{"id":6708,"date":"2015-03-14T18:52:21","date_gmt":"2015-03-14T18:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.riabro.com\/?p=6708"},"modified":"2023-07-26T18:00:13","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T18:00:13","slug":"business-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.riabro.com\/business-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Great readability tools that will transform your business blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Done. You’ve just written the best blog article ever. You even managed to include the words disburse, axiomatic and didactic in it!  It’s just a shame no one understands what you’ve written.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article I’ll highlight the reasons readability is vital to business blogging as well as introducing some great resources to improve your writing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why start a business blog<\/strong>?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let’s get back to basics. \u00a0There are many\u00a0reasons why your business may want to start a blog – sharing \u00a0expertise on a subject or starting\u00a0up\u00a0conversations with customers being just a few. \u00a0I won’t create a\u00a0list here because some great ones already exist including one by\u00a0Dechay Watts over at SproutContent called\u00a019 reasons why your business should be writing a blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Point two on her list is “Your blog fuels SEO” – search engines thrive on new, relevant content. But while writing for search engines may do wonders for getting your blog found on the web, it’s important to remember that your ultimate audience is still human<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are readers having to decipher what you’re saying?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It’s essential to know your audience and be clear about the purpose behind writing at the outset.  It’s also important to include vocabulary relevant to the topic and industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, if ever your writing goes from being interesting and informative to a minefield of jargon,  you’ve just lost sight of an important fact – most people won’t continue to read (or go on to buy) what they don’t understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A business blog falling foul of jargon\u00a0in order to demonstrate authority on a subject\u00a0reminds me of a scene from a\u00a01977 Bollywood classic –\u00a0‘Amar Akbar Anthony”. \u00a0Wheeled into a party hiding in a giant Easter egg (don’t ask, the whole film is bonkers), Indian movie legend Amitabh Bachchan jumps up\u00a0and rattles off\u00a0ridiculous lyrics<\/a> in order to impress the young ladies present…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“You see the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere<\/strong> because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And the response from his ‘target’ audience? – “WHAT?!”<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the movie, speaking gibberish works wonders for him.  In real life, your audience will either conclude you’re trying to pull the wool over their eyes or that what you’re selling isn’t meant for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tools that can help improve your business blog<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Clear communication is very different to ‘dumbing down’ the message.  As the Plain English Campaign states, “It’s not ‘cat sat on the mat\u2019 or ‘Janet and John’ writing. Almost anything \u2212 from leaflets and letters to legal documents \u2212 can be written in plain English without being patronising or oversimplified.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As well as their incredibly useful guides<\/a>,  there are other tools that can help you get your message across quicker.  For example, a few years ago I wrote web copy for a company that sold ‘web caching’ servers across the globe.  For most of its customers English wasn’t their first language, so I ran my text through online readability tools to make sure that what I was writing and what the company was selling was easy to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such tool is The Readability Test Tool<\/a>\u00a0 which scores what you’ve written\u00a0for the most used readability indicators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n