Strike the right tone

People expect blogs to be less formal than more official publications, but that doesn’t mean that you should be totally informal. Just as your blog style should reflect your brand, your tone needs to carry those notes as well.

Having a blog is a great way to share information and your opinion. To get repeat visitors and regular readers, your content needs to be fresh … and informational or entertaining. It also needs to be professional and show your expertise.

Creating posts can be time consuming and coming up with topics can be tough. But setting and sticking to a regular posting schedule is important. Blogs are a great way to promote products or services and draw a larger audience, but if you’re over-scheduled, your posts can reflect it. Spelling mistakes, broken links, run-on sentences and bad punctuation are not the right tone for any blog. That’s not informal, it’s unprofessional. While you have to polish and edit a post as you would any article you would submit, you don’t want to force a voice.

‘Voice’ is a writer’s term for the personal style. It’s the tone of writing that comes most naturally and immediately.

It’s easiest when you have a regular amount of writing to do, to settle into a tone that reflects your ‘voice.’ That way the writing comes naturally and you won’t find yourself forcing anything.

That doesn’t mean you should write in dialect, but you should write comfortably. It’s easiest to be clear when you feel free to express yourself.

If you are concerned that your ‘voice’ doesn’t match your brand (and if your blog is tied to your business it should reflect your brand) then we suggest writing first freely in your ‘voice’ and then going back and making it a bit more formal.

You can do so with the help of a thesaurus, a bit of topical research (which you should always do on your post issue anyway) and some proofreading. With a few tweaks, some editing, and plenty of practice, you’ll be striking the right tone for your blog loud and clear.