The four areas you must take into consideration for each business letter are listed below. If you do not consider each one of them, your letter will be ineffective.
1. Subject
2. Audience
3. Purpose
4. Style/Organization
Subject
Every piece of writing — from the business letter to the novel — revolves around a subject. Luckily, in the business world the subject is usually specific. Quite often it is supplied for you by someone else, such as a boss or colleague, or demanded by a situation such as hiring or congratulating an employee. It’s a fact: The more specific your subject, the easier it is to write your letter. For example, let’s say that you need to request information about an order that did not arrive when it should have.
If you are in charge of the account, writing the letter is easy. If you are not in charge of the account, it is harder for you to write the letter than it is for the person who knows all the particulars. Regardless of the situation, stick to one or two subjects in your letter. Including more than two subjects clouds your message.
Write another letter if you have more than two subjects.
Audience
This area is tricky because you may not know your audience. If you do, you can tailor your letter to that audience. Many times, however, your audience is larger than you expect. Your letter may be addressed to Terry Smith but may be read by several other people in Terry’s firm to receive the action you wish. If you are
unsure of your audience, assume they are educated, reasonable people until you find out otherwise. Don’t assume they have as much knowledge of the subject of your letter as you do, or you may overgeneralize or forget to include important details.
Purpose
Many letters are sent with a specific subject and audience in mind but are not clear in their purpose. Know why you are sending the letter. Is the letter to inform? Is it to request information? Is it to offer congratulations? Condolences? Is it to get the recipient to act on a request? All of these are very different purposes. You have probably received a letter that, after reading it, left you confused because you didn’t know exactly what it said. The purpose was not clear.
Style/Organization
The first three areas dictate the content, direction and emphasis of the letter.
1. Know WHAT you’re writing about — SUBJECT.
2. Know WHO you’re writing for — AUDIENCE.
3. Know WHY you’re writing — PURPOSE.
Now you are ready to be concerned with HOW you are going to write the letter. The first three areas can be determined in a matter of minutes if you are familiar with the ideas that need to be communicated. The fourth area — style and organization — takes more time.
Labels: Business Blog, Business Writing, Letter Writing
Successful professionals know the importance of effective letter writing. You can’t have a good business relationship with customers if they don’t know what you’re trying to tell them in a letter. The services or products of a company cannot be marketed if a prospective customer is baffled by the service or product described. How can a salesperson expect to make a sale when, because of a muddled letter, the prospect can’t even understand what it is that’s being sold?
Letter writing is crucial to the success of every professional. Without letter-writing skills, the professional’s effectiveness is stymied. Before you begin to write more effective letters, you must learn what makes up a good letter. You need to know the importance of planning a letter and gathering all the information you need. The plan is put into practice when you decide on the approach your letter will take and the components necessary to achieve the selected approach. The components of a letter are effective only if you know the proper mechanics involved
in a letter’s structure and appearance. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and language usage are important if your letter is to be understood and well accepted by its reader.
Labels: Articles, Business Blog, Business Writing, Letter Writing
You Have a Blog. Congratulations. Now What?
Now you have a blog with some initial core content. What next?
Posting Frequency
You or your bloggers keep writing. Keep blogging. If you have hired professional bloggers, you should expect them to post as often as your contract with them specifies. If you and/or a few compatriots are doing that particular bit of heavy lifting yourselves, posting every day may not be possible.
A big team blog can offer quantity and quality, but a small one can usually only offer one or the other. Go for quality. The stronger the offline component of your business is, the less frequently you need to post. You could get away with once a week, if necessary, but three times a week would be much better. The stronger the online component of your business is, the more frequently you need to post. It’s best if you can post every day.
Some blogging platforms (such as WordPress) offer the ability to write a post and publish it at a predetermined date and time in the future. This way, you can publish on weekends, holidays, or even during the blogger’s vacation. If your blog relies heavily on current events and timely news, this isn’t an option you’ll be using much.
Labels: Articles, Blogger, Blogging, Business Blog, Wordpress
It’s been given out as good advice that a blog should have something more than a few measly posts for people to read if you’re going to make a big production out of announcing the blog’s existence. If you’re not going to make a big noise about starting a blog, then this isn’t as crucial. But if you’re an established business with a bit of longevity and presence in the market, then when you announce the launch of your blog, the standard good advice really is pretty good: there had better be something to read.
Many companies have one foot in the old-school world of business management, and the other foot is testing the waters of technological empowerment and its consequences. A good old-fashioned press release can drive an initial surge of traffic to the new blog, so there had better be something of substance there to create a good first impression.
What are you going to offer your new readers that will impress them and convert them into RSS subscribers and long-term readers? Many other great bloggers have written plenty of excellent material on creating initial content for a blog. Whether people calls these excellent material pillar articles or flagship content. Whatever you want to call it, it needs to be written before the blog launches.
Labels: Articles, Blogging, Business Blog
One way in which business blogs are unlike personal blogs is that they’re not… well, personal. They are personable, but they’re not personal like a diary is personal. Business blogs need to fulfill a business purpose. Or, if you turn it around to face the customer: a business blog should meet customer needs. A business has a purpose beyond just earning money. Earning money is simply the result of a business fulfilling its greater purpose. A business blog helps the business fulfill its greater purpose. Hammering out the purpose of a business blog is one of the most important early steps in the process of starting a business blog.
The purpose of a business blog should be summed up in one simple statement. For example, the purpose of getting consulting clients. If I sold products, the purpose of my blog might be to help me sell more products and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction regarding those products.
Goals are what you need to accomplish in order to fulfill your blog’s purpose. To help you choose a direction, I’ve listed some non-mutually exclusive overarching goals a business blog can strive towards:
- Convey company news and events.
- Demonstrate knowledge, expertise, passion, and authority in a niche or industry.
- Provide helpful tips and info on getting the most from company services or products.
- Pass along success stories from customers about how your business has helped them become more successful.
- Dominate a niche or industry in search results (hence market and mind share) by becoming the authoritative source for information on a subject and using good SEO.
- Become a resource for the media and cottage industry about your business’ market, elevating your business’ position and brand.
When I speak of a business blog, I’m not specifying any size of business. What I’ve written above could just as easily apply to a business of one as to a Fortune 500 company.
The points above can be combined in any way: all of them or some of them can be the goals of a business blog. The first one alone would make me and everyone else yawn as we reached for the back button. They aren’t exhaustive, either.
Labels: Blogging, Business Blog
