I reached my fingers down into the dry green foliage and rummaged around until I saw the collection of dusky blue berries I had been commissioned to collect. They were small and a little bit hard, not like the plump, perfect berries we could buy in the stores. These were wild blueberries, with a sharp, tangy flavor, and they hid on thousands of little bushes in the scrubby patch of land we called a field that lay behind the hospital. My mother was going to bake a pie.

Someone was watching for bears that day, but it wasn’t me. I was five years old and gloriously ignorant of any threat to me or my world. It was a time of innocence and simple being-ness. Along with my cousin, Kim, I meandered from bush to bush with a little plastic sand bucket and relaxed into the afternoon. We plucked the tasty little berries from the bushes, eating at least as many as we plopped into our bucket, and we told goofy jokes, swatted at horseflies, tripped on shoelaces that had come untied, and giggled in the way of children who are fast friends.

That experience was priceless. In and of itself, it was like one of the berries with which I have filled my life’s bucket. It plopped in there on that gorgeous summer day and, decades later, I am still taking pleasure from its sweetness.

I thought of that perfect summer day recently when I was speaking with a client about their blog. It seems to me that when a blog post is well crafted, it should be like a berry in an ideal client’s life bucket: enjoyable, valuable and memorable. It can be tough to do that well, but when you get it right, the results are excellent. You might not get a phone call that day, but it will be like the other “berries” your ideal clients are putting in the bucket that has your name on it. They collect them from your social media accounts, your Linked In profile, that great video you have on your You Tube channel, the nice conversation you enjoyed at the last conference or networking event…eventually, they’ll have enough in there that they figure they can ask you to bake them a (metaphorical) pie.

So go ahead – blog! And remember to give your readers an experience to remember. Of course you will want to make them think about what you have to say. But far better still is to make them feel something…like the fragrant delight of a day of picking berries. and the memory of a fresh blueberry pie that melts into your memory like the promise of a perfect day.

Would you like to know more about blogging? Contact us at info@crossmancommunications.com and let’s arrange a time to chat about that idea!