57 Varieties of Blog Post

In which I offer simply 57 prompts for blog posts, and offer a model for focusing content along two dimensions: relatability and purpose.

Liz Cable
3 min readOct 3, 2019

Relatability

Put simply, a blog post can be all about you, or it can be all about your audience. The personal post appeals because people are keen to learn your story, and to have a sneak peak into your lived experience. We are all nosey neighbours at heart. Alternatively, laser-focusing your sights on a particular group of readers when writing makes your post highly relevant, and your readers believe it’s written just for them.

Purpose

Your readers surf the web for one of two reasons, to be enlightened or to be entertained. You can have a go at both at once, but scoring highly on either aspect is a great start. How can you make it MORE entertaining? How can you make it MORE useful?

57 varieties of blog post

I recommend using these prompts at the planning stage to think about a seasons worth, or even a year’s worth of content. These 57 prompts are not mutually exclusive;

You can mix 2, 5 and 15 together to get a series of interviews for your blog where you put two experts head to head on a subject, and then pull out their best quotes to create memes to share on social media.

You can mix 12, 14 and 21 together to create the ultimate visual checklist for pretty much anything from buying kitchen gadgets to choosing a holiday to share with vegetarian friends.

Here’s the list in full:

  1. The interview — plain and simple

2. The interview — Same question asked to different people — experts

3. The interview — Contrast two views — e.g. business voice versus customer voice.

4. Guest posts: Write for someone else OR Get someone to write for you

5. A blog series — 6 posts on XYZ

6. Reports

7. Poll or Survey and then a Report

8. Collated Stats

9. The How-To tutorial

10. Reflection on an experience

The dimensions of content — is it all about you? or all about them?

11. The review

12. The comparison review

13. Three things I learned from an experience/an interview

14. Gallery/Album

15. Quote

16. Video and commentary or show notes

17. Audio/podcast and commentary or show notes

18. Lists and Listicles

19. Link Lists: Curated lists of other peoples’ content

20. Cheat sheets

21. Checklists

22. Why everyone else is wrong about something

23. Infographic

24. Roundups

25. Breaking News & why it matters to your audience

26. Case Studies

27. Profile Post

28. Behind the Scenes

29. The problem and the solution

30. Curate social commentary. e.g. how twitter reacted to . . .

31. Questions to ask when/who

32. FAQ

33. Contests

34. Screencasts and Webinars

35. Thinking out loud/working out loud/learning out loud

36. Rants, open letters and criticisms

37. Complete Beginners Guide to . . .

38. My favourite tools/apps/etc.

39. Metrics to measure

40. Myth-busting

41. Previews

42. Curate a niche topic or a person’s work

43. Shout-outs and Thank you

44. A personal story with a meaning.

45. Glossary or jargon-buster

46. Folks I rate to follow

47. History of your product, service or company

48. Roundups

49. Handover to charity. Give your platform to a worthy cause.

50. Definitions

51. Research about something, step by step

52. What if? A thought piece to encourage conversations

53. Debate — two sides of a story

54. Examples — of say, customer service moments — not a case study

55. E-book — possibly crowdsourced

56. Collab project with other bloggers

57. Ask me Anything — or Open for Questions

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Liz Cable
Liz Cable

Written by Liz Cable

Social media | digital narratives | sharing economy | transmedia @LeedsTrinity Writer, Escape Room designer, puzzle-maker & bookworm #jisc50social Views my own

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