5 Blog Posts Every Blog Needs To Make Money

Blogging is an excellent way to get your brand and message seen by potential clients and customers, and make money! However, if you’ve never run a blog before, you might be a little lost on how to keep it populated with engaging content that draws traffic and customers. The Content Marketing Institute reports 36 percent of businesses have an issue with producing engaging content, and 21 percent struggle with producing enough content.

If you’re at a loss for words on your blog posts, and want to make sure you make money from your blogging efforts, here are five types of blog posts your audience will find useful and engaging.

1. Behind the scenes

All too often, customers find that businesses are nameless, faceless entities. They don’t develop any particular brand loyalty because one store is the same as the other, for all intents and purposes. This changes when you let them see behind the curtain. Detail how products get made in your factories, explain the day-to-day happenings in the office, or provide information on how you develop a product line. Not only do you educate the customer on your business, you’re putting a personality to the brand.

2. How-to guides

Customers don’t want to sit down with a manual and read through it to get their products up and running. Provide how-to guides, preferably illustrated, on exactly how your customers can use their products. These guides can also explain common troubleshooting techniques, advanced features and anything else that would benefit from in-depth explanation.

3. Lists

If you want to push the viral content angle, use lists for your blog posts. The list topics can be related directly to your product, something about your industry or humorous list topics. For example, a web hosting company might create an article called “5 Must-Have Scripts for Windows Hosting,” “10 Ways Hackers Ruin Your Day,” or “7 Cloud Hosting Benefits.”

4. Customer showcase

Do you supply customers with products they use in their own projects? Show off what your customers have made in a post. Not only will you build brand loyalty with that specific set of customers, you’re also showing the practical ways your potential customers can use your products. A picture is worth a thousand words, and when a customer is engaged enough to share with you, you want to reward them.

5. Industry and news commentary

You don’t want to regurgitate news stories, interviews and industry press releases. If blog readers wanted to see that, they could go to plenty of other sites. Give them a reason to read your blog posts on the industry by providing your own expertise and insight into the movers and shakers of your industry. If a new technology gets introduced, talk about the practical ways you can use it, or the downfalls that come from new tech.

Yahoo Small Business reports companies who blog have 97 percent more inbound links than those who don’t. Even if you can’t keep up with a regular blog posting schedule, putting up anything gains you far more than staying away from blogging.

And if you work to incorporate these five types of posts into your library of content, you’ll go a long way to encouraging more readers and customers from whom you can make money.