Do you blog on a regular basis?
How is it going for you?
Do you believe that your blog posts may not be bringing you as much traffic as you expect them to?
Content marketing is an important aspect of today’s online world, but it is not just about blogging. Although blogging is a major part of content marketing, but CM is believed to be a much broader concept with a lot of important dimensions.
One major aspect of content marketing is planning your content and blog posts. Most bloggers and online businessmen fail at this.
You see, they do hours of research, write thousands of words, but they still fail to get the leverage from their blog posts that they initially expected. Their blog posts fail to bring the required amount of traffic.
And isn’t targeted traffic is what we are all after?
At our blog, we share plenty of tips and tricks on how you can increase your website traffic by search engine optimization. In today’s blog post, we are going to discuss traffic-generation from a slightly different angle, i.e., by choosing the right type of blog posts.
According to Cobert Barr:
“If you are working to build a loyal audience, you can’t afford to waste time writing mediocre posts.”
Writing high-quality content is the only option you have. There is simply no debate about it.
First of all, make sure that you are creating content that actually helps your blog readers and target audience. If your content is solving their problems, it will perform.
Once you have learned the importance of high-quality content and have a clear mindset, idea, and set of tactics for how you can create such high-quality and useful content for your readers, it is time to pick the right kinds of blog posts that are almost guaranteed to bring you more traffic.
You shouldn’t waste time on blog posts that don’t normally work.
You Don’t Have to Invent the Wheel
A great part of blogging and online marketing world is that you do not have to invent the wheel from the scratch.
Other influencers and well-established bloggers have been doing it for you. You just have to pick the right things and follow along. Emulate them and their successful strategies and you would become successful. This is the beauty of the online world!
This is commonly known as “reverse-engineering” or “piggybacking technique” and this is exactly what we are going to apply here.
Certain Blog Posts Just Work!
There are certain tips and tricks about blog creation that just almost always work.
As I said earlier, you do not have to discover a new way. You can just identify the techniques that have been working for traffic-generation and emulate them.
So, here are 4 types of blog posts that almost always work and are guaranteed to bring you more traffic and leads.
Blog Post #1: The Long-Form Blog Posts
The world of content marketing has evolved in the past couple of years. As more and more bloggers and business owners are learning the power of high-quality content, they are competing harder to outrank each other.
One of those techniques has been to create long-form, detailed, and comprehensive blog posts that really dig into a topic.
Getting your posts ranked on the Google’s 1st page is a great way to generate a consistent amount of targeted and free traffic. What is the criteria for getting ranked there?
Generally speaking, there are around 200 Google ranking factors at the moment. You will have to focus on many of them if you want to rank on Google’s 1st page. But if you manage to create truly useful content, Google will ignore many discrepancies and rank your posts on its #1 page.
SerpIQ recently did a research with 20,000 different keywords as samples. Their research concluded that none of the blog posts that were ranked on Google’s 1st page (for those 20,000 keywords) had less than 2,000 words in them.
Here are their findings.
As you can see from this research, long-form blog posts with more than 2000 words work. They find it easier to rank on Google’s 1st pages, and they bring free organic traffic for you.
Moreover, they also bring you more social media shares. And more shares mean more traffic.
As you can see in this image, the number of social media shares increase as the number of total words increase in a blog post. There is a direct correlation between the two, and you should definitely leverage this to generate more traffic.
Blog Post #2: Expert Roundup Posts
It is one of the easiest blog posts to create, and this particular type works like a charm.
If you want instant traffic and an increment in exposure and credibility, create an expert roundup blog post.
What is it?
In simple words, you contact the well-established bloggers and influencers within your niche and request them to give their professional opinions on a certain topic. This topic would be the title of your blog post.
For example: 15 Email Marketing Experts Share Their Best Tips on Reaching to Your First 1000 Email Subscribers
Why does this particular type of post work?
It works because those experts already have their own loyal audiences and established social media following. When they share your blog post on their profiles, you start receiving instant traffic.
Blog Post #3: Infographics
If graphic designing is more like your cup of tea, infographics is the way to go.
They are unique. They are to-the-point useful. And they look pretty.
Moreover, people are 3x more likely to like or share an infographic than any other form of content.
According to Neil Patel, the founder of KISSmetrics and Quicksprout:
“A few years ago when I discovered the branding potentials of infographics and started creating them, my organic traffic increased for both Quicksprout and KISSmetrics. It may not bring overnight organic results for you, but keep at it.”
He further adds:
“I noticed that whenever I publish an infographic on my blog, it will receive 22.6% less traffic in the first 90 days than regular blog posts. But over the course of 12 months, infographics receive 35.1% more traffic.”
Blog Post #4: List-Based Blog Posts
There is a reason why BuzzFeed creates so many list-based blog posts. Because they work. List-based blog posts bring traffic, high-quality backlinks, and an insane amount of social media shares.
I used BuzzSumo to find out BuzzFeed’s top-performing blog posts. And unsurprisingly, all of those posts are list-based posts. Have a look.
BuzzSumo and OkDork got together and did a research on which type of contents go viral on social media websites.
Here is what they found.
As you can see, apart from infographics (which we have already mentioned), list-based blog posts get the second highest number of social media shares.
And we all know that more social media shares eventually translate into more backlinks, traffic visitors, credibility, email subscribers, and loyal customers.
So, the next time when you get torn between a list-based blog post and a “how-to” or “question-based” blog post, always pick the list-based option.
Final Words
There are two ways to create blog posts:
You can either keep guessing by creating random types of blog posts and hope for the best, or
You can use these types of blog posts that are almost guaranteed to bring you more traffic.
The choice is yours. And remember, you do not have to discover anything spectacular in order to be successful.
P.S: Once you have created this blog post, don’t forget to optimize them for better search engine rankings and more long-term traffic. You can use our free SEO Toolbox to optimize these posts — and your website — for free.
