particular entry for your blog, how do you expect your readers to follow along? A simple thesis statement will help you stay focused on the theme.  
2. Informs the Reader – Chatty news that wastes a reader’s time is annoying and serves no purpose. Have something of merit to say.  It does not have to be earth shattering but it should make them think.
3. Originality - If the reader does not feel that they walk away with a new piece of information or a new perspective they probably won’t come back to visit your blog again. Offer an innovative or creative view that provides the reader with that “aha” moment.
4. Content – Clarity and simplicity make your content readable and “sticky”. Stickiness is important if you want to hook a reader and keep them engaged with your material. Too much information, too much detail, and too many meaningless adjectives make the content difficult to follow. Avoid jargon, techie terms, and extra adverbs (“ly” words) that add nothing to your content. Create compact segments of content that have sub-headings that act like directions to the key parts of your blog. Spell check and proof read all entries before and after they are ‘live’. You can and should go back in to edit if there are errors.
5. Headlines and Keywords – Be bold and daring and keyword rich in constructing headlines. Remove articles (a, an, the) and prepositions from your title. This makes it easy for search engines to pick up your latest entry and blast it out on the web. Readers search Google, Lycos, and Mozilla by keywords, not sentences. Keep your headlines short. If you have ten words or more in your headline, you have probably said too much.
6. Disciplined Blogging – Create a publishing schedule and stick to it. Perhaps you write a week or a month’s worth of blog entries in one sitting, you still have to faithfully log in and publish each entry. Put it on your day calendar right. If you schedule it in writing you are more likely to stick to your plan.
7. Blogging Rate – frequency and regularity of blogging submissions does count. Search engine spiders will visit and notice you and your site if there is change in your site. Blog regularly, blog often, and blog well.

 Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction. Shannon has over 17 years in the academic world teaching English composition to native and non-native speaking students.

Publish Regularly – Don’t Become Blogstipated

Publishing consistently is a huge commitment but does not have to eat up large chunks of your time. If you create a schedule and put it on your calendar you can carve out time to write and post 2-3 times a week. Some people write once a week. They create all their articles for the week in a single sitting and then jump on-line each day to upload articles separately.  

Finding Your Voice – Writing larger amounts at a single sitting will help you to find and establish your voice and the tone for your blog. Content that reflects the blog author’s personal experiences and “lessons learned” are more widely read then standard narratives.

What will you write about? How will you create a voice that readers will return to time and again? Statistically, blogs that relate on a personal level to readers are the ones that get the largest readership. Readers do not want to know about you and your business. They want to know about information and resources that help them in their business. Readers want to know about a problem you had and how you resolved it…not how you felt afterwards!

Writing Strategies

Provide your readers with:

• Stories of what you or a client or reader experienced that was a problem or a concern.  
• Examples of decisions and actions that made a change or improved a process.

 Your strategy for your blog should be to create a community that helps others or that provides a forum for readers. A reader focused blog encourages participation through shared experiences and suggested solutions. Encourage and foster that and your blog will take off and create an enthusiastic audience that sees you (the author) as an authority figure. Blogging can be a powerful author promotion and marketing tool.

About the Author: Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction. Shannon has over 17 years in the academic world teaching English composition to native and non-native speaking students.

Size (and Content) Does Matter…in a Blog

Blogging is a great way for authors, entrepreneurs, and speakers to generate an audience for your books/products/services.  People love blogs that present the writer’s personal perspective on a lesson  or experience.  Now that is not to infer that the article entry should be a boring rendition of how you baited a hook and caught a trophy fish last summer. That would make people run shrieking for cover.

Content – Authors and speakers who blog want to populate their blog with information and resources  that their readers will find helpful, beneficial, or interesting. Content in your blog should be stories about what you have experienced in a particular situation that resulted in decisions and actions. What did you do? How did you either get out of the pickle you were in or how did you improve your approach?

Size – How much do you say? How long should you make each paragraph? The general rule of thumb is to write for the short attention span of the modern reader. We are inundated with material to read and process each and every day. Keep it short and sweet. Ask a question, tell a brief and pointed story, and then provide an answer or pertinent point for the reader.  Less is more. If readers want to know more let them comment or go to your website and hire you!

Now get out there and practice! Find what works for you and your audience. Carve out your niche and start building your audience.