If you arrived on this page from a quick search, then I know you saw dozens of results promising you dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of supposedly good blog post ideas. Color me skeptical.
In my experience, all of these half-baked lists aren’t helpful if you’re blogging as a business or if you just want to see real results.
I’ve run blogs for global public companies like Shopify and currently run multiple content-driven businesses as an entrepreneur. I’ve been blogging for nearly 15 years and I’ve spent my entire career in content marketing. The truth is that the types of blog posts that actually work make up a fairly small list, and they all fall into three core buckets.
This post won’t share 500 slapdash blog post ideas I dreamt up but have never tried before. Instead, we’re going to focus on quality over quantity and share a strategic shortlist of the blog posts that drive business results. And they’re all organized by my easy-to-follow category system.
What are the core categories for blog posts?
Traditional businesses usually have far different reasons for publishing content than your standard media company. Most businesses aren’t blogging to report the news or drive revenue through advertising—they’re trying to get people to buy their products.
Or, if you’re a blogger without a product of your own, you’re probably trying to sell other companies’ products in order to earn a referral or affiliate commission. The principle is roughly the same, but the execution is a little bit different since you’re selling the product on behalf of another company.
So, what are the three categories for business blogging? They are as follows:
- Education. Harvest existing demand from the market by teaching a reader or prospect how to solve a problem or make a product-related decision.
- Industry insight. Capture demand from the market by becoming the source of truth on trending industry topics.
- Influence. Create demand by pushing stories/narratives into the market to key audience segments