Article or Blog?

Whether you are writing a blog or an article, both involve meaningful content, but is the content intended to be meaningful to you and about you, or for your reading audience in particular? A blog and an article are two separate vehicles to frame content. An article involves more time to generate than a day’s posting of events into a personal blog. If you are an assigned writer, however, for a company or media source based blog, it obviously requires more time, effort and thought because there is focus involved in marketing a service or product. If you want to attract readership for a much longer time frame, then it’s beneficial to write an article about a person, place or thing (these represent your “products” essentially) and work on your own personal writing style which will essentially market your writing product.

An article is more formal than a personal blog. An article has requisites including a plan or outline, possibly research, proper grammar and sentence structure, and appropriate editing. Articles should have more stringent requirements. Based on an article's content, it will be apparent to readers a lot of research was involved and such research lends to credibility. If a reader questions credibility, this is not a bad thing if it's performed productively because we, as readers, should question everything. For example, when watching the news, watch several stations to develop a more informed viewpoint.

Articles should also be error free and if it’s a great article, the chances of readers being attracted to the site(s) containing the article may be increased. It might be visited several times a month for a very long time or 100 times in one day. The writing styles practiced by more disciplined writers are evidenced in articles as opposed to certain types of blogging. An article might contain a lot of details, information and researched facts about any one person, place or thing with a good use of language that seems to flow throughout. Writers and readers alike do not necessarily have that same expectation with personal blogging.

With an article, the reader is exposed to more organization of the content and more specific rules or writing, grammar, and those things learned in writing or journalism classes are displayed. Believability is another aspect here because of the way the content is framed and the manner in which language is pulled in and out of such content. Readers might rely more on the facts discussed in an article that might be backed up with a reference source or a quote. There are more expected standards to comply with in an article plus the fact it is usually accompanied by a good strong title to attract a reader's attention. A blog doesn't need a title unless the writer wants to include one, but even if that's the case, it could just be something simple like, "How my day went again!" And that's just an example and not intended to badmouth blogging because the content that could follow that type of title might actually be quite funny.

A personal blog is not formal and is displayed as though the writer is talking to a reader without immediate concern about perfect grammar or some structural plan. It can be a discourse on any subject, but it does not have to follow any nature of professionalism. Almost anyone who writes can present content in a blog. Blogs have become very popular as is evidenced by the fact they are everywhere on the web now, including company sites which might have a page for a blog. Where companies or firms included a blog format on their website, it might be so well-constructed that if it is topic specific, a reader could digest it as though it reads like an article. An individual who has a blogging site might come home from work one evening and feel compelled to hop on their laptop to tell all of his or her fans what a great or crummy day just occurred. That type of self-expression, for example, is blog related. Once communicated, the fact it was communicated might be helpful in some manner to the blog writer. It’s like having someone to talk to. Once the writer has shared an expression, the urgency to share that expression is immediately satisfied. It fulfills a need or want, and may not be related to fulfilling a passion related to writing itself.

If you come across a blog on a site that is commercially based from its onset, there will be postings performed routinely. On these types of blogs, especially those found on news media sites like The Huffington Post, there may be more experienced writers involved with the content to satisfy readership. For individual blogs, no writing experience is required.

Blogging has essentially been a form of social networking to the extent that it is also a form of personal news spreading. I see facebook, for example, as a form of sentence blogging of a personal nature. My personality, however, won't choose to post things such as "omg, I have a migraine today," mainly because I don't see the point outside of needing a form of sympathy attention. I do, however, post items of interest such as articles I have read, newsworthy stories of interest, family photos, or a comment on someone's sharing of interest. I do routinely post articles from HubPages that are interesting, well-written, and meaningful. I do obsess about the way language is used because I love words and I admire different writing styles and I generally know when effort was performed in composing a poem, story or article.

There are a lot of useful blogging sites on the web that attract traffic whether they are personal or professional. If someone has a personal blogging site that is fulfilling without any intention of seeking some measure of viability, it's still a goal that is satisfied because of that fulfillment. If another person wants a blogging site to become a vehicle for the potential of creating something viable, then thought and effort have to be involved and at this point, a reader can discern whether the content can be defined as a useful article.

Blogger which was formerly called Blogspot has come a long way since its inception in 1999. Over the years it has underwent technology improved and enhanced changes and is Google owned and supported. If you have a Google account, you can create several blogs and marry your blog to Google Adsense. I created a blog utilizing the available tools, generated one follower, and did not have the time to dedicate "updates" that basically is a necessity. The growth of blogs from 1999 to the mid-2000s was absolutely phenomenal, especially when they began to focus on topic related subjects instead of mainstream ...what I call thought waves.

Wordpress, born in 2003, is very user friendly. I first went here to create a blog for a book I self-published. Once I created a website for my book, I abandoned the blog. Although, a benefit with Wordpress is having the ability to obtain its download for blogging capability to add to your own website domain. Because of its user friendliness and add-in options, many prefer Wordpress over Blogger.

HubPages was founded in 2006 by Phil Edmondson and co-founders, Jay Reitz and Paul Deeds. According to CrunchBase, it is the "Most rewarding place to publish online." HubPages is a platform for writers, including experienced and well-versed authors, and topic experts, to publish their material online for free. It is very user friendly and offers the convience of housing all your articles in one location.

According to DomainTools, the SEO score of HubPages is 96%, based on several elements, is a ranking offered by the way it is seen by Google. DomainTools also lists the top percentages of viewers of HubPages to be coming from the United States, India, and Great Britain (in that order) and indicates there are millions of visitors on a monthly basis.

HubPages also owns YieldBuild, a resource to help promote optimization of ads for online publishers.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO FIND ON HUBPAGES

First, HubPages (currently at 237,000 contributors) gets a Thumbs-Up ranking from this contributing author. Why? It is the one source I can find an ample amount of articles, stories, poetry under specific topic criteria. The community of writers in this venue is remarkable beyond words. This community is such a vital helping tool not only for productive feedback or to help improve upon the craft of writing, but the effects of the collective passion.

HubPages is a good platform to practice freelancing and overall is a fulfilling experience for so many who have a passion to write. And, like so many options available on the web, naturally, you will find some negative commentary, but you can report anything that is inappropriate. If you write something meaningful and thought provoking, expect to be praised by someone who crosses your Hub doorway and expect to run into each other again. Hence, a writing relationship that thrives in a community of writers. Is a writer's experience in HubPages as good as it gets? Well, that depends on how much time and effort is placed into each piece referred to as a Hub similarly like anything else pursued as a long term goal. Writing on HubPages can become a viable opportunity, but it will not happen overnight, so don't expect it to. Keep writing good content, perform appropriate research on what makes a good topic of interest, and edit it accordingly. Be patient, work hard, and wait and see.

The HubPages includes so many thought provoking articles of interest, articles of opinion, poetry, historical food for thought, viewpoints on newsworthy subjects, content of humor, and so much more all contained in one community. HubPages also contains content which can be defined as blogs, but they help support the network of commonality and a reader has an option to move on to the next HubPage. If you love poetry from a variety of flavors and styles, this is the place to find it from all over the world.

HubPages continues to grow in members and is widely searchable based on content. What will you write next?