Blogging is essential for any business to stay relevant in any industry. It’s beneficial for visitors and search engines to have fresh content on your website.
According to this Hubspot study, companies that published 16 or more blog posts a month received approximately 4.5 times more leads than companies that published 0-4 posts a month.
As you get your business up and running in 2018, here are 6 types of blog posts that every startup needs on its business blog.
Guest Posts
Regularly hosting guest posts can grow your traffic tremendously. In fact, Kissmetrics says it grew blog visitors to 400,000 a month with guest posts. Be selective in picking guest authors for your business blog.
By only offering guest post opportunities to industry experts, you not only make it more exclusive, but you also ensure that you’re getting quality posts that your readers actually want to read.
Another benefit to this type of post is that it allows you to sit back and have someone else create the blog content for you. Additionally, allowing experts to guest post on your site provides free promotion.
Ideally, guest authors will promote the post to followers linking back to your website.
Let’s take a look at an example from TechCrunch, a leading technology blog.
While it’s certainly not a startup, when it was first starting out a couple years ago, TechCrunch created a guest posting policy that allowed experts to create content specifically for the TechCrunch blog.
Today, as an established blog, they still feature guest posts from industry experts.
How-to Posts
Readers are drawn to how-to style articles. Share missteps and learning moments from a startup environment.
Explain what went wrong and how it was solved. This gives a more transparent view of the business and connects with your readers.
Use this opportunity for advice and provide value to your readers. This perspective will help your company build trust and loyalty with readers.
You will also gain a new vision of your own business and industry by writing about how you overcame a hurdle.
This next example, from Lightspeed, goes over many of the obstacles of starting a business. Furthermore, Lightspeed details how to overcome these obstacles – things like how to get financing and how to create a marketing plan.
Your blog post doesn’t necessarily need to be about starting your business, but ensure that your how-to topic covers something that your target market is searching for and interested in learning about.
Local Keyword Posts
If you are trying to rank for location-specific keywords, a great place to include this keyword targeting is within blog posts.
It is important to remember that you only want to target a specific location on one page – targeting the same local keyword on multiple pages will cause your pages to compete with each other in the eyes of search engines.
Start by researching what keywords you want to target, looking at how competitors in your industry rank, and determining which keywords make the most sense to include in your post.
Then, include your local keyword and various variations in the title and throughout the post in the most natural way possible.
This next example from Kratom Connection shows how creating city-specific landing pages is helpful in targeting local keywords in various service areas.
Not only is this beneficial for local SEO, but it also allows for ranking for industry-specific terms as well. Make sure to follow Kratom’s lead and ensure that your local keyword is included in your title.
Top Tips Posts
Providing your readers with tips is very important as you establish your business. It shows that you have expert insight and establishes trust with your target market.
If they feel like they can come to you for tips and tricks on industry-related topics, they are more likely to come to you to make a purchase.
So how do tip posts differ from how-to posts? They are certainly very similar. However, how-to posts go through a step-by-step process on how to solve an individual issue.
Tip posts, on the other hand, are more likely to offer multiple ways to solve a problem without going too in-depth on any of the tips.
Let’s look at an example from beauty brand BioClarity. In this blog post, they offer top acne fighting tips straight from the experts – dermatologists. By providing 16 tips, they cover a wide range of ways to treat acne.
This is especially beneficial for this topic seeing as not every tip will work for every reader, so by providing multiple tips, they are reaching a wider audience.
Types of Blog Posts: Explainer Posts
Another way to show your expertise in the industry that you’re operating in is through explainer posts.
Explainer posts allow you to go into detail about a particular industry-related topic that your target market may be looking for more information on.
Show what makes you different from competitors, though, by taking a new/different approach to explaining the topic. Make sure that you’re not just regurgitating the same information that is available all over the internet.
Bring new light to the topic by explaining it from a different angle or perhaps taking a new approach.
Our next example, from Source Capital Funding, explains how fix and flip loans are different from other types of loans.
What makes this article different is that it also explains who, besides the typical customer, can benefit from using fix and flip loans.
By taking a different approach to explaining these loans, they are able to set themselves apart from their competition.
Infographics
This final post type might be a little bit more difficult to execute, but if you have the resources to create an infographic, you are almost guaranteed to see a return on your investment.
Infographics are some of the most shared pieces of content. Their visual nature allows users to comprehend complex information more quickly.
In fact, one of the biggest benefits of infographics is that people interpret images more quickly than they interpret words, so an infographic is a great way to capture and keep the attention of visitors to your blog.
Users will be more attracted to this visual content and will likely take the time to view the entire post and absorb as much information as possible.
Let’s take a look at one more example which comes to us from CoSchedule. The infographic they created has various elements that make it interesting to visitors. They start out with doing a side by side comparison.
While this information could have presented in text form, it is easier and more interesting to the reader seeing it in a visual form.
Additionally, it’s important to note that they include an intro before presenting the infographic. This serves as a way to go a little bit more in-depth on the topic they’re covering.
This combination of text and infographic ensures that the reader is getting all the information they need to fully understand the topic.
Final Thoughts
Your business blog should reflect business goals, your brand, and your target audience.
This space is an opportunity to educate readers, brag about your business, and develop lasting relationships with customers.
And you can accomplish this by utilizing all the different types of blog posts mentioned above.
Maintaining a blog requires planning, research, and putting pen to paper (figuratively speaking).
And with the flexibility and fluidity of a startup company, a blog that publishes varied types of blog posts can generate a very high return on investment.
