Sandrine Coosemans the founder of Smart Alpaca Marketing presented at the Bloggers Meetup and gave insight about creating a blog plan with a purpose. Smart Alpaca Marketing focuses on helping content creators organise, optimise, and monetise their expertise to make a livelihood from it.
In this episode Sandrine talks about the various types of blog posts, cornerstone content, and creating a plan with Airtable.
As there are different types of blogs out there, what are some of these types and would they pair well with the topics you want to write about?
What are the different types of blog posts?
When making a blog plan with a purpose you need to decide on the type of blog you want to write. There are different types of blog posts that can be used for your blog, such as:
- Interviews and stories
- Lists
- Roundups
- News or time-bound entertainment
Interviews and stories
When writing a blog that focuses on interviews or stories, there are usually a lot of questions focused around a particular topic with another person or people answering them. For this type of blog it is also written from a single perspective.
As for the story type this can be a personal experience for the blogger or it could be a story that a guest wants to share with the viewers. For both of these types they can be used to invite an expert to discuss various topics or share a story or experience.
Having an interview or having someone share an experience is a good way for a blog to gain visibility. The more traffic the blog brings, the more people will be aware of the interview or story.
Lists
Lists are a quick and easy way to get content out. But the lines blur between lists and cornerstone content. There are different types of lists that can be used such as checklists, or best of lists.
Lists are favoured by readers as they are a convenient and useful way to gain information because of how quick they are to read through. In addition, lists are often a great choice for social media posts.
Round ups
Roundup is a type of blog post that consists of interesting content on a specific topic or from a specific field. Typically this type of blog will have sources from experts and links to other articles.
It is mainly used as a form of comparison and can have a similar structure to that of a list. In addition, roundups are a great way to get more people interested in niche topics or a topic you find interesting.
News or time-bound entertainment
Another type of blog that can be used is a news or time-bound entertainment blog. Despite the name, these types of blogs avoid discussing breaking news, unless that is the type of content that is usually discussed on the blog.
These types of blogs focus more on current events or new developments taking place in your industry or niche. In addition, this type of blog can also be combined with a cornerstone post to create extra traffic to the blog. It is a great way to get more interaction on social media.
These are only a few of the different types of blog posts that can be used. When looking for advice on how to plan for a blog the term cornerstone content is often brought up, what does this mean?
Cornerstone content
Cornerstone content are the main posts used to increase your search engine optimisation (SEO) rating by making use of relevant keywords. These types of posts are usually ultimate guides or everything you need to know about blog posts and are the pillars of your blog.
With these types of posts you can use them to link other blogs you have written to gain more traffic to your website. The amount of cornerstone posts you have varies as it depends on the amount of content you have, if there isn’t a lot of content to work with there should not be a lot of cornerstone content.
In addition, the content of these posts can be broad or they can be more focused, it all depends on the content you want your blog to have.
Creating a blog plan
When creating a blog plan, it is important to determine what type of posts you want and what topics are going to be discussed. Some people prefer to use a programme known as Airtable as it can be used to make the process a bit easier.
Airtable is a quick and user-friendly programme that can help with the planning process as it can do a bit more in terms of a planner programme to help form a flexible plan.
To create a blog plan it is important that you first determine what your goals are. Do you want to gain more traffic to your site from search engines? Or give people easy access to information? Or a combination of goals? The goal you want to achieve can help you determine what to post and when you post.
When creating a plan the first step is to determine the content for each topic and whether you can interview any experts for it. Depending on the content of the topic you can write multiple different blog posts on that topic.
The next step in this process is to organise the posts, this can be done by category or alphabetically. Once that is done you can add dates to the posts. These dates do not have to be fixed if you want to change the post for a specific date to fit into your schedule that is perfectly fine, do what works best for you with planning.
There are multiple types of blogs that can be written for different purposes. How you go about planning these blogs should be in a way that can be changed to not be overwhelming or lead to burnout. It is important to be flexible so that the blog and posting schedule can fit in with your lifestyle.