Blogs or Articles… Which Are Best?

Everyone who is responsible for marketing a website knows only too well that you need to keep on pumping out new, fresh content if you want to keep flying high in the google ranking stakes. The problem many marketers face is deciding whether to churn out product or service related articles or to just keep on blogging about their company’s activities. It would appear, and certainly from my experience, over the last few years, the demarcation line between articles and blogs has somewhat blurred. So the question is… when is an article an article and a blog a blog?

The casual blogger…

The word “blog” is short for weblog. It’s something people do to let others know what they’re up to. A blog is generally a short post consisting of around 200-300 words. Its content is usually biased and based solely on the opinion of the blog writer or blogger. It’s written in a very casual way and just about every man, woman, child and the family dog can write one. Well, perhaps not the latter. However, it’s not quite what you might expect a serious, professional business to be using for its marketing… right?

The arty article…

Now an article is a totally different type of textual presentation. It’s based on an impartial viewpoint and is usually backed up with credible facts and figures. Very often, an article is at least 500 words long and as much as 2,500 words, which might also include a few quality images and diagrams. In many cases, it’s more like a report although it shouldn’t be written in the style of a whitepaper, a thesis or even a factsheet. However, it will have a degree of professionalism and sophistication about it. Does it work?

Keyword magic…

In my opinion, and that of many other marketing writers, neither a blog nor an article is going to help your business in any way unless it also contains some “magic ingredients”. These being Keywords but not any old keywords. They must be highly relevant keywords and you’ll need more than one variation of them. However, you cannot overdo it or you’ll risk the wrath of Google for keyword spamming. You’ll need to include just the correct density of keywords if you want your article to get noticed, as in “ranked.”

More to SEO than keywords…

You’ll need a good title, which should include the main keyword and some sub-headers, which also contain keywords. Headers are known as H1 and sub-headers are H2 and H3 tags. You’ll need images and you might want to link to external websites, as a reference to your information sources. Google likes that. There is more of course, as we worldly wordsmiths know but the main focus with article writing is structure. So, articles are winning hands down over blogs, right? Hmmm… not necessarily.

A star is born…

As the Internet and everything digital constantly evolves there is now a new type of written content, which is basically a hybrid. I’m not entirely sure what it should be called. Maybe an “Artiblog” or a “Blarticle” or even a “Blogart”. Whatever… anyway, it’s an article that lives on a blog. It’s written like an SEO article but in a more casual style. It’s designed to engage the reader, inform the reader and even entertain the reader. However, deep down behind the jargon, glib and flippancy. Lurking somewhere amongst the facts, figures and flamboyant phraseology is a serious message. It’s… “BUY ME”.

The bottom line…

Blogs and articles on blogs are no longer a mainstream way of keeping everyone in the loop about some new discovery, invention or an individual’s daily working habits. These precious masterpieces of well-engineered content are now designed specifically to sell products and services… albeit indirectly. And they work. People love to read them. The Google bots are all over them and websites are a buzzing with new leads and hordes of fresh traffic. Want one?

Who wrote this stuff?

Bill Knight is a UK, Direct Response Copywriter specialising in creating informative, compelling and engaging content to help promote a broad range of products and services all over the Internet, to a wide range of audiences. For more details call 01275 837 577 or visit: http://topcopywriter.co.uk