Thursday, October 29, 2009

Five Different "Kinds" of Blog Posts


Five Different “Kinds” Of Blog Posts

Blog posts come in many different forms and lengths. If you want to keep your blog fresh and interesting, you should post often. Creating different types of blog posts will help to keep your audience interested. It will also keep you from getting bored with your blog. Whether you are blogging to make money directly from the blog or blogging to drive traffic to an affiliate program, you should know about these five kinds of blog posts.

1. The INSPECTION Blog Post.

Review blog posts can help you monetize your blog. You “inspect” – take a closer look at – a product. When you review a product and include an affiliate link, you’ll make a commission off of each sale generated with your affiliate link. Review blog posts should go over some of the major plusses and minuses of the product. Even if you loved the product, you should keep your review balanced by mentioning a few things that could have been improved. Your audience will appreciate your honesty and be more likely to trust your recommendation.

2. The INSIGHTS Blog Post.

Quick tips are great “in between” posts since they are so short. They are normally between 100 and 250 words. If there’s a great bit of information that you want to share with your niche but it doesn’t really warrant a full blog post, you can post a quick tip. The tip should be focused on one key area of the niche. For example, “How to Grease a Muffin Pan” is a perfect quick tip article for a cooking blog.

3. The INDEX Blog Post.

Blog readers love lists! If you’ll look at the most popular blogs you’ll see that they make good use out of this type of blog posts. You can make lists fit any niche topic imaginable. They are great ways to convey information online because they can easily be scanned by web readers who like to skim over information. You can create resource lists that will help your readers find information on your niche. You can also create lists of different ways to accomplish a goal in a niche, like “5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Letter.” The possibilities are endless.

4. The INTERVIEW Blog Post.

Although these require a bit of preparation, they can be very valuable to your blog. You can interview someone in your niche and share the results of the interview with your blog readers. This will not only help provide valuable content for your blog, but you can also get more traffic to your blog. Likely, the person who you are interviewing will publicize the event on their blog and around the ‘net which will bring more traffic back to you.

5. The INSTRUCTION Blog Post.

Like quick tips, how to posts help you provide valuable information to your readers. However, unlike quick tips, these posts go into detail on a certain topic. Some how to posts are even separated out into two or three part courses. For ideas on what to create how to posts about, look at the most frequently asked questions in your niche and develop posts around those topics.