Mixing up the types of blog posts you publish is crucial for a few reasons. One, you don’t want to bore your readers. Two, when you are building thought leadership, sharing your knowledge is just as important as opining on trends in your industry. And three, taking the time to create a video, post someone else’s video (with your own commentary), or film a short video blog from the comfort of your desk is like hitting the SEO jackpot.
The key to success with any of the blog posts you write is to make sure they are keyword-rich. Try using Scribe SEO or Zemanta—they are online tools that will ensure your blog posts contain the keywords that your customers use. In no specific order, here are the 5 types of blog posts you should be writing:
1. How-to’s
These contain information your customers can actually use. They are usually short and can be written quickly. This blog post is the perfect example!
2. Fun
These are meant to be purely entertaining, and they are a great way to humanize your company. Whether your customers are other businesses or consumers, everyone likes to put a face (and personality) with a name. If done well (meaning, they really are funny), they’ll end up driving a lot of traffic to your blog and you’ll get lots of links. Here’s a great example from Hubspot.
3. Opinion pieces
These are a great way to establish thought leadership, but they require time to write. You can analyze trends; offer your view on a popular or emerging subject/tool/software/business process that is relevant to your audience; dissect someone else’s article, blog post or video; yor interview a thought leader in our industry—let them offer their opinion to your audience. If you write a few times a week, I would only do an opinion piece once or twice a month. Here’s an example, written by Ben Casnocha.
4. Bold contrarian opinion pieces
These are totally different from regular opinion pieces, which are more thoughtful in nature. A bold, contrarian opinion piece is written to start a debate, ruffle feathers and generate a lot of attention. You’ll most likely receive numerous comments, so be sure you can defend your statements. Here’s an example, written by Penelope Trunk.
5. Series
A blog series will take time to write as well, as you will be delving down deep into a particular subject. They will probably include a lot of links, screen shots, and maybe videos, but once you are done, you can turn the series into an e-book to sell or to use as a promotion to gain leads, new fans on Facebook, new subscribers to your newsletter, etc. A great example is the three- part social media series I just wrote for the Network Solutions blog.
Image by Flickr user Brice Ambrosiak (Creative Commons)
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Tags: blog writing, blogs, keywords, lead generation
Posted in Marketing, Small Business, Social Media | 4 Comments »
