They May Look at the Website, But Your Blog Helps Them See!

Communications coach and friend Myrna Selby forwarded a video to me relating to a psychology study on focus. In fact, the two professors who co-authored the study have published a book called The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.

The directions are to count how many times girls in white shirts pass the ball to each other.  In other words, the viewer is directed to focus on one aspect of all the different things going on in the video.  But (and this is the whole point), when you focus on one aspect, you miss the others.

To me, that premise hits the nail on the head for the way websites and blogs relate to each other.  Websites present the big picture – the different services and products the company offers, who the principal players are, the mission statement, the geographic areas the company deals with, the “unique selling proposition” – in other words, the whole enchilada!

But, just like in the video, where the viewer can’t focus on everything that’s happening at once, on a website, each page and each block of content takes the mind away from all the others.  It’s exactly the same as focusing on the number of passes by the players dressed in white and missing the gorilla!

What each blog post does, then, is focus on just one aspect of your business, so that online searchers can feel at ease and not be distracted with all the other information you have to offer. In previous Say It For You blog posts, I’ve compared blogging to job interviews.  Each post is like one question at the interview.  The question might be about your technical knowledge in a given area, or it might be about your reliability, or about your salary expectations.  The interviewer will expect you to stick to that one subject in answering that question in the most direct way. That’s exactly what each blog post is designed to do.

Online searchers may look at your website, and that’s a good thing, but it’s your blog that will help them “see”.  Each single blog post makes it clear why this one set of products you have, this one service you provide, and this one piece of special wisdom you have relates to just what they need!