Blogging is one of the fastest growing businesses today in the Web world. Innumerable blogs emerge every day, and that means the competition gets tougher. Blogs are written by a variety of writers: some are amateurs, others professionals. Some blog for fun while others keep it business-focused and try to make it big.

However you choose to blog, figure out the standards and stick to them. These standards can be related to the title of your blog, the niche, the content type, the design and so on. All these things together contribute to the quality of a blog. Perfecting each one is as important as actually writing posts.

In this article, we’ll discuss different types of blog posts so that you can choose the right content for your blog.

Bloggers have endless choices of niche subjects to blog about. There are personal blogs and tutorial blogs, informative blogs and world-news blogs. Professional bloggers must write within their niches in order to maintain rapport with their readers, popularity, relevancy and usefulness. A blog’s impact and power depends on its content. Hundreds of bloggers write on the same topics, so your task is to write posts that are unique and top-quality. Contents vary from blog to blog but there are few particularly popular types of content that might help you attract readers. Let’s talk about these.

The first five are the most popular and the safest, but there is great competition.

1. Tutorials / How-To

People all around the world use the Internet to look for answers and learn. Tutorial blog posts can teach almost anything: how to lose weight, how to learn photography, how to learn a language, how to understand math concepts, and so on. Take a look at this as an example.

It’s important that every blog has a focus, so write a set of tutorials or divide your tutorial blog into sub-tutorials or sections. Write within the limits you set. If your tutorial blog is about Photoshop or another such tool, write on all the various aspects of that tool, and don’t post unrelated tutorials. This will give readers a satisfactory experience, and that can lead to referrals.

The bounce rate is relatively low because readers tend to complete the tutorials they begin, and a low bounce rate is something all bloggers should want. Readers also tend to return to the teachers they learn from, and nobody is done with learning in one day.

Tutorial blogs can get popular quickly, but they can also fade fast. The competition is fierce. If your subject isn’t unique, let your teaching style be fresh—and the more interactive, the better.An interactive tutorial, well equipped with examples, images, videos, animations and so on, will definitely attract readers and serve them well.

2. News

News blogs are also very popular (like this one). News is the main ingredient in journalism, and there are always a lot of readers for such blogs; they’re attracted easily and they come back for more. News breaks every second, so content will be available on a regular basis. Readers want only the freshest news, but it can be difficult to break stories before other blogs do.Sometimes you’ll be able to report news via other news blogs, but it’s best to break stories yourself. If you want to be a real contender on this scene, stay on top of the news and serve it fresh.

Major news blogs have front pages and sub-divisions for categories like politics, economy, sports and so on. That’s one way to go. Alternatively, you can report niche news, especially if the category is large enough to cover a whole blog. For example,the political landscape in India is vast, and there are multiple political parties, so politics in India is a strong blog concept. That concept might not work for a small country or a country with a two-party system. Likewise,the world of sports is big enough to support one news blog, but the same might not be true of just tennis or soccer.

3. Reviews

Review blogs, which serve opinion pieces, are popular too; giving a review or putting forward an opinion always gets readers. Readers might or might not agree with the opinions but they’ll read anyway. This type of blog usually welcomes large numbers of comments and debate. The advantage of writing an opinion blog is that you are free to speak your mind, unlike news blogs on which you are bound by journalistic objectivity. But don’t feel you have to out-and-out revolt, because it could turn off your readers.

There are review blogs about gadgets,products, games, movies, etc. A gadget blog might introduce electronic products and review functionality, prices and features. These blogs help readers decide what to use or purchase. Typically, readership increases steadily over time. People usually do research on the Internet before committing to major purchases (laptops, washing machines, etc). They also check movie reviews before deciding what to watch. Take a look at Rotten Tomatoes. The competition is fierce in this arena as well, but readership is usually steady because readers repeatedly read the reviewers they like. They tend to compare reviews from different blogs, and they return to those they learn they can trust.

4. Entertainment

Entertainment blogs are always crowded with readers,but maintaining an entertainment blog is difficult. The big challenge with blogs like this is to entertain people well enough. They attract readers only if they themselves are entertaining because entertainment is not a necessity for readers; it’s a luxury.Entertainment-blog content can include stories, exploration, ideas, information, celebrity gossip—pretty much anything. Take a look at these.

5. Resources

Resource blog posts usually have lists or links to resources and cover all kinds of things, from study guides for students to coding language for developers. They’re popular because they give readers exactly what they are looking for: answers and support. If readers like the resources, they’ll keep coming back.

6. Content Aggregation

These blog posts, which just aggregate long posts and resources from elsewhere, are gaining in popularity.They filter the best bits out of long posts and summarize them with links that lead back to the main posts. Readers get the gist, and if they want to read on they can.

7. Interviews

Readers of interview blogs want to read the views of their idols and icons—politicians, filmmakers, actors,engineers (masters of any field). Maintaining an interview blog is not an easy task; you need to collect interviews live or from other sources and present them in a fresh way to bring readers to your blog and distract them from others.

8. Debates

Sometimes it works well to put up a story about a popular or current event and open it for debate. This encourages reader participation and interaction.

9. Images

There are also blog posts focused on images rather than text. They usually begin with introductions and include relevant commentary here and there along with the images. This kind of blog post usually explores the creative arts (painting, photography, crafts, etc) because in such fields, people are likely to search for images; images help readers to relate to subjects, and they’re more attractive than text.

10. Competitions and Contests

Host a competition and invite your readers to contribute reviews or posts by offering gifts. People will feel free to show their creativity, and they’ll hope for prizes. Your blog will become all the more interactive and popular.

11. Guest Posts

One of the best ways to connect your blog with its readers is to invite them to participate. Whenever you give your readers a voice, you attract other readers. There are two advantages of the guest post: your blog becomes interactive and it gets a fresh contribution. What’s more, you become more real and relatable to your readers.

12. Awareness

Make people aware of a cause, a social-justice issue, or some other problem faced by the world. But don’t repeat your advice because you might start to sound preachy.

Conclusion

Each of the types of content I’ve mentioned can serve as the niche topic fora whole blog. Each type can also be used on any blog that writes for any niche. A Photoshop blog, for example, might offer tutorial posts, reviews, news updates, stories, entertainment elements and links to the best Photoshop support. Content types can be blended as well; share an opinion, then open up the topic for debate, for example, or make a tutorial that primarily uses images.

Hopefully the task of choosing content has been made easier by this article. Just remember that your content needs to be unique enough to strike readers and useful enough to build relationships with them. Strong content that is presented well will help your blog make its mark on the Web.

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