How Professional and Personal Blogging Differ

It’s very easy to start a blog. If you have a simple website that you created with WordPress or Wix, you can write about virtually anything, and then you can post it with a single click of a button. Even if you are not very tech-knowledgeable, you can put your opinions on any topic out there.

Blogging is how some individuals come into the public eye. If you’re a skilled writer, or you’re able to write about something that people like to read about, you might gain enough acclaim to support yourself that way. You can gain sponsorship if companies see that you’re getting enough page views.

However, there’s another kind of blogging, and that’s the professional variety. In that scenario, you have a business website, and you’re trying to connect with new and existing clients. Professional and personal blogging differ from one another in certain ways, and we’ll discuss that a little bit right now.

Personal Blogging Comes with Few Repercussions

As we mentioned, if you start a personal blog, which is to say, one that’s not connected to your business, you can write about anything you like there. You’re free to rant about UFOs or lizard people if you want. You might mention that 33% of US teens experience cyberbullying, and then you might talk about some potential solutions to the problem.

Personal blogging can be fun in some ways because you can expound about whatever you like, and if you’re only doing it as a hobby, you don’t have to worry about any repercussions. It’s true that you might get some negative feedback, but as the site admin, you can choose to block any commenters who say things you don’t like.

The only reason you would have to censor yourself at all on a personal blog is if you’re trying to monetize. If you’re attempting to grow an audience and attract sponsorship, then if you say certain things that offend particular demographics, you’re probably going to lose some corporate entities. You might have to tailor what you say so that it does not incense any of the sponsors who you are trying to court.

Professional Blogging is Different

Professional or business blogging is an entirely different animal. In that situation, you’ve set up a blog for your company’s website, or you hired a web designer to do it for you. You can write weekly blogs or set up another schedule that works for you.

You likely will want to follow a more-or-less rigid posting schedule, and you can use a handy tool like Hootsuite to help you do that. The new blogs you post are fresh content, and they can help your company’s website from an SEO standpoint. Fresh content helps your site stay at the top of the SERPs.

This stands in direct contrast to your personal blog, where you can post as often or as little as you like. With a personal blog, you might let six months go by before posting a new article if you feel like it.

How Else Are They Different?

The other major way that professional blogging is different from the personal variety is that with business blogging, you need to stay within your niche. If you run an office supply company, it makes no sense for you to suddenly start talking about politics.

You need to stay within your industry. If you’re talking about something like current events, you have to tie what you’re saying back into your niche somehow. If you don’t, your readers won’t understand why you chose that topic.

You can monetize both a business and a personal blog, but in different ways. With a private blog, you’re attracting sponsorship, and that transaction is pretty straightforward.

With business blogs, you’re also trying to monetize. However, the way you’re doing that is by attracting new potential customers who will come read your blog, but who will then hopefully stick around on your site long enough to buy some of your products.

The language you’ll choose to use on the private blog versus the business one should be different. Again, you’re representing your business when you write and post blogs on your company’s website, and you can’t risk alienating a large group of people by saying something offensive. That’s why your professional blog should probably steer away from topics like religion or politics. In both professional and personal blogging, you should follow the rules that go along with each one.