7 Types of Content to Create for Your Blog or Website

When you’re running a blog or a website, you’ll want to create different types of content for your readers to consume.

In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the best post types to generate traffic, earn money and support the content you’ve already published.

Whether you’re running one site or multiple, consistently creating ‘evergreen’ content will stand you in good stead for the future. Creating content that ranks takes hours, days, and sometimes weeks, so the fewer times you need to go through this process, the better. Right?

So, what is ‘evergreen content’? To sum it up in a sentence: it’s content that stays relevant for a long time. In the tech niche, “a long time” could be six months to a year! In other niches, it could be two to three years or longer.

It will need updating from time to time to stay evergreen forever, but those updates shouldn’t take long. And in the meantime, you’ll see a steady flow of traffic and earnings from ads and/or affiliate commissions.

Let’s take a look at some of the types of blog posts you could create to add variety and keep people interested.

1) How-tos and tutorials

The vast majority of blogs use how-to guides and tutorials as the basis for most of their posts. After all, people turn to the web to find out how to do something so how-to guides work in just about every niche.

If you can get your article into the top results for competitive phrases, you’ll see steady traffic for years to come.

How long should you spend writing one? It depends on the task you’re describing. If it’s complicated, with many steps requiring a screenshot for each, a decent tutorial can easily take a few hours to get right.

2) Beginner guides

Beginner guides could be lumped into the ‘how-tos and tutorials’ category, but I’ve given them their own as a beginner guide doesn’t need to go into the same detail as a how-to guide.

That’s because a how-to shows the step-by-step process to do something. A beginner’s guide takes a broader look at a subject.

Here are a few examples of beginner guides for you, all published on this site:

• A Beginner’s Guide to Web Hosting
• How to Build a WordPress Website
• What is Affiliate Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide

Within the context of a blog, a beginner’s guide is often used at the top of the funnel to attract people who know little to nothing about a subject. From the post, you could filter people through to other areas of your site by turning relevant keywords and phrases into hyperlinks.

Alternatively, link out to your affiliate partners.

Better yet, use a mixture of both of these methods (as I try to do in the articles listed above and other sites I run).

3) Personal opinion

A strong opinion piece related to your niche can generate a ton of traffic and quickly grow your audience.

If you really want to go for the jugular and piss people off, write something controversial.

I mean really controversial.

Get it in front of influencers so they share it with their audiences and prepare yourself for the inevitable backlash. It will come. But that’s the point in writing a strong and emotional piece. You want to attract new people who think like you and feel the same way about whatever it is you’re writing about.

There will be haters.

Once they’ve had their say and the dust has settled, you’re left with your tribe.

4) Personal experience

When it comes to blogging, creating content about your experiences is an excellent way to grow an audience, generate traffic, and earn money. This topic bleeds slightly into the next one (reviews), but depending on the subject and how you format your post, can be treated very differently.

The type of post I’m thinking about covers personal travel experiences, a journey through an illness, growing a business, or anything else your audience finds relatable or that people search for.

5) Product reviews

Product reviews, with affiliate links to Amazon or other online retailers, are a great way to increase the revenue potential of your website.

But there’s a problem.

On 8 April 2021, Google announced the Product Reviews Update. This broad core update rolled out over twenty-two days and had a major negative impact on some affiliate websites that contain ‘thin’ reviews.

The update is designed to reward reviewers that go to the trouble of buying and using a product before finally writing a review about it. Once again, Google’s looking for real-world experience and authenticity because it wants to show searchers the best content for their query.

Before the update, a lot of the content for Amazon niche sites (as they’re known) was created by curating information from product descriptions by the manufacturer, buyers’ comments on Amazon, and other reviews of the same product.

This was exactly the type of content Google wanted to tackle.

So, if product (or service) reviews are going to play a large part in your content strategy, the best way to go about it is to create completely original content and to use your own photos rather than those supplied by the manufacturer inside for the review.

And if you can go a step further and create a video, which you can post on your YouTube channel (with affiliate links embedded in the description (it’s allowed, but include a disclosure in your video)) you’ll add another level of authenticity to your review.

6) Listicles

People love lists. They love to read ’10 best this’ or ’75 best that’. You’re reading one now!

Put simply, a listicle article is made of a list of things associated with a topic. They’re similar to the beginner guides mentioned above in that they attract people at the top of the funnel, at the start of their journey.

Say you’re on the lookout for a new smart TV. You’ll likely start by searching for ‘best smart tv 2021’. You’ll almost certainly find a couple of listicle articles in the results. Chances are you’ll click on them to see what’s on the market (because you have no clue at this stage).

Listicles work in any niche.

If you want to try this type of article, and I think you should, studies have shown that people prefer odd numbers over even numbers, so use 5, 7, 9, 15, 21, etc over 6, 10, 14, 26, 50.

7) Round-ups

The next type of post I want to mention is the round-up. Typically, you ask X amount of people their opinion on a subject your readers care about and post their answers in the form of a blog post.

It’s not the kind of post you create in a day, but they have enormous potential to bring in readers and get social shares as almost everyone you feature will share it through their social media profiles.

The people to ask are the big-wigs, the people with authority, opinions, and expertise. You want to tap into their world and get them to do some marketing for you.

They’re very common around the web, and I’m sure you’ve seen them before.

BONUS SUGGESTION

News

Generally, this isn’t the kind of content I’d publish on my sites because the life cycle is short compared to evergreen content. But it might work for you.

Google says that around 15% of the phrases entered into its famous search box each year have never been searched for before. A lot of those phrases relate to the launch of new products, news and entertainment events (sports, music, movies, etc).

If you want to jump on the bandwagon when you see the opportunity to create content about a breaking story in your industry, whip out your laptop and set about writing a post. They’re usually quite easy to write, and depending on how in-depth you go, shouldn’t take too long.

Depending on how much authority your site has, and how competitive the news is (you probably won’t rank for anything related to iPhones or Windows or BitCoin), but you could rank for the launch of a new tool or service in your niche.

Wrapping up

Creating content for your website or blog takes time and effort, and creating the same type of content over and over again gets a little boring, no? If you’re looking to mix things up for yourself and your audience, I hope you’ve found some ideas from this article.