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.

B is for Blogging

Blogging is a powerful web platform that can be used in a wide variety of ways online. It can help you build a reputation in your niche, build your relationship with your customers and drive traffic to your own product or your affiliate links.

In other words, it can help ya make money!

What is it?

Blogs are websites where the freshest content is posted first. Normally, posts are listed in chronological order. There may be some static content in the sidebars or on other pages of the blog, but the homepage is updated when there is a new post. Visitors can post comments on your articles and you have the opportunity to create a real community in your niche.

Blogs are popular because they are very accessible. You don’t have to know much about setting up a website in order to use one. That makes them VERY “beginner friendly”. Once the initial set up is complete, they are as easy to use as a word processing program. To top it off, visitors love blogs because they can interact with the content. With a few smart posts and some traffic generation strategy you can quickly have an authority site in your niche.

What are three keys to doing it successfully?

1.CHOOSING THE RIGHT BLOGGING PLATFORM.

There are several different blogging platforms available to get you started with blogging. Wordpress has a bit of a learning curve but it is by far the best in terms of usability. You can completely customize your Wordpress blog so that it looks totally unique. You can also install several different plugins to make your blog more user friendly. For example, one Wordpress plugin automatically suggests related posts on your blog underneath each post to encourage visitors to explore your website. Here's a great Word Press tutorial that covers everything from getting started to optimizing your blog for the search engines.

2.CREATING FRESH CONTENT POSTS.

A successful blog has to be updated at least once a week, at the very minimum. Many successful bloggers add new posts every weekday. You should plan to have new content on your blog at least once every seven days. This can be accomplished easily if you create an editorial calendar. Write down a variety of different topics and plan when you will post them to your blog. With Wordpress you can even write them ahead of time and schedule them to be automatically added to your blog at a certain date and time.

3.CULTIVATING YOUR BLOG FOR PROFIT.

It’s very easy to make money with blogs and you have a few different options to choose from. With your blog, you can make money through contextual advertising with ads that are displayed on your blog. You get paid when someone clicks on the advertising. You can also link to affiliate products or sell your own product from your blog.

Can you give me an example?

You’ve discovered that there is a demand for knowledge on cooking gluten free meals, something you have a lot of experience with. You start a blog about gluten free cooking and post your favorite recipes each week. After several months, you decide to write your own online cookbook and sell it from your blog.

Not sure what to right? Here are 5 different kinds of blog posts to get you started.