The Types of Blog Posts

When you first start blogging you will probably write posts of a length that feels natural is a long as you have something to say. As you get further along into your writing it will help to break things up and create other types of posts. I’ve listed 7 types here and the purpose of creating each.

Lists Posts

List posts are often used as filler posts or when you have writers block. Just don’t think these are quick, often if you are doing your homework on the subject you will spend a lot more time on these than your medium sized posts.

Lists, especially with lots of photos, can be a relief for you and your reader. Nice visuals can help to break up the walls of text you are used to writing. It also gives you a little break to spend some time searching around the internet instead of hammering the keyboard.

Don’t use list posts all the time. Once a week is probably the maximum.

Quick Blurbs

If you don’t have a lot of time or don’t have a lot to say, a quick little post works out well. Not something to get in the habit of, but if the topic can be covered an a couple sentance or paragraphs, don’t force yourself to write more. Your readers will appreciate your brevity.

Quick Tips

A mini version of a tutorial or how-to. Sometimes good when you don’t have much to write about. Not something to get in the habit of but still worth doing a few times a month to keep a consistent post schedule.

How-Tos and Tutorials

Digging deep into a topic. Explaining how to do something, either as a post or screencast or preferably both. Both is ideal because people cannot always listen to a screencast and just watching the video without sound is pretty useless. Writing it out also gives you search engine juice (that’s a technical term) and allows readers to find a specific line of information without having to search through the video to find something. Also, text in videos can sometimes be hard to read so if you have the transcript available your readers will be happier.

Cornerstone Posts/Pages

If your posts are spokes on a wheel than the cornerstone would be the hub. Cornerstone posts or pages are where you concentrate your search optimization efforts. Build cornerstones around the main topics of your blog. These are places were you cover everything about the topic in detail and have many links going out to the individual blog posts about this topic.

Cornerstone posts or pages are essential in building authority for your topics. These pages are also handy for your readers because they can quickly find anything on the topic they might need in one central location.

Medium Sized Posts

The majority of your posts will probably fall into this category. Posts that are not too long but are able to get a point across.

Large Articles to Feature

Similar to cornerstones these are your major blog posts. The ones you might spend a couple days on instead of an hour. These posts will be used to generate social buzz outside your site and should be advertised inside your site as featured posts, in the sidebar and anywhere else you want to promote your very best work.

It would be nice if all our work was excellent but many times we have a couple iffy posts on our homepage. For first time readers this might ruin a chance to get a subscriber. So have your best work advertised on the homepage somewhere where it can be easily found.