Yours Respectfully: Establishing The Tone Of Your Blog

When you start business blogging, your primary goal should be to establish the tone, also known as the “voice” of your blog.

Tone is important, because although business blogging is business writing, writing a blog has more in common with writing email than it does with writing reports. If you’re a business person, loosen up when you write a blog - drop the jargon and the business speak.

Establishing the right tone for a blog can take a month or two. You need time to get comfortable with your readers and with your content, and you can’t do that overnight.

Here are some tips which may help.

1. Write to a specific person - an ideal reader. A business blogger I know couldn’t find the right tone for his blog posts until he wrote his posts as email, directed to a friend. He started each post with “Hi Rob”, then deleted the salutation before posting.

2. Keep the majority of your posts short - under 300 words. You can write longer posts of 600 to 800 words occasionally, but make sure that they’re informative: don’t waffle. Everyone’s busy today, so if every post you write is a lengthy article, readers will skip the posts until they have “more time”.

3. While your tone should be informal and friendly, check your spelling and grammar. Blogging is casual communication, so the occasional typo just shows you’re human. Constant errors in a business blog however indicate sloppiness - that’s not the image you want for your business.

4. Reward your readers: they should learn something from each post. Write a brief outline - just a list, or a couple of sentences - of points you want to make in a post before you start writing. All writing tends to morph as you write. An outline keeps you on track to making a point in the blog post.

Your blog’s tone will emerge over time. Keep your writing informal and friendly, and ensure that every post helps your readers, and you can’t go wrong.