What is the difference between a blog, vlog and slog?

Blog, vlog, slog – What do all these terms and abbreviations mean? Just last week I heard the word 'slog' for the first time when a colleague came up with the idea to record an audio version of a blog post and publish it on our blog – he called it a slog! Marketers are often confronted with confusing abbreviations, acronyms and jargon in which the meaning isn’t immediately obvious. So, I decided to explain these three abbreviations briefly.

What is a blog?

The term blog is short for weblog. Blogging is about creating relevant and engaging content. A blog post is posted to your blog - the space where you place all these posts – you are reading a blog post now. 

Business blogging is a core component of inbound marketing, as it drives traffic to your online presence, it helps establish authority, and it is a prerequisite to generate new leads. 

What is a vlog?

Vlogs (short for video log) are video blogs. Instead of text and images, a video (or a video link) is embedded on a website or uploaded on a video platform, such as YouTube or Vidyard.

According to a report from HubSpot Research, 54% of consumers want to see videos from businesses – more than any other type of content. Video is becoming the preeminent way that companies are starting to communicate with their prospects and their customers. With video content, you can reach your buyer personas through a type of content that is quick for them to take in. This type of content has become increasingly popular recently, not least because of the low barriers of producing videos with high quality. Here are some tips on how to create engaging video content online.

What is a slog?

A slog is an abbreviation for a sound log. It is the recorded audio file of a blog post. Slogging is a great way to repurpose old content into something new. The finished recording can be uploaded to music and podcast streaming platforms such as SoundCloud or Mixcloud. Slogs are perfect for your audience when they have little time to read a blog post or are on a journey. 

Tip: With GarageBand, you can record voices and musical instruments. If you don't have the proper equipment or enough time to record audio files by yourself, then use text-to-audio tools such as BeyondWords – as I did in this post.

Have you ever considered recording an audio version of your blog post? In this presentation below, we have shared our tips and learning based on our own experiences in creating our first slog 'Why people attend seminars and keynotes about onlinification and digitalisation'. 

Do you want to create your first slog?

Recording your own audio is one way to get started. But you can also harness AI to automate production of your slogs and save time. With a tool like BeyondWords, you just need to copy and paste your article and a realistic generated voice will read the text for you.

If you want to try it out, we can lend a hand — take a look at our text-to-voice package to see how we can create audio versions of all your articles for a fixed price.