Content types to change up your blogging

1. Listicles

Everybody loves a list. They’re easy to scan, have digestible information and they’re super popular for social media sharing.

You can create lists on almost any subject. It could be your favourite books or a list of your top bloggers to follow.

Here are two great examples of listicles:

• 10 Great Space-Saving Speaker Cabinets For Guitarists
• 11 Best Minecraft Server Hosting Providers

Pro Tip: Build your lists around your main blog niche and topics to stay relevant to your audience. It’s also recommended to consider what type of lists people are searching for in Google. Check out our guide to keyword research for more help.

2. Written tutorials and how to’s

Tutorials and how-to guides are a great way to engage your audience and educate them in a single blog post. Plus, they’re easy to work on too since you’re already familiar with the topic.

The key thing to remember when writing how-to guides is to break things down into small actionable steps. This makes it easier for readers to follow your instructions. Including step-by-step screenshots further aids in this, especially for visual learners.

Marketing bloggers could write tutorials on how to use different social media platforms. Beauty bloggers can guide their readers through makeup applications. It all depends on your target audience and what they want to read.

Here’s an example from YourCreativeAura.com: How To Write A Song: Songwriting Basics, this post is broken into the 5 main sections of song creation, along with imagery and examples to make it easier for beginners to understand.

3. Video tutorials

If writing full guides on a subject seems too daunting for you, you can always create a video tutorial instead. Video is hugely popular – sometimes more popular than the written word, so utilising it in your blog makes a lot of sense.

Your options for video tutorials include:

• Filming yourself explaining things
• Filming a screencast of you performing the tutorial steps
• Filming a screencast with a voice-over explaining as you go through the steps.

When posting your tutorial to your blog, you can either host the video directly on your website by uploading it. Or, you could upload it to a video hosting site like YouTube or Vimeo and embed it in a blog post on your site.

4. Checklists

A checklist is one of the simplest types of content you can publish. We’ve all written a check-list or to-do list before and they work because they’re short, easy to digest and allow the ability to cross items off as you complete them.

Translating this into a blog post is the same thing. Simply post your checklist with some supporting information.

Gardening bloggers could post a checklist for planting in the spring or getting your garden ready for winter. On the other hand, interior bloggers can create a spring cleaning checklist.

5. Industry news

What do you do when you get up in the morning? You’ll likely grab a tea or coffee and browse the latest news. This is a habit you could include in your daily blogging activities too.

Why not scour various news sources for the latest in your blogging niche or industry. Put together some of the best pieces into a blog post and add your own critique and commentary alongside it.

A regular feature like this has the potential to be something your readers return regularly to read. Here is a great example of this in practice.

6. Infographics

Infographics don’t have to be those long professionally made images you see all over Pinterest. An infographic can be an image of any size or shape and about any type of information.

Creating infographics for your blog is an effective way to provide valuable information while encouraging people to share something visually appealing. They could be charts, statistics, step-by-step instructions an even fun facts.

The higher the quality these infographics are, the better. Tools like Canva and Venngage make it especially easy to make your own imagery with their pre-built templates and free icons.