What Genre is Your Business Blog?
Is a blog a literary genre? Kevin Eagan poses that question in his own blog, critical margins, admitting he doesn’t have a definitive answer. Blog content writers, he muses, are a “relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world.” (Wow! Love that description of the work we do here at Say It For You.)
Bloggers do on the screen what 18th Century essayists did in newspapers and magazines, Eagan reflects: They meander, they search, they seek out something. The historic form closest to blogs is the diary, Eagan goes on, but a diary is almost always a private matter, while a blog is instantly public. In an Atlantic Magazine article, blogger Andrew Sullivan described blogging this way: You end up writing about yourself, but transforming a retrospective and personal piece into a public and immediate one.
As a marketing blog content writing trainer, I realize that our art is related to the “genre” of advertising, but with a very big difference. Blogs are not the same as advertisements, billboards, or even brochures. What freelance blog content writers do is help business owners communicate to readers a vision of themselves feeling safer, healthier, more comfortable, better looking, happier, or wealthier. Blogging helps establish a business owner or professional practitioner as an authority on a subject.
Some years ago, Damon Richards shared an interesting insight about an added benefit of blogging through a guest post on this Say It For You blog: “A useful added benefit is the ability to send messages to your existing customers that you’d rather not have to tell them directly. In a business blog post, the statement seems more generic, so my customers don’t feel singled out. They view things as universal problems, which makes them more willing to implement fixes.”
As a businessperson or practitioner, I teach, you have many different kinds of stories to tell through your blog:
- the benefits of your products and services
- the history of your business and your own journey
- successful case studies and testimonials
- news of importance to your customers
- your perspective on trends in your industry
As Kevin Eagen admits, “The blog article encompasses many things. A blog post is about searching, about open-ended questions and lose ends. It’s not a” tidy” genre like the 21st Century novel.” So, no, blogs don’t fit neatly into one literary genre
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