Blogging vs. Business Writing: 10 Unique Differences

Written by Laurie Zinn@LineByLineLLC8 years ago

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On any given day, you write thousands of words for your business. You answer emails, craft proposals, and take notes in meetings. You may be responsible for updating your business’s website pages, or for writing an article for your company newsletter.

If you read a lot of blog articles, you have probably noticed the subtle differences between that and most other types of writing you create for your business.

With traditional business writing, there is often a formality or a process involved with it. For example, a proposal may always follow the same format. A press release requires an inverted pyramid style of writing, presenting the most important facts in the first few paragraphs. Your company will probably have expectations about your annual business plan, such as identifying goals, analyzing data and reporting results in a concise, factual manner.

Blogging has its own unique style, and is different from business writing in the following 10 ways:

1. It has personality and voice. Your writing voice is how you “sound” when what you’ve written is read. Your voice could sound casual, funny, sarcastic, serious, or sincere. Everything you write has a voice, but because a blog’s writing style is less formal, blogging lets you showcase the traits and personality that are unique to you.

2. It’s professional, but a little more relaxed. Your blog represents your business so you still can’t get away with spelling or grammatical errors. But you can start sentences with “but”. Or “or”. Sentence fragments are okay. You can write like you talk (in most cases).

3. It’s search engine optimization focused. Blogs have the added benefit of leading readers to your website. Using keywords in your blog’s headline, body, meta tags and images help your customers to find the blog article in a Google search.

4. They can link to each other. It’s to your advantage to link words or phrases of an article to related articles on your site. Links encourage your readers to click on them, resulting in more time spent on your site.

5. You can add your opinion. You can use the first person point of view, tell a story to make your point, or give your take on a product you tried. Whether you liked something or didn’t, feel strongly about something or don’t, all is fair game in blogging.

6. It’s more fun. That’s my opinion, but as a blog writer, that’s okay for me to say.

7. It invites conversation. Most blogs have a comment feature, where your readers can pose a question or add their thoughts and opinions. This is a great way to open a dialogue with your potential customers. You should always respond to anyone who takes the time to comment on your blog, whether it’s positive or negative.

8. Its paragraphs are shorter. If you love to craft beautiful copy with flowery descriptions and complicated words, you’ll need to dial it back on your blog. Readable formatting like short paragraphs, white space and bulleted lists let people skim the article, and possibly read it in its entirety if they are interested. Sonya Ramsey’s article, “Tracking Your Goals with Apps” makes good use of these formatting options. Save your heavy copy for your best selling novel.

9. It’s shareable on social media. Blogs work great as social media post teasers, sending your reader to your website to read the full article.

10. Blogging keeps your website fresh and updated. Google likes websites that have new content, and supporting an active blog on your website is the best way to accomplish this. Innovate New Albany is a great example of a blog that is updated frequently. Thanks to our dedicated contributing bloggers, the site publishes five to six blogs each month.

So enjoy blogging for the fun that it is and the opportunities it presents to your business. Not only does it help with search, it adds a bit of variety to those thousands of words you are writing every day.

Laurie Zinn is a Columbus-based freelance writer and owner of Line-By-Line. She helps businesses communicate with their customers through website content, blog articles, email marketing campaigns and social media. For more information about Line-By-Line, visit http://line-by-line.us or contact Laurie at laurie@line-by-line.us.