Planning your blog Content

Planning your blog Content

There are many types of content that you can put into a blog, ranging from news posts to how-to tutorials. An important part of how you approach a niche is to determine what you are going to be publishing.

We’ll discuss preparing, editing, and styles of content in detail.

For now let’s look broadly at some different content groups and formats to make the big picture decisions on what your blog will look like.

Content Types:

1. News

News is the staple of the publishing world. It’s constantly updating and changing, there is always new source material, and readers always return for more. The difficulty with news blogs is getting content before anyone else. Getting the scoop on a big story is essential to get readers, particularly if you are competing against popular sites and outlets. If you are angling for a news blog, then you should consider how you can break stories rather than just reporting via other news outlets.

2. How-to

Teaching readers how to do something – whether it’s to lose weight, manage money, or learn a new skill – is another staple of publishing.

The great thing about how-to content is that as long as you can teach something of value, you’ll always get readers, even if there are lots of other sites teaching in the same area. People have a thirst for knowledge and will obsessively read all about their favorite topic searching for nuggets of information.

As always, it helps to have a differentiating angle, however in education, even just creating a large resource is often a differentiator.

3. Opinion

Opinion content ranges from reviews of products like gadgets and games, to opinions on the news, to opinions on life. Opinion-based blogs work best with a strong editorial voice and are often driven by individual personalities. Virtually all blogs will have at least a dose of opinion blended in; the choice is really more about what quantity.

4. Entertainment

Entertainment content is tricky to do well, but if you can manage it, then it is by its very nature differentiated. That is to say if you are entertaining people, then you’ve already managed to produce value.

Audiences can never seem to get enough entertainment, so the throttle here really is that it’s difficult to produce content that is genuinely engaging.

5. Content Aggregation

Aggregation is when a blog exists to filter out quality links, news, and content around the web. They will often rely on short posts with links or large lists of “the best” this and that. Aggregation is surprisingly popular, quite easy to do, and therefore somewhat overdone.

Each of these content types can be applied to virtually any niche. For example, a site about gardening could have news about new garden products, how-to posts about gardening techniques, opinions on gardening tools, entertaining posts about gardening stories or a comic strip about gardeners, and a weekly list of the best gardening links from around the web.

Moreover you can also blend content types. A news post could be packaged in the form of news plus opinion. If the post was about a new gadget being released, the blogger could then add their opinion about what the gadget might mean, their take on its utility, or how they personally would use it. Similarly, a how-to piece could be packaged in a humorous voice to be entertaining, an aggregate post could include short opinions on the links, news could have snarky entertaining comments, and so on.

Content Formats:

Although blogs are primarily written, there are in fact four different media that are often used on blogs:

1. Written

Virtually all blogs have a written element to them, whether they are long articles or short link posts. The big advantage written content has over the other three content formats, is that it has far bigger search traffic potential.

2. Photographic

For some blogs, photographs are simply accompanying imagery to written posts. For others such as the popular PostSecret (http://postsecret.com ), the photos are the content.

3. Video

Recently video blogs such as that of Gary Vaynerchuk (http://garyvaynerchuk.com ) have been getting more and more popular.

4. Audio

Podcasts were very popular for a while, but today video has taken that mantle. Nonetheless there are some very popular podcast blogs around.

Sites like Odeo (http://odeo.com ) aggregate the more popular audio (and video) content and are a good place to see what is out there.

As with content types, it’s quite possible to have a mix of content formats.

Certainly written and photographic content are almost always mixed. More recently video has been making its way onto sites, particularly as the costs of producing video and audio content slowly drop.