3 Types of Blog Post to Keep Your Content Fresh
The trusty blog remains a stalwart of both SEO and content marketing for modern, online businesses. When managing a blog, it is crucial to maintain consistency of presentation (e.g. your readers need to know when to expect your blog to be posted), while keeping the content fresh. Here are three ideas for different types of blogs you can use to ring in the changes:
1 – The newsjacking blog
Updating your blog with news from other sources will keep it relevant. While these types of blog posts can be great for getting an extra boost from trending topics, they are best approached with a bit of common sense. In other words, avoid anything that suggests that you’re turning other people’s misery into marketing material. Some big brands, which really should have known better, have got into trouble for a lack of sensitivity when trying to jump on the back of tragedies or bad news stories.
2 – The employee interview
People want to do business with people, so give your company a human face by sharing a little about the people who are part of it. Remember, however, that a blog is essentially a story rather than the sort of biography you’d read in a LinkedIn profile.
There’s obviously a limit to how often you can interview employees, depending on the size of your company, but there are various ways you can spin this approach to generate more content. For example, if you have a corporate charity or other good cause you support, then you can feature regular updates on what individual employees are doing to support it; this can create plenty of interesting material as well as showing that your support for your partner is more than just paying lip service to corporate responsibility.
3 – The reviews and/or resources blog
These are typically variations on the list posts and how-to posts (both of which are hugely effective). The general idea is that you look for products, services and/or resources that are complementary but non-competitive to your offering and then you present your blog readers with a curated list of them, ideally adding your own comments for extra value.
For example, if you sell organic cleaning products, you may wish to create a list of the best YouTube videos that demonstrate a particular aspect of cleaning, e.g. how to clean your car. You could then add value by including a downloadable cheat sheet that lists the steps in an effective car clean for your users to print off and have handy when they are cleaning their car.
General tip – make your blog more compelling by adding pictures and/or video
It’s an old tip but it bears repeating: a good thumbnail picture grabs attention and adds to the shareability of content, while video helps to engage people. A good video may be enough to convince your customers to bookmark the main content and come back to it later.