10 Types Of Blogs To Make Content Marketing More Effective

What is a blog post? When most of us think about a blog, the first thing that comes to mind is a piece of text that offers value to our audience by covering their pains, needs, and interests. While this is correct there is much more hidden behind what a blog post is…or at least what it can become.

types of blogs

While the content you create is there to offer value to your audience, it is also an important element of communication. It shows that:

You know what you are talking about
You know how to answer the reader’s questions
You know your audience’s intent

C is perhaps the most important element when creating a post. Oftentimes people are reading in order to get educated but just want very basic “surface” content; other times they might want something more in-depth and actionable, or they might just want something easy to skim while on the go.

That's why it's important that you get to know what your audience wants and how they want to consume it.

So what does this translate to?

While you might be addressing all of your audience’s pains and interests, if you do it in the same way over and over again, it will become monotonous and will cause many readers to slowly stray away.

So let's take a look at 10 types of blogs that cater to all sorts of readers, offering not only variety but also the proper format for each form of visitor intent.

We have segmented each blog post type into 5 main categories based on reader intent.

“Useful” Blog Types

The "How-To" Blog Post

This is a highly used blog post format to educate an audience on how to do something. This can range from a simple how-to, to a more in depth examination of the issue.

These types of posts are usually supplemented with an instructional video or some form of image that helps the audience better understand what is being said in the text.

The "List" Blog Post

This type of blog post is used to organize content into a simplified list that gets straight to the point. Ideal for those who want something that can be consumed fast and easy, just by a simple scan.

Such posts can be used to aggregate a list of tips, tools, books, resources, ideas, tactics, or any other information that can be valuable to your audience.

checklist image-1

The "Ultimate Guide for..." Blog Post

This is a detailed, comprehensive blog post providing an in depth explanation to a topic your audience is interested in. Typically this type of blog should be on an evergreen topic that can remain relevant for months and years.

This is mainly because a lot of time and effort is needed to put such posts together, so creating an updated version very often can be quite tedious.

“Personal Appeal” Blog Types

The "Behind The Scenes" Blog Post

If you have a large following, this type of blog post can be very successful as it humanizes your company in order to continue to build trustworthy relationships with your audience. This can include the behind the scenes of an event or a webinar showing the inner workings of your brand.

“Audience Driven” Blog Types

The "Crowd-Sourced" Blog Post

This is a win-win-win situation for both the company that owns the content and the influencers taking part in its creation. With crowd-sourced blogs, an influencer provides a blurb on a specific topic of content while simultaneously promoting your content.

In return, they get a backlink promoting their site within your page. As for your readers, they get to read something fresh, a new idea, a new way of thinking, new insight by those helping the creation of the post.

The "Link Roundup" Blog Post

Employing this type of post can generate a series of articles that would get published either weekly or monthly. The post would contain a conglomeration of pieces previously published by other authors, tied together by a common theme that the audience will find valuable.

Bonus: Once the cycle is complete, these posts can be combined into an ebook, containing a massive amount of insight for your audience (and for minimal effort on your part).

“Promotional” Blog Types

The "Comparison" Blog Post

This type of post compares two different elements and shows the benefits of one versus the other. This could be either between strategies, a tactic you use vs. a tactic a partner uses, industry norms vs. strategies that you came up with etc.

Be sure to present these posts with neutrality and transparency as you want to build trust with your audience and show that both sides are respected. This will be useful for your audience as they will be exposed to additional tactics they might have not thought of before, or even give them the chance to implement some of the things you are mentioning.

The "Best Of" Blog Post

This type of posts typically appears at the end of a month or year, pulling together the most popular posts published throughout the given period of time. Be sure to layer in some original content when combining the pieces in order to avoid any duplication of content that can be dinged by search engine crawlers.

“Timely/Topical” Blog Types

The "Review" Blog Post

Provide an honest review of a product (such as a marketing tool), event, or newsworthy breakthrough that is relevant to your industry and audience. Presenting these posts in a topical fashion will generate value for your viewers and capitalize on trending issues to boost traffic.

It will also present you as an authority figure from which your readers can get the latest news and get educated on trending topics.

The "Survey" Blog Post

Choose an important and relevant topic that interests your audience and conduct a survey. Once you've compiled the results, generate a blog post around the findings. This can unveil industry norms, new stats that your audience was not aware of and additional insight for your readers.

survey image-1

Bonus Tactic

One of the most effective ways to come up with content and blog post ideas is to spy into your competitors. (What are they doing? How effective is it?)

That's exactly what we did... and the result? We generated 77% growth in traffic and 4x our leads. Click here to learn more!

What blog post types are you currently using? Is there any we should add to our list? Let us know.

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