That’s you, remember?
Since the Holiday Season is upon us, and we all have better things to do than read blogs, I thought I would go ahead and shut things down for the year. And what better way to go out than with a recap of what you found notable in 2006?
What makes a blog influential?
Influence is often attributed to traffic and readership levels. But in reality, those are actually benefits that are symptomatic of something that precedes them.
How do we get people to pay attention to what we say in the first place?
Ultimately, a blog catches on just like any other idea spreads—it must somehow speak to people in a way that they want to hear. Your posts must fill a human need, and that will most often be at an emotional level, no matter how practical we think our subject matter is.
What’s the secret to finding the remarkable reader benefit that leads to sales, publicity, links or attention?
It’s keying in on the right element of the story.
Recently, blog network b5 Media accepted venture capital in the amount of $2 million to further grow their business.
Certainly, a collection of blogs as a real business is interesting, especially to those outside of the blogosphere.
And a business built around a collection of blogs landing $2 million bucks is certainly interesting as well.
But what’s the angle that’s hooking the mainstream media? Let’s take a listen to b5 Media partner Darren Rowse on that:
I had interviews this week with two journalists about b5media and it was interesting to see that in both cases the story that they latched onto was that we’d built a company without having met each other.
Being interesting is just the baseline requirement.
The real hook is the part that’s fascinating.
Here’s ace copywriter John Carlton’s take on fishing for hooks.
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Stories sell, there’s no doubt about it.
But they don’t sell because they tell people what to do.
It’s what a story allows people to tell themselves that makes it a powerful selling tool.
Sometimes people do believe what you tell them.
But people rarely ever doubt what they conclude.
Take the novel and film Fight Club for instance.
I love movies, and movies are what led me into copywriting and entrepreneurship.
Better explain that one, huh?
Back in 1997 when I bolted from the big law firm and moved down to Austin, my plan was to become a screenwriter. Feast or famine, damn the consequences, starving artist type stuff.
Well, instead of writing screenplays, I got caught up in the Web 1.0 boom, and read a lot of books about the film industry in my downtime.
Turns out, being a screenwriter in Hollywood ranks somewhere below “best boy” and “key grip” when it comes to actual influence. Not exactly inspiring.
The only way to have true influence in the film world as a writer is if you are also the director and/or producer. That fact made me realize that I am really an entrepreneur, not a pure writer.
And being an entrepreneur is so much like being a Hollywood writer / director / producer, except you operate in the real world. But often the writing part gets neglected, and that ultimately hurts the business.
I’m not only talking about writing in the blogging / online marketing sense. Anyone starting a business is primarily responsible for both the big story and the day-to-day tales, in one way or another. Online, that responsibility is amplified by the benefits that great storytellers enjoy in the social media environment.
Some people think it’s all about “how you say it.”
Others think it’s all about how many times a week you post.
Both groups are wrong.
What you say matters more than how you say it or how many times.
Before you’ll succeed with a business blog, you need to truly understand a simple 9-word sentence offered by old-school copywriting genius Rosser Reeves (as channeled by Gary Bencivenga):
A gifted product is mightier than a gifted pen.
Your “product” is what you offer, whether goods or services, and the overall substance of that offer. Whether you want to call it your USP or your big story, it still needs to be solidly in place before you’ll ever have a truly effective business blog.
You can’t tell compelling small stories with your posts if your big story sucks.
Let’s look at it another way.
If I give you a hand-scrawled note riddled with typos and grammatical errors that tells you that the other side of the paper contains the winning lotto numbers, and this is the ticket, you’re highly receptive to that message, right?
But the most dazzling sales pitch ever about the latest fall line for women at Neiman Marcus will never matter to me one bit.
If you’re about to start a business blog (or if your current one is going nowhere), stop, take a step back, and ask yourself this:
Why should anyone care about what I’m blogging about?
That’s another 9-word sentence that makes it perfectly clear that painting a cow purple is not the same as owning a purple cow.
What you say will determine if you can sell at all.
How you say it will determine how much you can sell.
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