December 1, 2016
Hello again agent. Congratulations on passing the blog content assignment, Diego is satisfied with the information you have provided. Both he and your users now have a solid idea of your business, your products and the benefits you can provide. You will also be pleased to hear that Google is on your side too. Good work agent.
Your next assignment is to recover and expose a time-honoured artefact. This is a fairly innocuous brief agent, so let’s not go into this one all-guns-blazing. Weapons are strictly forbidden. Strictly! Your task is to find out all you can about the art of article writing. It may sound simple enough but a decent article is hard to come by these days. So you will need a guide. When you reach your destination you will be introduced to Tarquin…
Tarquin is actually mistaken here. Perhaps his old age and refusal to follow technology has clouded his judgement. For this reason, he may not be the most useful of guides on your mission but this is all the intel we have. See, there are actually thousands of proper articles readily available on the web. You simply need to understand the difference between a blog and a digital article before you realise just how many decent articles are published online. Without this knowledge, articles become a forgotten artefact!
The distinction between blog and article content is very minimal. Ultimately, they both have very similar elements and both serve a very similar purpose. The main difference is that a blog was invented via the internet and is purely for digital use. Whereas an article can be described as a crossover between traditional printed media and digital media. Articles can exist offline while a blog cannot. This represents the middle ground between traditional and contemporary writing; focusing more on the quality of information rather than interactive features or imagery.
So why would you ever write an article if blogs are a product of the internet? Especially if both types of content are very similar. One way of explaining it is that a blog has a lot more personality. The values and thoughts of the writer shine through more so with a blog than with an article. An article is meant more for educating and informing rather than entertaining. This provides an effective solution to describing your technical and industry-specific information in clear, concise and relatable form. In basic terms, an article is a lot more academic.
You should expect nothing but expertly written English language, utilised to describe and explain a fully researched topic with all bases covered. In addition to this, an article will also have a positive effect on your SEO plans and help contribute towards your search engine rankings. So if you have a subject that is technical, complicated or particularly high-brow then an article is the perfect way to express yourself.
Here are some quick facts, figures and statistics to help you design, write and layout your blog content. All of these factors are extremely important and if you fail to take them in account you may as well not write your blog!
The most important thing to remember when writing article content is to be strictly informative. As mentioned before, an article is not here to entertain, it is here to educate. If a blog can be a naughty school kid, then an article is the headmaster. And when you’re in the headmaster’s office, you usually listen! It is this sense of authority that sets apart an article from the other service types we offer here at Content Juice.
This is the second instalment of our blog series Content Design Manual. Throughout the series we will discuss in detail our most popular content services and the associated design principles. The next stage of your mission will follow shortly. Dress smartly for the occasion agent – you’ll need to look the part for this one.
