By Prasiddha Gustanto
Senior writer and editor at ALVEO
The world of business writing requires different approaches to producing written content depending on the situation.
Some situations may call for a writer to make an article, while others may see the need for a blog post. These two types of writing, contrary to popular belief, are not interchangeable. Each type has a distinct way of conveying information, serves different purposes and caters to specific audiences.
Recognizing the differences between these two is crucial to know when best to use each of them and to get the most out of your writing output.
Articles
Dating back hundreds of years, articles have historically been used in newspapers, magazines and other forms of print-based publications to convey information in writing. This has continued until the current era of the internet and social media, with organizations publishing articles electronically through their websites and apps.
This type of writing is formal and typically lengthy, with the shortest pieces being 500 words (such as newspaper articles) and long-form write-ups going up to thousands of words (such as magazine or journal articles). They are used to convey facts, news and information through a generally professional and impersonal tone.
The serious nature of articles means that such written pieces need to carefully go through editor and review teams before publication to check for grammar, misspellings and errors. The unique power of articles lies in their ability to convey in-depth levels of information.
However, while having the potential to be very detailed and thorough, articles have the weakness of not being search-engine optimized. Customers or clients in need of quick and bite-sized information may not have the patience to read through long blocks of text in articles to find what they seek. As such, articles are best suited for businesses that want to write for already established clientele.
In the commercial world, businesses looking for written content aimed at drawing in more prospective customers can look to shorter and more search-engine-optimized writing. This is where blog posts can come in and help.
Blog Posts
Whereas articles have been part of history for hundreds of years, blog posts are a much more recent invention birthed by internet culture and exist exclusively in electronic mediums such as through websites and apps.
Blog posts typically range from 300 to 1,000 words. Some might even go shorter than that, with blog posts containing a paragraph and a link to a video, article, website, or social media post. The more bite-sized nature of blog posts makes them the perfect tool for businesses wanting to market themselves or for communicating simpler messages like event announcements.
The shorter lengths also allow for more informal and casual written tones. Carefully constructed paragraphs are also similarly unimportant for blogs, with many of them often being written in bullet points.
More importantly, the shorter length also lends blog posts well for search-engine optimization due to the way they rely on hot keywords to maximize traffic. The fact that blogs are an online-only type of writing also means that they can constantly be updated in real-time.
Maximizing Business Output
Knowing the differences between blog posts and articles is also important because they demand different rates. A blog post also typically pays per published post while articles are typically paid on a per-word basis. Be sure to know the differences so that you can make the most of what you want to get in your business writing content output.
