You’re staring at a blank screen, wondering which types of content you can create for your blog. I’ve been there—struggling to think of anything new when it comes to your creative content marketing efforts—but your posts aren’t getting many comments or shares.
Worse yet, you’re hardly making any money from your blog—which was one of the reasons you decided to start a blog in the first place.
You know you should shake things up with your blog content marketing, but how exactly do you do that? In this detailed guide, I’m going to take you through 42 different types of content marketing (including real high quality content examples) to inspire your content marketing strategy this year.
The great thing about having a wide variety of content on your blog, is that it gives you lots of different ways to appeal to readers. It also provides you with opportunities to go after different keywords in your niche, improving your blog’s search engine traffic (SEO) and thus ranking higher on Google. 👋 Try my free keyword research tool to help a lot with deciding which topics you should write about in the first place.
Sound good? Here’s the even better news—along the way, I’ll be sharing lots of examples of these types of blogging content from right here on my blog and elsewhere around the web, so you can see how these content types work in action.
To make it quick and easy for you to dig into this list of successful blog content types, here’s a handy table of contents you can use. Just click on a type of content marketing that looks exciting and you’ll jump straight to that point in the guide.
42 Types of Content Marketing for Your Blog (Successful Blog Content Types) in 2023
- How To Content
- Listicles
- Reviews
- Case Studies
- Beginner’s Guides
- FAQs
- Tutorials
- Industry News and Company News
- Product Comparisons (A vs B)
- Resource Lists
- Problems and Solutions
- Behind-the-Scenes
- Infographics
- Photos
- Charts and Diagrams
- Screenshots
- Slideshows or Photo Galleries
- Memes or Gifs
- Quotes
- Audio Recordings
- Podcast Episodes
- Videos
- Live Streaming
- Guest Posts
- Expert Roundups
- Interviews
- Reader Surveys
- Quizzes
- Contests and Competitions
- Whitepapers
- Checklists
- Templates
- Webinars
- Mini eBooks
- Workbooks or Worksheets
- Cheat Sheets
- Online Courses
- Testimonials
- Success Stories
- Comments
- Social Media Posts
- Emails from Readers
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products and services I’ve personally used and stand behind. When you use one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my in-depth high quality content free of charge for readers (like you).
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Written Types of Content Marketing for Your Blog (Guides, Case Studies, Long-Form Content and More)
When you think about the different types of content marketing, you probably picture written content. Most blogs are made up primarily of text—and that’s a great thing, because it makes it easy for Google to find and rank your content with better blog SEO best practices.
It’s easy to feel a little burned out on your written content creation, though—especially if you keep producing the same types of blog posts over and over again. To spark your imagination, here’s a list of great written content types to try.
1. How To Content
It’s usually safe to assume that most of your readers are beginners in your topic area—and “how to” posts are a source of great high quality content for helping those beginners get up to speed in your niche.
Another big advantage of “how to” posts is that they’re often long-form content by nature, which means they’re great for traffic that comes from your search engine optimization efforts (also known as SEO). People will often turn to Google when looking for instructions on how to do something, so it’s a smart move in your content marketing strategy to have plenty of foundational “how to” articles.
Examples of these types of content marketing:
- How to Start a Blog (and Make Money)—Easy and Free Beginner’s Tutorial (ryrob.com)
- How to Start Mountain Biking for Beginners (Two Wheeled Wanderer)
- How to Write a Blog Post (Ultimate Writing Guide for Bloggers) This Year (ryrob.com)
2. Listicles
Listicles, or list posts, are incredibly popular with audiences looking for some guidance & direction. Whether you’re aiming to entertain, educate, share tips or inspire, you should absolutely make use of the list format in your content marketing strategy.
Listicles can be a little deceptive, though. They look easy—but you’ll want to put in plenty of time and thought to produce a great listicle that stands out from the crowd.
Example of this type of content: 50 Best Blogging Tools (Marketing, SEO, Writing and More) to Use This Year (ryrob.com)
3. Reviews
Reviews are a great type of content for two reasons. First, they bring in search engine traffic: people often look for reviews of software, books, and other products they’re thinking of buying.
Secondly, reviews are a great source of revenue from affiliate marketing. If someone reads your review, clicks your affiliate link, and makes a purchase, you’ll get some commission.
Example: 25 Bluehost Reviews: An Honest Compilation of Real Bluehost Reviews (ryrob.com)
4. Case Studies
Case studies are a really strong type of content for any business (or blog) that sells a product or service. Simply choose a happy customer, interview them about how they use your product/service and what benefits it brought, then write a post about it.
You can also offer case studies about your own experiences: this is a great opportunity for affiliate marketing where you can share stories about how you’ve grown your business as a result of using a particular tool you’re now promoting to your own audience. You could also write case studies of people or businesses for your readers to learn from, which makes for really compelling forms of content.
Examples of these types of content marketing campaigns:
- 20 Best Blog Examples (to Learn From): Case Study of Successful Blogs (ryrob.com)
- How Customer.io Uses Automated Handoffs to Enable Sales (Close)
5. Beginner’s Guides
A beginner’s guide is designed to tackle a key area that beginners will need to work through before they can benefit fully from your other high quality content. This content format is extremely popular in the world of digital marketing, because it gives the blogger an opportunity to showcase the full range of their knowledge while helping beginners find their footing.
It’s also a great opportunity to link to further information on your site, so that beginners can dig deeper around your blog—either on specific steps within the guide or as next steps after completing your guide.
Example of this type of blog content: The Beginner’s Guide to the Gym (Barbend)
6. FAQs
One of the oldest content formats on the web, a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) web page can be a great addition to almost any website—or even a great feature of an individual blog post where readers come with a lot of questions.
On a blog, you’ve got a couple of options with the FAQ format: you can either create a huge blog post rounding up the biggest FAQs in your niche, or you can pick individual FAQs to tackle as separate blog posts (potentially linking them together in a blog post series).
Example of this kind of blog content: Frequently Asked Questions About College Life (iSchoolConnect)
7. Tutorials
Tutorials are perfect for blogs in specific niches, particularly technology, craft, cooking, and beauty. Basically, if there’s a process that you can teach step by step with images, that kind of content could become a tutorial your audience could benefit from.
Your tutorial should take readers through a whole process from start to end. It’s also a good idea to include tips on troubleshooting, plus photos, screenshots, or diagrams to help new audiences follow your instructions.
Example of this type of blogger content: How to Create a WordPress Table of Contents Menu (No Plugin) (ryrob.com)
8. Industry News and Company News
Depending upon your blog niche and your blogging style, you might share about industry news or company news. Even if your blog focuses on evergreen content, rather than news stories, you might want to include occasional topical content that’s impacting your broader industry. Insights into what’s going on inside your company can go a long way to build trust, thought leadership and forge deeper relationships with your customers too.
Most bloggers won’t be breaking news stories—instead, you can give a brief overview of the facts (linking to sources), along with your thoughts or opinion on the piece of news. Keep in mind too, that company news is often of deep interest to customers and potential customers alike—and simultaneously gives you an opportunity to build brand awareness with new audiences.
Example of this type of content: The MozCon 2022 Final Agenda Is Here! (Moz.com)
9. Product Comparisons (A vs B)
Product comparisons have similar benefits to product reviews, but they’re a tried and true digital marketing form of content that’s structured to compare two similar products, software tools, or services.
The most effective product comparisons tend to compare different aspects of each product or service as objectively as possible, perhaps having a section on “Features” that looks at both A and B, then a section on “Price” comparing A and B, and so on. If you can incorporate real product testing (and some video) into your content creation process here, it’ll make for much more valuable content for your audience.
Example of this type of blogging content: Bluehost vs Dreamhost (Comparison): Best Bargain Web Hosting? (ryrob.com)
10. Resource Lists
Publishing a list of resources can be useful for several different reasons. First, it lets you show your expertise in your niche (i.e. showing that you’ve read lots of relevant blogger books or business books).
Second, a resource list like my free blog planner bundle offers real value to your reader—so much so, that some bloggers use resource lists as downloadable content that requires an email address. And third, it can be a great way to bring in affiliate revenue, if you link to the resources using affiliate links.
Example of this type of content: 18 Best Free Blogging Resources (for All Bloggers to Grow Faster) (ryrob.com)
11. Problems and Solutions
Your target audience may not realize that you can help with the problems they’ve been struggling with—until you publish a post that does just that. (Sometimes, they may not even be able to articulate what the problems are until they see your blog post’s title—which is why you should always use a blog title generator tool to make sure your headlines are on point.)
A “problems and solutions” post will present a list of mistakes to avoid or stop doing, along with things to do instead. It’s crucial that you include the solutions—you don’t want to just tell readers everything they’re getting wrong!
Example of this type of blog content: Raising Resilient Kids: The 5 Things You Should Stop Doing Right Now (A Fine Parent)
12. Behind-the-Scenes Content
A behind-the-scenes post draws readers deeper into your story—helping them to get to know you. It can also be a great way to share lessons learned or top tips.
There are lots of different ways to create a behind-the-scenes post. You could write about your morning routine, share income reports, or give the readers an insight into part of the world they wouldn’t normally see. In fact, I like to add some behind-the-scenes content to every landing page I make when I’m launching a new online course, showing potential students exactly what they’re getting (and who I am).
Example of this type of content: Blog Income Reports: How I Earn $30,000+/mo from My Blog (ryrob.com)
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Visual Types of Content for Your Blog (Infographics and More)
Even if your readers enjoy long-form written content, it’s smart to break things up with more visually-focused posts from time to time in your content marketing strategy. This can work for almost any niche, though it’s particularly important for niches like photography, travel, beauty, lifestyle, and for blogs that are designed more for entertainment than information or inspiration.
Before you begin producing visual content marketing assets, make sure you check out these best practices for using images on your blog. Then, dig into these visual types of blog content.
13. Infographics
Infographics have been around for decades, but they became hugely popular online around 2013-2015. While you won’t see them popping up quite so frequently now, they’re still an incredibly useful form of visual content, plus they tend to generate a lot of backlinks and create opportunities for spikes of traffic from large sites & publications.
There are lots of tools you can use to create your own infographic: you don’t need to pay a designer. You’ll want to make sure your infographic is as useful and interesting as possible, especially if you’re hoping it’ll get as many social media shares as possible—or backlinks from other popular blogs.
Example of this type of content: How to Write a Blog Post (That Captures Reader Attention) + Infographic (ryrob.com)
14. Photos
Plenty of blogs use photos to enhance their written content, often adding stock photos at or near the start of a blog post to draw in the reader’s visual attention. But you could also use photos as the basis for a type of blog content even in its own rite.
This doesn’t just apply to photography and travel blogs, either. All sorts of blogs can publish photo collections—and these can be a great way to connect with your readers. If your blog is for a business, for instance, you might publish photos from a recent staff team-building day that can humanize your company to your audience.
Example of this blogging content type: 5 Couples Photography Tips for Wonderful Images (Digital Photography School)
15. Charts or Diagrams
Charts or diagrams can make for a great foundation of an entire blog post (and are their own types of content on their own). Sometimes, you might incorporate simple charts or diagrams into an infographic (or as supporting visual material throughout your written content), but more complex ones might even work best on their own as a sort of analytical report.
These types of content can work especially well for any blog that covers technical, medical, or academic topics. You can also make good use of charts or diagrams to humorous effect (as Buzzfeed demonstrates here).
Example of these blog content types: How to Perform a Sales Analysis (Step-by-Step): Methods & Metrics (Close)
16. Screenshots
Screenshots can form the basis of a tutorial post, with relatively minimal text. You could even overlay text on the screenshots to show what to do (e.g. “click here” plus an arrow)—though do add the instructions to the image’s alt text, too, to help make your post accessible.
There are lots of tools you can use to take and edit screenshots, such as SnagIt. These make it easy to annotate your screenshots, crop them down, zoom in on certain areas, and more.
Example of these types of content: 12 Blog Layout Examples (and Best Practices) to Learn From This Year (ryrob.com)
17. Slideshows or Photo Galleries
Slideshows or image galleries can make a great visual form of quality blog content. You can often repurpose these from a slideshow that you’ve already created (e.g. for an in-person talk or for a webinar).
You can upload slideshows to SlideShare: this lets you easily embed them in your blog post but also means they can be found by people searching on SlideShare. With photo galleries, you can easily use a WordPress plugin to allow readers to flick through the photos.
Example of this type of blogging content: Vertical Gardens: Slide Show (Garden Design)
18. Memes or Gifs
Who doesn’t love a great meme or gif? These types of content won’t always necessarily fit your blogging brand—but if you tend to be lighthearted or downright funny in your content & tone, some well-chosen memes and gifs can add a lot of life to your blog (and make you that much more memorable to your audience).
Keep in mind that since gifs are technically short videos on a loop, they’ll add to your page load time and potentially slow down your blog. You probably won’t want to have too many of these forms of content in a single article.
Example of this type of blog content marketing: Here’s Every US State Described Perfectly By A Meme (Buzzfeed)
19. Quotes
Lists of inspirational quotes are very popular online—but you could offer a twist on this trend by offering funny quotes, insightful quotes, or even the stupidest quotes from your niche to make for a high quality experience that adds something new to the conversation.
You could put together a post of the quotes in an interesting, graphical format or you could use text for your quotes but include photos of the people the quotes are from.
Example of this type of content: 51 Blogging Quotes to Motivate and Inspire Your Blogging This Year (ryrob)
Video and Audio Types of Content Marketing for Your Blog
I’m not going to give lots of different examples of video and audio content types, as that would take us out of the realm of pure blogging and into something more like starting a podcast or video blogging. Creating high quality audio and video content also requires special equipment that you might not have.
However, there are a few basic audio and video types of content marketing for your blog that you’ll want to consider.
20. Audio Recordings
Some bloggers produce audio recordings of their posts. This can make for a very time-consuming piece of content—but it also helps make these types of content significantly more accessible to your target audience. You could use these recordings for a podcast or simply publish them on your blog as an alternative way to consume your blog posts.
To create a good, clear audio recording, you’ll want a decent microphone. I’ve listed some great, cheap USB podcast microphones here that still record excellent quality audio, so that’s a great place to start if you’re looking for recommendations.
Example of this type of blogging content marketing: 7 Tips for Opening Your Story In Medias Res (K.M. Weiland) (scroll down to the bottom for the audio recording)
21. Podcast Episodes
Some bloggers also start a podcast—though I’d definitely recommend you don’t try to start both at the same time if you’re new to each of these channels. If you’re struggling to decide which to start first, check out my tips on blogs vs podcasts. And for an example of how I ran my own podcast, check out this episode with best-selling author Jeff Goins.
It’s a great idea to publish your podcast episodes on your blog. Some readers will listen from your blog itself, and may not use a dedicated podcast app on their phone. You could also include a transcript of the episode, or detailed notes, to both make it more accessible and help with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Example of these blog content types: Reach: Create the Biggest Audience For Your Book With Becky Robinson (The Creative Penn)
22. Videos
You can include videos in your blog posts, either with a short introduction and notes—or with the video content being used as an example, supplement or an alternative to the written instructions in the article.
Make sure you do this by uploading your video to YouTube or Vimeo, then embedding it in your blog post. Don’t upload the video to your media library and then add it to your post: that will end up eating a huge amount of your bandwidth, along with a chunk of your storage space.
Example of this blogging content type: How to Migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (SmartWP)
23. Live Streaming (Live Video)
The only thing more interactive than video content is doing a live stream where you’ll be interacting in real-time with your audience, wherever they tune in from around the world. You can think of live streaming like a webinar, but often with a bit less structure (usually no slides or a presentation, per se). Take this content example of Bob Ross live streaming on Twitch:
While live streaming tends to be most popular in the video game space, it’s becoming more common with other creative fields where artists & musicians often launch live streams to collaborate with their audience or give them a glimpse into what their creative process looks like—making for some of the most uniquely valuable content.
Example of this form of content: Bob Ross on Twitch (Live Streaming Channel) (Bob Ross on Twitch)
Collaborative Types of Blogging Content
If you’re not yet at the stage where you can afford to pay freelance writers to create content for you, then you might be struggling to keep up your enthusiasm for writing yet another blog post.
This is where collaborative content comes in. There are plenty of successful blog content types that require very little writing on your part.
24. Guest Posts
You might mainly think of guest blogging in terms of the content you can write for other blogs. However, accepting guest posts for your blog is also a great opportunity. It gives you a break from writing, introduces readers to a new perspective, helps you build relationships within your niche and exposes your work to new audiences.
If you plan to use guest posts on a regular basis, you might want to draw up a set of guest post guidelines that you can provide to your potential guest writers—and employ my blogger outreach strategies to get the attention of your prospective guest blog hosts.
Examples of these types of content:
- How to Buy a Blog (and Make Money) from a Blog Acquisition (guest post by Manuela Domingos on ryrob.com)
- The 3 Things That Make Work Meaningful (by me on the Buffer blog)
- 25 Best Sales Strategies & Templates for Startups and SMBs (by me on the Close blog)
25. Expert Roundups
Expert roundups bring together a bunch of different big names in your niche, sharing their perspective on a particular question or topic. For that reason, these types of blog posts are often some of the highest quality content on a particular subject matter—which makes them invaluable resources for your target audience (and your blog).
These are most often created by emailing influencers and thought leaders in your industry, then asking them to contribute a short quote to the post (they’ll get a backlink to their website in return). Another option, though, is to look through their blog and find a quote to use in your roundup. Both methods do require quite a bit of admin time.
Example of this type of content: 40 Top Bloggers Share Best Blogging Advice (to Grow Quickly) This Year (ryrob.com)
26. Interviews
Lots of blogs publish written interviews with other bloggers in their niche. You could run a series of these, asking the same questions each time: this makes it really quick and easy to gather this piece of content for your interviews.
If you’re contacting people who get interviewed a lot, try to come up with some unusual and interesting questions. They’ll be bored of answering the same sorts of questions again and again … and your readers may well have already read or heard their answers elsewhere.
On the flip side of this type of content, you can build your own thought leadership by offering yourself up as an interviewee for popular podcasts or YouTube channels in your niche.
Example of this blogging content: Ryan Robinson Shares the Secret to Becoming an Affiliate Marketing Influencer (Cloudways)
27. Reader Surveys
You might already be surveying your readers to get useful input on what to blog about and what products to create … but have you considered using your survey results as blog content?
Sharing results from surveys can be a great conversation starter and may well lead to other blogs linking to yours, along with lots of social shares. It can also help build a stronger sense of community on your blog, as your readers realize that other people share their opinions, struggles, or preferences.
Example of these blog content types: Survey: 80% of Freelance Writers Are Concerned About the PRO Act Affecting Their Ability to Work (Make a Living Writing)
28. Quizzes
Another really fun form of content that involves your audience proactively, is quizzes. By offering your readers a quiz to take, they’re more likely to be engaged with your content than if you’d instead just sent out your regular weekly blog post email. It shakes things up!
Not only does it often provide more valuable content to your target audience, but it also gives you the opportunity to collect useful insights, trends and data points. In part, that’s how I’ve compiled my roundup of the latest blogging statistics—by sending periodic quizzes to my audience.
Example of this type of blog content: Should I Start a Blog? 8 Questions to Ask in This Free Quiz (ryrob.com)
29. Contests and Competitions
Running a contest or competition can be a great way to come up with content for your blog, if you ask readers to contribute a tip, photo, story, or something else that you could use as part of a blog post. (Plus, a short post announcing your contest—or a giveaway—is also useful blog content.)
If you have a photography blog, you might run a contest that asks readers to submit, say, their best underwater photograph. You could then bring together the top 10 underwater photographs in a blog post and announce the winner.
Example: The World Through Your Lens: Our 25th Anniversary Travel Photography Competition (Audley)
Downloadable Blogging Content Types (for Your Blog)
As well as writing blog posts, many bloggers will produce some kind of downloadable content to use as a lead magnet. This is an incentive for readers to sign up for the blogger’s email list—offering them something of immediate value.
You may want to produce several different pieces of downloadable content, promoting these through different blog posts. Some great types of content to consider are:
30. Whitepapers
A business whitepaper is an in-depth report on a particular topic, usually presenting a problem and offering a solution. If you have a blog that’s aimed at business owners, then creating a downloadable whitepaper is an example of smart gated types of content that you can offer in exchange for a new reader’s email address.
Compared with short eBooks, whitepapers tend to require a lot more research. They’ll cite sources and take a more serious, business-like tone than lots of other forms of content. Think of them as something more like an academic paper than a regular blog post.
Example of this content type: The HubSpot Ecosystem: Nearly $19 Billion in New Opportunity Ahead (HubSpot)
31. Checklists
Checklists are hugely popular with blog readers in many different niches. This type of content marketing doesn’t require lots of upfront time investment from the reader—in fact, a good checklist should help save them a lot of time.
You can create checklists for almost anything. You can use checklists for a step-by-step process (like finding and booking a great-value flight) and you can also use them for items (like foods to keep in your store cupboard) that will likely be checked off in a non-linear way.
Example of these types of content marketing: Kitchen Essentials Checklist + Guide (The Culinary Letter)
32. Templates
Like checklists, templates are great for readers as they save time. Most templates will be set up as documents or spreadsheets, but you could also create templates for specific software or apps, such as Notion templates or even Google Docs, Google Sheets or their Microsoft Word & Microsoft Excel counterparts.
For example, if you run a craft or parenting blog, you could also offer printable templates for use in craft activities. Or on the other hand, I have a much more in-depth template that’s very popular on my blog, which helps new bloggers develop a business plan around growing their readership.
Example of this type of blog content: How to Create a Blog Business Plan (Free Template) (RyRob.com)
33. Webinars
While you may not think of a webinar as downloadable content, you could offer access to a pre-recorded webinar as a freebie when joining an email list in your greater content marketing strategy. At Close, webinars have been one of our most successful lead generation strategies that have help get more subscribers for our email marketing efforts.
Another option is to provide downloadable slides or other resources related to your webinar, either for your email list itself, or to encourage people to sign up for the webinar.
Example of this content type: Execute a Technical SEO Site Audit Like a Pro (Moz)
34. Mini eBooks
Short eBooks make great email list incentives. If you don’t want to come up with entirely new content and write an eBook from scratch, you could put together an eBook that collates blog posts or email newsletters, perhaps with some extra material as a bonus.
Most free eBooks are provided in PDF format, to make them easy to download and view on any device.
Example of these types of blog content: The Ultimate Fat Loss and Body Composition Ebook (Mind Performance Health)
35. Workbooks or Worksheets
A more interactive alternative to an eBook, a workbook will contain some text along with opportunities for the reader to make notes and write answers to questions. If you don’t want to create a whole workbook, you could create an individual worksheet.
Ideally, you’ll want to use an editable PDF that the reader can type into, but you could also supply your workbook as a read-only Google document (with instructions telling the reader how to copy it) or as a printable workbook.
Example of these blog content types: Organize Your Craft Room Workbook (The Keeper of the Memories)
36. Cheat Sheets
A “cheat sheet” is a quick reference that readers can turn to time and time again. There’s often quite a bit of overlap between cheat sheets and checklists, though a cheat sheet typically won’t contain items that all need to be checked off.
Cheat sheets can work as powerful types of content in almost any niche, and you can create them for both total beginners and even your more advanced target audiences.
Example of this type of blogging content: Must-Have Lunch Packing Cheat Sheet (Veggies & Virtue)
37. Online Courses
While many online courses are premium products that require a one-off or subscription payment, some online courses are provided free—in return for an email address. Take for example some of the top blogging courses and online business courses on the market today—both a mix of free and paid options.
You could use a useful blogging tool to deliver your course, or you could offer it as a downloadable PDF or a series of emails. Either way, an online course is the ultimate long-form content that’s designed to comprehensively teach a subject. Your course might consist of written lessons, video lessons, or both. You could also include other elements that we’ve discussed, like workbooks.
Example of this kind of content: Built to Blog: Get Your First 10,000 Readers (ryrob.com)
User-Generated Types of Content Marketing for Your Blog (Social Media Posts, Testimonials, Comments and More)
Your readers are producing content all the time—you just might not have noticed it yet. User-generated content marketing (has become incredibly profitable for businesses over the past decade or so. Just think of all the people creating videos for social media platforms like TikTok, images for Instagram, threads from LinkedIn & Twitter—that’s rich digital marketing fuel you can use for your cause (with proper permission, of course).
Your own blog content can take advantage of user-generated content, too. This isn’t just a great way to save yourself some content creation time—it also lets you put your readers front and center, helping you build a stronger relationship with them.
38. Testimonials
Testimonials are a really powerful type of user-generated content as they can help you sell your products or services. A short but glowing testimonial can be more effective than pages of material that you write yourself, as it’s a type of content that shows readers what real people think about your product or service.
You can include testimonials in blog posts where you announce a new product or a product update—or you could even write a blog post that brings together a bunch of different testimonials.
Example of these types of content: Here’s What Customers Have to Say About Close (Close)
39. Success Stories
One step beyond just a shorter-form testimonial from a customer, is working with them to create more in-depth success stories that can shed even more light on how your product or service has helped a particular customer achieve their goals or better their lives. Success stories are one of the most powerful types of content you can create, because it’s a content format that allows your customers to do the talking for you.
You can weave in success stories throughout your blog posts where you talk about the benefits of a particular product or service—or you can even promote a success story as a standalone form of content that’ll deliver value to your audience.
Example of this type of content: How My Content Marketing Consulting Got 11,000+ Shares for My Client (ryrob.com)
40. Comments
Readers may leave some really insightful ideas and share some great stories in the comments section of your blog posts—but most other readers won’t scroll down that far.
Bring these comments into the spotlight by including them in a blog post. You could do that by using the comment as a starting point for your post (especially if it includes a question) or by bringing together several comments to share readers’ tips or ideas.
Example of this content type: Mortification Week: the winter party, the wet socks, and other stories to cringe over (Ask a Manager)
41. Social Media Posts
The high quality content your audience (and influencers in your space) publish on social media platforms can also become great content for your blog. If you’re a book blogger, for instance, you could bring together fan videos from TikTok to share on your blog.
Where possible, embed the social media post rather than taking a screenshot of it, like this example of using Tweets & Twitter threads as embedded content examples. This is a better way to credit the person who posted it, too.
Example of these blog content types: 21 Relatable Tweets for Everyone Running Out of Steam At Work (HuffPost)
42. Emails from Readers (Q&As and AMAs)
Some readers won’t comment on blog posts—they’ll email you instead. You might get an email that contains some great questions or insights, and you could share that in a blog post. Or on the flip side, you could offer a Q&A session or AMA (Ask Me Anything) session where you’ll answer your readers questions right there on your blog or in a live video format.
Of course if you go the email route, you should always get permission before sharing a private email on your blog. Check whether your reader is happy for their name to be included—and be careful not to share personal information in these types of content that are publicly available (like their email address or full name).
Example of this type of blog content: Ask Me Anything: How Do I Break The News To My List? (IttyBiz)
Which of These Successful Types of Blog Content Marketing Will You Try Today?
I’ve shared lots of types of content above—and now it’s your turn to pick some. Don’t forget though, that the best content always comes from delivering meaningful solutions to your target audience.
Choose at least three different types of content that you haven’t tried in your blog’s content marketing efforts before.
- One type of content piece to create this week (i.e. a post of motivational quotes)
- One larger blog content example to create this month (i.e. a beginner’s guide post)
- One in-depth piece of blogging content to work towards launching next month (i.e. a downloadable checklist)
If you want to go further, use my editorial calendar template to plan out the forms of content you want to create as part of your content marketing strategy for the next 6–12 months.
By planning ahead, you’ll be able to make time for bigger pieces of content that help bring you lots of new traffic and leads. As those pieces add up, they’ll help you build a truly successful blog.
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These are all solid possibilities for content marketing. Listicles, e-books, and the like are especially handy when it comes to repurposing content, repackaging and distributing it in different ways.
Nice! Glad to hear it, thanks Carola 🙂
Thanks Ryan, This post is full of information.. Again nailed it!
Nice! Glad to hear it—thanks for the kind words 🙂
wow worth reading articles
🙏
wow worth reading blog
Thanks! 🙂
How long did it took you to rank on Google or even have consistent visitors? I am guessing it took a lot of patience and writing these blog posts..
Just wondering how affiliate marketing can get you money?
Yeah it takes a good amount of time, even when your site is well-established! Expect it to take 1-3 months to rank on the first page of search results if you’re going after a competitive keyword phrase… and that’s if you’re building links to your content through guest posting, promoting it on social media channels, etc. Here are a couple of good guides for you:
Here’s my (free) in-depth guide about how to promote your blog: https://www.ryrob.com/how-to-promote-your-blog/
Here’s my (free) guide on how I monetize my blog with affiliate marketing here: https://www.ryrob.com/make-money-blogging/