Blogging for Techies - Tell them the best bit.
Don’t leave your best bit of your story til the end. Because we’re taught to start with an introduction and end with a conclusion, we often leave the most important info til last. It’s buried. We think we’re leading up to a brilliant denouement, but actually our reader has lost interest before they get there.
So how can we bring it out? You probably already do this socially. Imagine your readers are standing outside the office local, pint in hand. What are you going to tell your workmates when you turn up? Why do they want to hear it? This is probably your best bit.
It’s likely that your best bit will be the success. If you’ve got a ‘taa-dah!’ statistic or result that you’re building up to, this will be it.
In a business-to-business tech blog things to look for are:
A solid result
Like time or money saved, productivity improved.
‘We reduced service costs by 90%’
or
‘Our AI model is 99,98% effective’. (We think this is the best bit of our AI story).
A man-bites-dog opinion
The media adage is that if a dog bites a man, that’s not a news story. But if a man bites a dog, that could be. Do you have an interesting opinion (that you can support)? In the age of fake news and unnecessary provocation, there’s no need to invent controversy, but you could turn your idea around. Like this;
‘How Artificial Intelligence will work in your business’
becomes
‘Why Artificial Intelligence won’t work in many businesses’
An unusual example
Whilst you don’t want to be totally out there, an unusual example helps to capture the reader’s attention early.
‘We created an Artificial Intelligence model for a marijuana farm’.
You may not be able to find this immediately, but it’s in there. It’s the ‘we did X’ sentence, the part the reader has come for. The news they’ll tell their mates. Well, maybe their colleagues. It’s the information they didn’t know before and that encourages them to read on.
A brief note on proof here. We saved $5m may be a lot of money, or not much at all, depending on the company. Keep your best bit to within the bounds of sanity, or use a percentage to make it more relevant. Your reader wants something that works for them, not an outlandish result.
Finding the best bit of your story can sometimes take a bit of thinking before you write. If you can’t find it after a few goes, you need to think about the point of your blog. If you don’t know, push that question back to Marketing.
Have you got questions about this?
Would you like to try the ideas out in a session just for your team?
Word Savvy runs blog sessions for techies. We work on your actual blog in the session, so you come out with a good first draft.
We’ll show you how to:
• Think about your reader
• Structure your thoughts
• Work out your best bit
• Use proof effectively
• Edit to sound expert
Once we’re done you’ll have content you can use with prospects; post it on your website, put excerpts on LinkedIn, mention it down the pub.
