Matching the Typeface with the Type in Blogging for Business

Concepts discussed at the most recent Financial Planning Association meeting were the inspiration for this week’s Say It For You blog posts. 

One presenter at the meeting made the wry observation that the size of the font on the Wall Street Journal headline announcing a drop in the market earlier this year exactly matched the size of the headline font back in 2008, when the drop was many times more severe. The presenter’s point? Big, bold type in journalism makes the information appear important and has the power to make to raise disproportionate concern in readers.

While blogging for business is different in many ways from news reporting, I couldn’t help reflecting that we blog content writers can use typeface and bolding to draw readers’ special attention to parts of the message in each of our posts.

While bolding and exclamation points can be overdone, in blog posts, I’ve found, it’s important to “exclaim”.  There are at least two reasons for this.  First, as I often stress, online searchers tend to be scanners, not readers. Punctuation, italics, and bold type are some of the ways to draw attention to the central point(s) in each post.

The second reason to use emphasis clues in blog content writing is to satisfy the “spiders”.  Search engine software indexing programs need clues to match up the content on websites and blogs with searchers’ needs. 

“Everything in proportion” is a good guideline, not only for newspaper headline typefonts, but for blog bolding and bullet points as well. Big, bold type, when used inappropriately, does in fact have the power to exaggerate or alarm.

The secret of success – match the typeface with the type of message you’re trying to convey!