This is part 4 of our continuing Blogging for Business series. We have already discussed why you should blog, looked at other blogs and learned how to own your blog; now we are going to look at different types of content. Mixing up the types of content on your blog make it more interesting. Let’s look at some of the content types:

Text – this is the obvious content type. Text is probably the most common content type. There are several different ways you can use text that will be useful for your readers as well as for search engines.

Lists – people like lists. They are quick and easy to read. Think of all the types of lists you can make- top 5 of this, 10 ways to do that. The possibilities are endless. Not only are lists quick and easy to read, they are also quick and easy to write!

Sub-headers – If you are going to write a long post, use sub-headers to break it up and give your readers an easy way to skim through and see what your post is about.

Keyword rich – make sure your posts contain those all important keywords and keyword phrases. This helps people find your content when they are looking for you in search engines. However, use your keywords in a meaningful way. If you are just stuffing keywords in everywhere, your posts will not make sense to your readers. Being found by search engines does you no good if once you are found, you are just confusing.

Pictures – Pictures are a great content type. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. You definitely want to use pictures. Just make sure that your pictures are optimized for the internet. Keep in mind that your pictures online do not have to be a gizzilion mega-pixels like they would for print. Optimize your pictures by reducing the file size. Your picture will look great and load fast! Again, you want to optimize for people as well as search engines and search engines are now looking at load speed. If you don’t have a program on your computer that will compress the file size of your pictures, you can use a free online tool such as pictureoptimizer.net.

Video - Words and pictures combined! I love the way ESPN does video. They post the video and then provide a transcript of the video as well. Now, that is a great way to include video. You get the advantage of video and the SEO boost with the transcript. Google likes video and so do people.

Think about ways you can incorporate all of these content types in your blog. Having a mix makes your blog more interesting and useful!