Writing for a blog is one of the most pleasant things for those who enjoy writing. There is only so much that you can say to the world, and you don’t need to ask for anybody’s permission to published them anytime you want. You can also decide in which format you prefer to see it, how many words it will have, if there will be any images, etc. But blogging isn’t a one-way conversation. You want that your post gets to be read – if you didn’t care about it, you would be journaling, right? So, to accomplish it, you need to find the types of blog posts that will help you to grow your audience – and here are the formats that are currently getting the best traffic results in the web so that you can get inspired.
# 1 – The “How-to”
Most of the time when we search for something online, we are looking for a solution for a problem. In many cases, we want to know how to get something done. We might need instructions from scratch or just a way to perfect the way we currently do it. And this is why “how-to” posts are so popular. “How-to” posts offer the tips and tricks that we need to make our lives easier. They also increase the blogger’s authority as they show off how they can do their work more efficiently than the majority. So check your content and see if you can come up with any article that will offer this kind of information to your audience.
# 2 – Curated Content
There is so much information available online that is just too hard to go through everything. Plus, if you are new in an industry, it can be very difficult to decide who is a trustworthy source and what is reliable content. This way, finding a curated content post in a blog that we already follow is a blessing. Many bloggers avoid curated content posts because they think they will look lazy or that they are just copying someone else’s ideas. If you are one of them, you should reevaluate your approach to them. Writing a curated content post is much more complicated than you think as you will need to go through several blogs and find the best ones. Then you will need to say why you chose them in the first place and why your audience should care about them. As you can see, there is a lot of work involved and your audience will appreciate your efforts.
# 3 – Real-life stories
We love to hear about other people’s lives and it isn’t only because we have a thing for gossiping. This is just the way we gather precious information so we can avoid making the same mistakes and it is also how we learn to empathise. Anyway, no matter what the reason is, it is clear that real-life stories can grab the attention of any audience, so you should find a way to add them to your blog posts. You can either write a post about your experiences as a blogger and your relation to the topic that you are writing. And you don’t need to make the entire post about it. You can simply add from just a few lines to a couple of paragraphs to the posts that you already have done or to the new ones, and you will notice how an appealing writing will bright up your post.
# 4 – Listicles
You might think that they are getting outdated but you are reading one of them right now, so you know that they are pretty much alive. Listicles, blog posts writing in the form of lists, are one of the most popular types of online articles, and there is a good reason for it. Their format is the best for reading on a screen in a very short time as it makes it easy to scan. And the truth is that not many of us are prepared to spend the same amount of hours going through a text on a mobile, or even a tablet, as we used to do with our newspapers and magazines. So finding a post that allows us to read only what we want is something that we love to find and share.
# 5 – Reviews
Same way that your audience will be happy to find curated content ready for them to read on your blog, reviews will be very appreciated. They might be trying to decide if they buy a specific product, and they will be glad to know that you have already tested it and that you will be telling them if it is worthwhile or not. It will save their time, and more important, their money. So go ahead and try to find anything that you can write a review about. You might need to buy the product so to test it, but you will see the return of it on your traffic.
# 6 – Interviews
Interviews are another kind of post able to grow your audience. Of course, you need to be interviewing someone considered as relevant to your audience, but that is it. As soon as you find this persona and announce what is coming up, you are bound to see the traffic increasing to your blog. And this will happen not only because of your own efforts but also because the person that you will interview will probably be sharing it to their own audience. So you are doubling the number of people who will potentially read your post – or even more than that if the person in question is an influencer with a large number of followers. The bottom line The format of post that will grow your audience will depend on what your audience is looking for at that moment. So the first thing that you will need to do is to get to know them more. Then you can choose from the list above which one would be their favourite and make the most of it.
