Financial bloggers, your writing skill isn’t everything

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Financial professionals who blog often wish they were better writers. Writing skill helps. But it’s not enough to make you stand out among the many financial planners and investment and wealth managers who blog. You also need to be distinctive.

In “Only One Person Could Write That,” novelist Jeff Lindsay reinforces this point. “Good writing…comes from saying what you mean in a way no one else can say it,” he says. It should express your personality.

In my opinion, a strong and distinctive personality is more of an asset than impeccable punctuation and grammar. It makes your writing come alive. It says, to quote Lindsay, “This is me and no one else.”

Readers will forgive some weaknesses in your writing if you provide value in a way that’s unique to you. Of course, if your writing makes it easy for your audience to grasp your message, that’s even better. If you’d like to boost your writing skill, consider taking my blogging class. It’s tailored to the needs of financial planners and investment and wealth managers.

White papers: Great training for your ghost blogger

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Busy financial advisors may seek ghost bloggers to write blog posts for them.

Photo: tomasrotger.com

As a ghost blogger for a registered investment advisor, I’ve stumbled on a great way for you to train your ghost blogger: Hire the writer to craft a white paper before she or he starts ghost-blogging.

Advantage: White paper immerses writer in your topic

White papers are usually rich in information. So one white paper provides the foundation for multiple blog posts.

I’m a big believer in recycling information, as I’ve said in “A top technique of financial advisors who blog successfully.” Your white paper readers may not even notice that you’re recycling, if your writer doesn’t simply cut-and-paste into your blog.

Another advantage: When I write a white paper, I learn about the client’s expertise, business, and how the client likes to interact with me. This means I can get up to speed quickly on the blog.

What to look for in your ghost blogger

Here are some factors to consider before you ask your white paper writer to become your ghost blogger.

1. Ability to generate blog post ideas

2. Compatibility with the way you like to work

3. Dependability

4. Mastery of a “voice” – a writing style and formality level that works for you and your audience

5. Understanding of your field

I put these five factors in alphabetical order. Your priorities may differ.

Warning for registered reps

If you’re a registered rep using a ghostwriter, you may need to disclose that. I discussed this in “Registered reps, it’s time to ‘fess up.”

Make your writing easier with my fill-in-the-blanks approach for structuring articles

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Smart financial professionals often struggle to convert their ideas into compelling prose, losing readers in the first paragraph.

Photo: Joe Mud

If this sounds like you, you can benefit from my fill-in-the-blanks approach to write your introductory paragraph and structure your article, blog post, or other writing.

Step 1: Identify three keys to your article

This approach depends on your identifying three pieces of information:

1. Your target audience

2. Their problem

3. The solution

Step 2: Write your fill-in-the-blanks intro

To craft a compelling introduction, take the key information from from Step 1 and drop it into the blanks highlighted in yellow in the illustration below.

In other words: Name of target audience struggle with brief description of problem. You can solve this problem with brief description of solution.

Does this structure seem familiar?

It should. I used it in the first paragraph of this blog post. Name of target audience: smart financial professionals. Brief description of problem: struggle to convert their ideas into compelling prose. Brief description of solution: my fill-in-the-blanks approach.

Introducing your topic this way quickly shows your audience that you’re speaking to them and their needs. Plus, they’ve got an incentive to continue reading because you have a solution for their problem.

Step 3: Flesh out the formula in the remainder of your article

You’ve set expectations in your introduction, so follow through in your article. If it’s a brief piece, such as a blog post, dive in to explaining the solution. If it’s a longer piece, such as a white paper, you can first describe your audience and its problem in more detail to show you grasp their challenges. This enhances your credibility.

Have you tried this approach?

I’d like to hear about your experience with this audience-problem-solution approach.

No batteries required: My favorite blogging technique

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At LBJ's Texas White House

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably struggled to find time to write. Me too.

Blogging on vacation

My favorite place to blog – and to develop a warehouse of posts – is on an unplugged vacation. In fact, I’m writing this post in black ink on a steno pad. My boxy printing and black ink are supposed to make my drafts easy for my typist to decipher. I use a spiral-bound steno pad, so I don’t lose pages.

Blogging offline

I like the slow speed and lack of distractions that come with blogging offline. When I type up a draft, it’s too easy to tinker with my text as I go. Writing in ink – even though I double-space to allow for essential corrections – limits my edits. This is a plus.

Writing offline helps with my focus. It’s just me, my ideas, my steno pad, and my pen. Tough luck for my tweeps. Any brilliant one-liners will be lost to posterity (or obscurity) as I home in on my blog.

Paper fans

I was surprised to learn that I’m not alone. I found more paper fans when I ran a Facebook poll on “Where’s your favorite place to blog?” I suspect that our numbers will decline as technological changes take hold.

P.S. – This was written on a flight to Atlanta, en route to Austin, Texas.

Pat Allen, a great resource for tracking asset managers’ social media

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Pat Allen of Rock the Boat Marketing works for me. Well, not literally. No money changes hands. But Pat’s tracking and analysis of investment management companies spares me from the need to perform these tasks myself.

Three things stand out for me about Pat’s online presence:

  1. News coverage
  2. Analysis
  3. Twitter lists

1. News coverage

As @RocktheBoatMKTG on Twitter, Pat tweets and retweets news, blog posts, and other information relevant to investment management marketers. Here’s an example.

As @AdvisorTweets, Pat highlights the social media activity of registered investment advisors, brokers, financial planners, and other financial professionals. Asset managers need to track these financial intermediaries who are an important source of financial product sales. NOTE: Pat has put AdvisorTweets up for sale.

2. Analysis

There’s a 140-character limit to how much analysis pat can squeeze into her tweets. So, for analysis I turn to her Rock the Boat Marketing and Advisor Tweets blogs.

3. Twitter lists

To figure out which investment managers have a Twitter presence, simply mosey over to Pat’s investmentmanagers list, which she updates frequently.

Check out these highlights of Pat’s online presence. You’ll probably find more that you enjoy.

Disclosure: Pat wrote a lovely testimonial for my latest e-book. However, this blog post was brewing long before that.

EARLY BIRD rate expires JUNE 22 for highly rated blogging class

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Time is running out to register at the Early Bird rate for “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A Self-Paced 5-Lesson Writing Class for Financial Advisors.” This rate, exclusively for my e-newsletter subscribers and clients, expires at 12 midnight on Wednesday, JUNE 22.You will find details about the class on the registration page.

Register for How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Teleclass for Financial Advisors in Once-a-week telephone conference call for 5 weeks, April 22-May 20 on Eventbrite
You will learn how to

  1. Generate and refine ideas for blog posts that will engage your readers
  2. Organize your thoughts before you write, so you can write more quickly and effectively
  3. Edit your writing, so it’s reader-friendly and appealing


Here’s what advisors say:

  • “The class is great! I’m really getting a huge amount of value — there really is a process to writing.”
  • “Loving the blog writing class I am taking with @susanweiner #FF”
  • “Susan’s coaching is a classic case of ‘under-promise, over-deliver.’ I highly recommend her as a writing coach or teacher. Her coaching has improved the quality of writing in my blog posts. My writing skills were very rusty when we started. Susan’s practical, insightful suggestions–along with her Blog Post Preparation Worksheet–have been an incredibly valuable resource.”

The class format has been tweaked to accommodate your summer vacation and busy periods. So don’t delay. Sign up TODAY for “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read”!

Register for How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Teleclass for Financial Advisors in Once-a-week telephone conference call for 5 weeks, April 22-May 20 on Eventbrite

Questions? Call me at 617-969-4509, email me at info@investmentwriting.com, or read the class FAQ.


Using LinkedIn to boost your blog: “LinkedIn Groups Help Blog Posts Soar”

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One of my best posts for bloggers seeking to grow their readership isn’t on my blog.

I wrote  “LinkedIn Groups Help Blog Posts Soar” as a guest post for the American Society of Business Publication Editors. It describes my accidental discovery of how sharing the right blog post with the right LinkedIn Group boosts your readership.

As I describe in the post, simply blasting your every blog post to every LinkedIn Group is not the recipe for success. In fact, you’re likely to irritate more people than you attract.

Instead,

  • Be selective.
  • Show genuine interest in the responses that LinkedIn Group members post.

I sometimes wonder how many LinkedIn Group posts I can make before I’m perceived as too self-promotional. I suspect that your answers differs from the next person’s. Also, the nature of the content probably influences your response.

If you’ve successfully used LinkedIn to promote your blog–or you have opinions about how bloggers use LinkedIn Groups–please share your story. I’d like to learn from you.

Participants in Brag About Your Blog Day–Financial Advisor Edition

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Some great bloggers have participated in Brag About Your Blog Day–Financial Advisor Edition on the Investment Writing Facebook page. In case you don’t visit Facebook, I’m listing them with links to their blogs.

Thank you, participants! By the way, if I skipped your blog–or if your link needs updating–please let me know.

The next Brag About Your Blog Day is scheduled for June 25. Please join this distinguished group of bloggers in participating!

Bloggers who offer financial advice

ACap Asset Management – Ara Oghoorian

Curtis Financial Planning – Cathy Curtis

The Blog of Chuck Rylant – Chuck Rylant

Planning for Your Life – Strategies for a Healthy and Wealthy Life – Dagmar Pollex

Frazer Rice – Frazer Rice

Getting Your Financial Ducks in a Row – Jim Blankenship

Benefits and Compensation With John Lowell – John Lowell

Upperline Financial – Jude Boudreaux

Wall Street Steward– Matthew G. Griffin

Couples Financial Planning and Coaching, LLC – Nathan Gehring

The Whole Investor – Paul Puckett

Markets, Life & MCFC – Richard Stott

The Wealthcare Revolution – Russ Thornton

YH&C Investment Blog – Yale Bock

Bloggers who offer services to financial advisors

FP Pad – Financial Planning Technology Blog – Bill Winterberg

The Advisor Upside – HNW Advisor eSuite

If you haven’t started your blog yet…

…perhaps it’s time for you to consider enrolling in “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read,” my virtual class tailored to financial advisors. You will receive personalized feedback from a seasoned financial writer–that’s me. As you turn in your homework, I will coach you through each step of the writing process. If you do all of the homework, you will finish the class with a polished blog post. Plus, you’ll have a process for creating future posts.

Guest post: “Blogging: why you want a better bounce rate”

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Website bounce rates puzzle me. So I read guest blogger Tom Mangan’s article with interest. It seems as if you should put the most important information up top, where people will see it. Hmm, that sounds similar to good writing, so it’s not surprising that I met Tom through a community of freelance writers.

Blogging: why you want a better bounce rate

By Tom Mangan

Ever ask yourself where people go when they end up at your website? For most of my blogging life, the answer seemed like “somewhere else, as fast as their fingers can click.” That’s because up until a couple months ago, I ignored a key statistic called “bounce rate” that was telling me my blog needed a healthy tweak.

credit: www.clker.com

Bounce rate is one of the key metrics available free from Google Analytics. It tells you how many people visit one page at your blog and bail, typically by clicking the “back” button.

Web traffic gurus know most people make snap decisions about whether your page has something they’re looking for. You’ve got maybe five to 10 seconds to reel them in.

Like way too many blogs, my hiking blog had a standard layout with a header identifying what my site was about, a headline revealing what an individual page is about, and social links like e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. People who came my site had no earthly idea it was brimming with five years worth of content painstakingly compiled to warm a hiker’s heart. Typically over three-quarters of my site’s users left almost immediately; my bounce rate was 75 to 80 percent, day in and day out.

Then I changed to a new WordPress theme that allowed me to install all these cool navigation menus across the top, identifying all the many categories inside my site:

Immediately my bounce rate plunged below 50 percent — roughly a 50 percent improvement.

The game changer: I gave my readers something other than the “Back” button to click in that crucial first five seconds. Now roughly my half of my visitors click a second time. They longer they’re there, the better my chances of making them a regular reader.

If you’re thinking, “well, I’ve got all those links in the rail down the side of my site,” guess what: hardly anybody ever clicks on those. After the top two or three on the list, most get ignored.

Interestingly (or frustratingly, depending on how you look it), the big boost in bounce numbers did not equate, as near as I could tell, to a huge increase in page views. Page views were up, but I had also added new site features, and it was springtime, prime hiking season, when my site’s traffic always rises anyway, so I can’t say conclusively that it helped my raw page count. Furthermore, it appeared that the click-through rate on my Google ads cratered about the same time I made this change, so giving people more click options could be double-edged sword if you earn a living from ad clicks.

But if you use your blog to demonstrate your expertise and connect with potential clients, you’re not fretting over the scraps that land in your Adsense account every couple months. You want to tell people who land at your blog — in that first crucial blink of an eye — that there’s gobs of content inside that they ought to check out if they don’t see anything they want right now. Mind you, site navigation is just one component of your bounce rate. These links explore it in much greater detail.

Tom Mangan is the creator of Two- Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog, and the founder of Verb Nerd Industries, his freelance editing, writing and blogging service.

Pictures can supercharge your message: A grasshopper story

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People absorb messages better when words are complemented by an image. This is a rule that any writer can exploit.

Take my dinner at Casa Oaxaca on a Mexican vacation. It was a multi-course tasting menu, so I could gloss over the chapulines in the taquitos de jicama con  chapulines, quesillo y cuitlacoche. But then the dish captured in the photo to your right arrived.

Do you see the little antennae and the translucent wings?

I could no longer ignore the inclusion of toasted grasshoppers (chapulines) in my food. Good thing they were tasty!

Properly used, photos and other images add oomph to your written communications.

Tips for finding images

1. Look for the noun.

Finding an image is easy when you write about a concrete topic like grasshoppers. Simply search your favorite photo bank for your thing–the noun you’re writing about. Check my earlier blog post for free or low-cost photo sources.

2. Illustrate the adjective, verb or emotion.

What can you do when your subject is more abstract than grasshoppers?

I follow the advice of writer Erik Sherman:

Remember that none of your stories are about abstract topics. They are always tangible to someone. It might help to stop thinking about the topic – the noun – and focus on what people are doing – the verb – or what they’re feeling – the adjective. In a given investment story, someone is either making or losing money. It often happens in some industry, like real estate, high tech, or commodities. There may be regulatory aspects, in which case think about images that could represent regulation, like police holding a hand up to tell traffic to stop, a judge, Congress. The more tangible and simple you get about the topic, the easier it will be to think of a fitting image.

Financial blogger Chuck Rylant cracked this problem in his “Controversy Over Disappearing CalPERS Police Officer Retirement Benefits” blog post, which is no longer live. He illustrated the adjective “disappearing” instead of the difficult-to-depict noun, “retirement benefits.” Plus, the sinking ship in his illustration reinforced the message that the benefits are disappearing.

Can you add any tips for illustrating blog posts and other written communications?

Nov. 20, 2013 UPDATE: If you prefer original photos, read about the strategy used by advisor Sheri Iannetta Cupo. Aug. 15, 2016: I deleted some broken links.