10 Easy Content Types to Drive Your Brand Blog Traffic

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Stuck on what content to produce for your brand blog? Here are our top 10 types of engaging content that are quick and easy (and dare we say, fun?) to create.

Thousands of content pieces are published across the web every day. Each piece is created to give client brands a powerful and effective way to reach their customers, gain loyalty and acquire sales along the way. Content marketing engages and informs new customers, pays dividends forever, supports various levels of the consumer buyer journey and drives profitable action to your business.

One of the challenges brand publishers face involves the actual content creation process. You may ask:

• “What type of content should be created?”
• “How will I have time to create this content?”
• “How can I create content that people actually care about?”

Whether you are a small business or a powerhouse Fortune 500 brand, use this list to spark ideas for creating fast, yet effective content:

1. Ask the audience

By turning the table to your target audience and creating relevant content, you can resonate better with your customers. Produce a social media update on your brand’s social properties that with an open-ended comment like, “What kind of problems are you having with [X] product/service? ” Then take the questions and answer each of them in a separate blog post.

2. Infographics

Visual content is the bees knees for digital platforms (smartphones, tablets and PCs) and infographics are a prime example of digital-friendly and linkable visual content. You may think that infographics are hard to produce, but with the help of some online tools like Canva, Piktochart or even using Powerpoint, the creation process is simple.

3. Product comparisons

Businesses with tangible products or even services can create blog content that compares two products within their own brand or with competitors products. Pull product information off your product or service pages and go a layer deeper to provide a detailed and objective look at the pro’s and con’s of the product or service against another. Your candid review can also subliminally develop trust with your audience.

4. Statistic lists—“Statisticles”

Collect interesting statistics on a subject matter related to your business and curate it into a blog post. Top 10, 20, 50 or even 100 lists are great—people like getting information in one, curated area. These stat lists are easy to make and resourceful for your readers.

5. Listicles

Similar to the statistic list, listicles allow you to rank the top influencers, industry resources, blog posts you’ve created as a brand, curate “best of” or “worst of” content… The list goes on (pun intended). You will have fun writing the content and at the at the same time your readers’ brains will appreciate the organized and easy-to-digest nature of the content. Don’t agree that listicles are effective? Forbes’ columnist Steve Denning seems to think otherwise.

6. Interviews

If you have writer’s block from writing dozens of 500-word blog posts for your business, think outside your own wheelhouse. Ask high-ranked individuals from within your company, influential people within your industry, or even high-ranked individuals from complementary brands to be interviewed for your brand’s blog. Your job: coming up with a list of engaging, unique questions, ushering the interviewee along in the process, and sandwiching the interview with an intro and conclusion. The whole process of doing this takes less time than writing a post yourself, plus it probably will have more legs. Brush up on your interview skills if you decide to make it a more personal profile.

7. Press release 2.0

Repurpose a company press release into a blog post. Edit the content to interject more voice and make it more visually digestible with bullet points, visuals and other multimedia.

8. Prediction posts

Is it nearing the end of the year and you’re looking to produce content that stands out from the holiday clutter? Crowdsource the opinions of multiple thought leaders within your organization or industry to predict future trends within your space. An example: iAcquire produced a 2014 digital marketing predictions post that got picked up on Social Media Today.

9. Twitter chats

Does your brand host or participate in Twitter chats? Twitter chats typically only last an hour and the content published is soon washed away by more recent updates. Make the content evergreen by publishing the Twitter chat on your brand’s blog and share using the respective hashtag for the Chat.

10.  “Google on Air” transcriptions

Interview an executive within your company or influencer on a Google on Air, have the interview transcribed, then publish it on your brand’s blog. Here’s a great example: our friend Martin Shervington of Plus Your Business posted a transcription of an interview he conducted with ClearVoice’s Co-founder and CEO, Joe Griffin here.