A Life Reset

Over the years of blogging, I seem to veer from one style of blogging to another. This was in keeping with my own indecision on what exactly what I was trying to accomplish with my blog. Was I trying to be informational to family and friends? Was I trying to carve out some niche in the blogging world to become some sort of expert within that niche?

There are some defined archtypes that most of the major blogs fall into:

1. Meme-du-jour bloggers comment on the high-profile ideas of the moment. This type of blogger is usually focused on political issues.
2. Caterers determine what an audience segment wants to hear, and pursue that theme aggressively.
3. Nichebloggers, aka localbloggers. The subject is usually something the writer is passionate about, or has special expertise in.
4. Internet guides, such as Instapundit, create little original material. Their strength is that they are trusted link finders/filters.
5. The celebrity-blogger is someone whose site traffic comes from fame achieved outside of blogging.
6. The service blogger performs a service, often to the ‘Meme’ blogger (see 1).
7. The long-tail blogger is the rarest of successful breeds. This style requires consistent blogging over a long period of time (hence the rarity in a fairly new medium).

If I had to compare my blogging style, I more closely resemble item 3 as I tend to focus on a few things like Winston-Salem, Photography, Music and the Arts and so forth. In the beginning, I was writing posts about anything that popped in my mind but over the last year or so, my posting seems to be more categorised and refined which is why the site is currently in a magazine format for new to allow a better organisation for the site.

Still, blog posts or articles can be quite different even within a particular type of a blog .. and just what sort of blog posts are there?

So I googled around and found this site’s post about the twenty types of blogs posts:

• Instructional – Instructional posts tell people how to do something.
• Informational – This is one of the more common blog post types where you simply give information on a topic.
• Reviews – Give your fair and insightful opinion and ask readers for their opinion – reviews can be highly powerful posts that have a great longevity.
• Lists – One of the easiest ways to write a post is to make a list. Posts with content like ‘The Top Ten ways to….’, ‘7 Reasons why….’ ‘ 5 Favourite ….’, ‘53 mistakes that bloggers make when….’
• Interviews – Sometimes when you’ve run out of insightful things to say it might be a good idea to let someone else do the talking in an interview (or a guest post).
• Case Studies – Another popular type of post here at ProBlogger have been those where I’ve taken another blog and profiled them and how they use their site to earn money from their blogging.
• Profiles – Profile posts are similar to case studies but focus in on a particular person.
• Link Posts – The good old ‘link post’ is a favourite of many bloggers and is simply a matter of finding a quality post on another site or blog and linking up to it either with an explanation of why you’re linking up, a comment on your take on the topic and/or a quote from the post.
• Problem’ Posts – This is similar to a review post (above) but focuses more upon the negatives of a product or service.
• Contrasting two options – Write a post contrasting two products, services or approaches that outlines the positives and negatives of each choice. In a sense these are review posts but are a little wider in focus.
• Rant – get passionate, stir yourself up, say what’s on your mind and tell it like it is.
• Inspirational - On the flip side to the angry rant (and not all rants have to be angry) are inspirational and motivational pieces. Tell a story of success or paint a picture of ‘what could be’.
• Research – Research posts can take a lot of time but they can also be well worth it if you come up with interesting conclusions that inspire people to link up to you.
• Collation Posts – These are a strange combination of research and link posts. In them you pick a topic that you think your readers will find helpful and then research what others have said about it.
• Prediction and Review Posts – We see a lot of these at the end and start of the year where people do their ‘year in review’ posts and look at the year ahead and predict what developments might happen in their niche in the coming months.
• Critique Posts – ‘Attack posts’ have always been a part of blogging (I’ve done a few in my time) but these days I tend to prefer to critique rather than attack.
• Debate – Debates do well on blogs and can either in an organised fashion between two people, between a blogger and ‘all comers’ or even between a blogger and… themselves
• Hypothetical Posts – Pick a something that ‘could’ happen down the track in your industry and begin to unpack what the implications of it would be. ‘What if….Google and Yahoo merged?’
• Satirical -Well written satire or parody can be incredibly powerful and is brilliant for generating links for your blog.
• Memes and Projects – write a post that somehow involves your readers and gets them to replicate it in someway.

I think I done half of those types of posts since I have been blogging in the past four years or so. But most of my blog posts of late tend to be Informational or Critiques with a few Profiles and Rants tossed in for flavour.