Step 3 today! Once you’ve determined your niche, scoped your competition, and identified your audience, you’re in position to start thinking about the type of content you’re going to write.
Always remember that profitable blogs produce meaningful, useful content. While that seems obvious, many bloggers (admittedly, myself included) can get really caught up in creating content written only with SEO in mind or creating off-the-wall content in hopes to get a few extra shares and go viral. Remember: in the end, your website will be more profitable if you give strong, consistent quality content to your target audience.
So let’s start with the part of writing good content: knowing the post types.
Step 3.1: Learn the 20 Different Blog Post Types (then use the best one for your site and audience)
There are dozens of different ways to write a post. Your task is to determine, every time you write a post (and as you schedule posts down the road), which post type will be most effective for your readers. Here is a list of the top 20, a list that comes from pro bloggers Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett.
The 20 Blog Post Types
- Instructional: Teaching readers about a concept or how to do something (like a tutorial or step-by-step guide).
- Informational: Providing useful, up-to-date information about a topic, much like a news article.
- Review: Giving your opinions and experiences with a product, service, or location.
- List: Providing a numbered or bulleted list of things your readers might care about (i.e. “Top 25 Food Blogs of 2019”).
- Interview: Detailing an interview you conducted with someone your readers would care about learning from.
- Case Study: Giving a detailed example of something either you experienced or that actually happened that your readers would find fascinating (“How I Built My Startup and Made $120,000 Profit My First Year”).
- Profile: Getting into depth about an individual. You might, for example, occasionally profile other bloggers, authors, artists, engineers, or any other person that your readers may be interested in learning more about.
- Link Post: Writing a short blurb about something you read, then simply linking to it.
- Problem: Stating a problem that exists in your niche area, in the broader field, in society, or in the world.
- Comparison: Comparing two or more things (as in, “Sony TVs versus Samsung TVs: Which is Better?” or “Why I Like Target Better than Walmart”)
- Rant: Going off on something that bugs you or that you think needs to be changed.
- Inspirational: Motivating your readers to do something or feel inspired to make a difference in some way.
- Research: Detailing what you learned by researching and deep-diving into a topic.
- Collation: Combining two post types, like a research post with a comparison post.
- Prediction: Making expert-driven prediction about the outcomes of something (these are really popular in sports, as in “The Way-Too-Early Predictions for College Football’s Best Teams This Year”).
- Critique: Like a review, but providing in-depth analysis of something you feel like could be improved.
- Debate: Weighing the sides and perspectives of a current issue in your niche.
- Hypothetical: Dreaming up something that might spark interest, ideas, debate, or commentary from your readers (“What If Elon Musk’s Wild Ideas All Came True?”).
- Satirical: Taking a current topic and spinning it in some creative way (often humorously) in order to create conversation, awareness, or debate.
- Meme/Project: Designing something more visual (like a meme or infographic) that people can engage with in ways other than simply reading.
Step 3.2: Write Engaging Titles
When you’re ready to post, think of a way that will encourage your readers to want to read it. Be cautious of creating “click bait” (misleading titles that lure audiences into an interesting topic, only to cover something else), but think of ways that will entice someone to read your article. Remember that people are overwhelmed with information, so they’re not likely to read your article unless it has direct relevance and importance to them.
Step 3.3: Write Articles that Optimize Content and Length
There is no perfect formula for writing a blog article, but there are few key tips to know. Here are a two things to know about the most successful blog posts:
- Posts should be between 300 and 1,000 words. If they’re shorter than 300 words, Google doesn’t usually track them as well for their search engine. If they’re longer than 1,000 words, readers often lose attention. Granted—this is a general rule. Some posts will be better shorter than 300 words and some will need to be much longer than 1,000.
- Posts should keep SEO in mind. Remember that, while you write to humans first, you’re writing to Google’s algorithm second. If your blog posts never get found in Google, your blog won’t be read much. Think of key words (2 – 5 word phrases) that people would likely type into Google and write posts about those keywords, repeating the phrase several times in your article. If you can post the key word (phrase) into a heading and name your photos with the keywords in the file name, that will also help.
Step 3.4: Create Ideas for Series
Sometimes you’ll have more content than you want to cover in one post. And sometimes, you’ll want to keep your readers engaged in an idea for several days in a row. These are perfect opportunities for you to create a series of posts that you’ll publish over a pre-determined length of time. It can be helpful, too, as a writer, to have a series in mind so that you can write consistently. A few notes about creating series:
- Series are usually between 4 and 10 articles.
- You can publish once per day or once per week. Just determine what you think your readers will actually want.
- Start each series with an introductory post, telling readers that the series is coming.
- Make sure you complete the series. If you get readers following the series, they’ll be annoyed if you don’t complete what you said you were going to.
Step 3.5: Create a Calendar
While this step can feel annoying and time-consuming for many new bloggers, the reality is, it’s hard to keep a good, consistent writing schedule without a calendar. Always keep at least two months ahead so that you know what you want to write about. You can, of course, change your mind at any time and you’re not married to the dates and titles on your calendar. But…if you don’t have a plan for content creation, on the days when you’re not really in the mood to post, it can be difficult to think of a topic. If you have a list in a calendar, you’ll know what to write about every day.
Successful blogs have regularly updated content and content calendars will significantly help keep you on task.