14 Types of Blog Posts to Consider on Your Site

Writers have a difficult time deciding what to blog about. Finding topics comes up regularly in writer chats. I’ve never understood it because a lack of ideas never is my problem. My greatest issue is finding time to blog, not determining what to write.

Perhaps part of the reason people can’t find ideas is that they are unaware of all of the various types of blog posts they can write. There are so many options. While not every post type will work on every blog, at least some of them likely will work on yours.

14 Types of Blog Posts

There certainly are more than 14 types of blog posts you can write. But here’s a look at some common post types that might help get your creativity flowing.

1. Tutorials or How Tos

A tutorial or a how-to post is a step-by-step explanation of how to do something. You can write a tutorial about anything you know how to do that your readers potentially don’t. The thing about a how-to post is that it must tell the reader how to do the thing. I wrote more about that in this post on How to Write a “How To” Article.

2. Business Updates

This type of post offers an update on a company or organization’s business activities. For example, we just did a post at Content Journey about our operations team being in place. The post’s goal was to introduce our clients and potential clients to our behind-the-scenes team.

3. Reviews

You can write a review of pretty much any product or service, including books, movies, technology, video games, and restaurants. People use reviews when they’re attempting to decide how to spend their limited resources.

As you likely know, I write monthly book review roundups on this site. Reviews can be about just one thing or a series of things packaged together.

4. Research Findings

Performing research and/or releasing research findings also is another option for a blog post. People always are interested in facts and statistics when put in the context of their daily lives. 

Don’t have any original research to release? No worries! People also blog roundups of data from other companies. For example, this blogging stat post from ahrefs.

5. Personal Stories

A narrative almost always works in a blog post because people love to read about other people. It helps, of course, if you have the freedom to be transparent in your writing and if you include lessons you learned from the happening. 

The Pioneer Woman shares recipes on her blog, but she also shares a lot about her life and what’s happening on the ranch. Here’s a post about her husband’s health a year after an accident.

6. Quotes

I love powerful quotes. There’s just nothing better than someone who knows what they want to say and exactly how to phrase it. Quotes become blog posts when you create context and meaning about them in relation to your blog’s content theme. 

Check out this post of 110 quotes about reading, for example.

7. News and Trends

There always is something in the news worth commenting on. News and trending concepts make for great blog post ideas. The only downside to writing about newsworthy topics is that the content isn’t evergreen.

As you would expect, Poynter, a site for journalists, writes about a lot of news-related topics.

8. Conversations, Interviews, or Q&A

Talking to others helps generate blog content. Interesting conversations make equally intriguing blog posts. Be sure to ask the person you’re talking to whether it’s acceptable to use the conversation or keep them unidentifiable.

Check out this example from Fast Company about a designer using Instagram for visual self-care messages.

9. Resource Lists

Writing a list of valuable resources is a good way to give back to your industry or community. Here’s an example on blogging tools from Jeff Bullas.

10. Answer Reader Questions

Once your blog is more established, you will get reader questions via email or as comments on posts. You can answer these questions as blog posts. Chances are, if one person has a question, others have that question as well.

I love this approach, “Ask Buffer.” Buffer is answering reader questions and they’ve established a regular blog feature.

11. Series or Regular Feature

Instead of focusing on a single post, you can write a series of related posts. Many times these are identified by a special note at the top of the post or a visual made specifically for the series. The Buffer post above is also an example of a regular feature post.

12. Case Studies

People like to read an expert’s take on a situation or to learn more about successes. That’s why case studies are so popular. Here’s a case study example from Mack Collier.

13. Follow-Up

Sometimes the things you write about change or develop over time or you want to write about something you did. If the post was important enough to write initially, it’s probably important to follow up that initial post with changes. If you learned or shared at an event, your audience probably would like to know about that too. Here’s a post I wrote about the advice I gave when speaking to a class about Twitter.

14. Lists

Everyone loves to read a list. Even the bloggers who claim they hate list posts read and write them. You’re reading a list post right now!

Got Ideas?

Hopefully, some of these post types and examples have given you some ideas for content on your own site. If you still can’t figure out what to write after being introduced to all of these various types of blog posts, I encourage you to read more to get ideas.