7 TYPES OF CONTENT YOU SHOULD START CREATING

Contents that help to drive your website’s traffic

By now I’m pretty sure you know the importance of creating good content. Without good content, you won’t be able to: drive traffic to your website, engage with audiences, boost your website’s credibility and authority, and eventually, won’t be able to convert visitors to leads and improve your business.

Even if you’re a content master, there will be days where you run out of ideas if you focus purely on one type of content. Not only can you expand your creativity by diversifying your content type, but you can also keep your content fresh, and engage with different types of audiences.

7 types of content to help boost your website traffic

1. ARTICLES

Articles are mainly text-based posts, usually appearing on news sites or magazine-like websites. This is likely the most common type of content that you will see online. Everyone can write and everyone does write, but not everyone can write in a way that is appealing to others. And that’s what and how you should be creating content to stand out from others.

Whether creating brand new content or curating content, remember it needs to be relevant and valuable to your target audiences. Particularly with content curation, be aware of who you are getting the content from (same with reference linking). Make sure they are legitimate, and better if it’s respectable within the industry.

2. INFOGRAPHICS

Some content works well with the long-form written format, while some are better if you visualize it. For instance, if you are curating a list of “best coffee shops in town”, it wouldn’t make much sense to use infographics since ideally you would be providing links to the coffee shops’ website (if have) and even embed a Google Map with the address (think about user experience).

If you are presenting a bunch of data, it would be better to visualize it with bars, charts, graphs, etc. Visualization is a good way to simplify complex ideas and numbers and make them easily digestible for any type of reader at all levels. These are attention-grabbing content that could add colors to your post, increase user engagement and boost your website’s traffic. Additionally, infographics are highly shareable. A nicely crafted infographic (with quality!) is more likely to be used and shared by others, an indirect way to market your website without having you do it.

Infographics make use of charts, graphs, icons, illustrations, short sentences, and bullet points to simplify, deliver and visualize complex data and information

Simplicity is the key to a successful infographic. Your goal is to present complex ideas and data clearly and concisely, so readers could easily digest the messages. Unless you know about creating complex data visualization, I would suggest you stick with simple infographics instead. The last thing you would want is to have your readers trying to understand and figure out your graphic, it defeats the original purpose.

Source: New York Times Opinion – I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me

3. LISTICLE POSTS

Listicle posts are essentially articles written in a list-based format. These are the “Best mirrorless camera 2021: the 15 best choices for every budget (Tech Radar)”, “The Best Coffee Beans To Buy in 2021: 15 of Our Favorite Picks (The Manual)”, “10 Travel Bloggers Who Will Give You Instant Wanderlust (Culture Trip)”, and even this article “7 Types of Content You Should Start Creating”.

There are several reasons why listicle posts work well for boosting website traffic. For one, people are always in a hurry, listicle posts are formatted in a way that is easy for readers to scan and consume the content much faster. People would also know what they are signing up for when seeing the numbers—“Top 10”, “Best 5”, “28 terms”—in the titles. For creators, listicle posts are also a lot easier to write compared to full-on ultimate step-by-step guides.

Tip: Further format your content into HTML lists for search engines, it helps search engines to crawl and identify the important parts of your content—the list. And there will be a great chance for search engines to use your post as featured snippets.

Example of how optimizing your listicle so that Google may use your post as featured snippets.

Example of the HTML list format of this article.

4. GUIDES

In this “do-it-yourself” age, people are always trying to find tutorials online. These are “how-to” articles, the long-form step-by-step guides offering solutions clearly and concisely, ideally all on one web page. This is probably one of the best methods to boost your website traffic and enhance your credibility. You can also add graphics and videos as supplements to your tutorials.

There are a couple of “how-to” articles on this website too, like the homepage—How to Create a Marketing Page?

5. GLOSSARIES

If you are in an industry that uses a list of specific or professional terms, why not curate a dictionary-like article providing definitions of all those jargon? If visitors find your list useful, they are likely to bookmark it and return to the web page whenever they need it. (A continuous traffic boost!)

Source – IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC – Glossary

Source – Racial Equity Tools Glossary

6. VIDEO

More and more businesses, 86% according to Wyzowl Research, are using video for marketing. If done correctly, video content can generate tons of website traffic and drive conversion for your business. People generally spend 2.6x more time on web pages with video than those with none, and it’s estimated that online videos will account for over 82% of total consumer internet traffic by 2022.

7. ORIGINAL RESEARCHES

Original content is probably the best and the most valuable content of all. It doesn’t matter what format it is, each format has its own pros and cons. This is about having original research that is conducted by you, independently. Information that is coming from you, not only by citing from others.

The more original research you have, and the more people find your content relevant and trustworthy, this is how you start to build credibility and establish yourself as an authority in a specific industry. And hopefully, evolve to the go-to source in the future.

We’ve covered seven types of content to help boost your website traffic. However, I would like to make things clear, I am not telling you to use it all for your website, rather what satisfies your needs.

When choosing what type of content to publish, don’t just think about what type of content would work best to drive your website traffic, think about what kind of audiences you have, and see what kind of content works best for them.

Ultimately, they are the ones who will bring you business. So not only would you need to satisfy your needs, but theirs too.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you will have a better understanding of what kind of content you can make to improve your website traffic. If you already own a website, that’s good news! You can start creating your blog page and build your credibility. If you are new to website building, follow this article to understand more about blogging and start creating one using a website builder.

You can check out their price plan here and choose the plan that fits your needs.