15 Blog Post Ideas to Help Build Your Brand

Blogging is one of the best tactics you have to Brand Strong. Why? It gives you a format to creatively tell your brand story. You can showcase your expertise, share customer success stories, profile your employees, and humanize your brand in ways that you can’t in traditional marketing channels. It’s like having your own magazine online only you don’t have to pitch your story idea to an editor, you just start publishing.

You can also engage with your customers on your blog asking them questions, responding to their questions, or even having them contribute content. Bottom line, a blog allows you to provide your customers or prospects with valuable content that helps build trust, awareness and a strong relationship.

And, that’s not even talking about the SEO benefits a blog provides to help your brand get found online! (That’s pretty important, too.)

However, it’s easy for me to say you should blog. But that’s not helpful unless I also tell you what to blog about, to showcase your brand.

To help inspire you to be creative with your content, here are 15 types of blog posts that keep your content fresh and interesting as well as help to promote your brand and expertise.

1. How To or Tutorial posts.This is one of the most valuable types of blog posts and brings tremendous value to the reader as well as showcasing your knowledge. show them how to do something and they’ll love you.

2. Curated Industry News. You can serve as an expert curator by finding the best news online about your industry and consolidating it into a summary post for your audience. Your value comes from finding and recognizing the best content for your industry. They’ll look to you first.

3. Definition posts. To provide value to newcomers to your industry, you can use a blog post to define key terms or processes commonly used in your industry.

4. Problem and Solution posts. By illustrating a problem that you know your audience may have and highlighting a potential solution, you offer value. You can do this as a case story on how you helped a client or simply identify a common problem you see in the market and how you would propose to solve it.

5. Profile posts. Highlight and profile someone in your company each month. These posts are important to showcase the knowledge and expertise that resides within your staff, but it also humanizes your people to create trust and a deeper relationship. You can also conduct profile interviews with other thought leaders in your industry. The benefit is that the person being profiled will probably help you promote the post to their audience, which gives you more traffic to your site. Try it, it works!

6. Resource posts. If there are some common tools or resources you rely on heavily, why not share them? You’ll help your readers with ideas on where to get help and you give a positive shout-out to the resources you can’t live without.

7. Comparison posts. If there are two solutions to a problem, why not write a comparison post giving the pros and cons of each alternative. It highlights that you have evaluated many options, not necessarily your own.

8. Controversial posts. If you want to get a lot of engagement on your blog, create a controversial post. Disagree with another industry expert, question a common practice in your industry, or defend an idea or process that most people don’t like to get a conversation going. However, don’t create controversy purely to get comments. Make sure that your argument is well presented, your opinion supports your brand, be open to other ideas, and definitely ask and thank your readers for their thoughts. We aren’t going for shock and awe, here.

9. Inspiring posts. People love to be inspired and inspirational quotes get shared a lot on social media. Tell a story of how someone overcame a challenge in your industry. Or highlight an inspirational quote that really inspires you and your work.

10. FAQ posts. Post the answer to something that your customers ask you quite frequently. Or engage with your audience on the blog or on your social media accounts and ask them what questions they would like answered in future blog posts.

11. Reviews. If a book, publication or product comes out in your industry, review it for your readers. Highlight the main features, indicate who would benefit most, discuss what you like and don’t like about it, and finally offer alternatives if you think there is something similar or better in the market.

12. Cheat sheets. A cheat sheet is a handy resource you can look at to find quick answers. Can you create a handy resource for your audience? They’ll think of you every time they use it.

13. Checklists. Give your audience a list of things they need to do, evaluate, or collect before completing a task. It makes their life easier.

14. Behind the scenes posts. If you are going to a conference or industry trade show, provide a behind the scenes look at the event for those who couldn’t attend. Or, allow your audience behind the scenes to see how you do your research, design your product, collect your raw materials, or test products with customers.

15. Trends. Highlight some trends that are happening in your industry that your customers may have missed. “15 of the best practices right now” or “The key takeaways from industry conference XYZ” show that you have the expertise to look at the industry as a whole and identify new trends.

Quick Note: In general, some of your posts should be “evergreen” which means that the content is always relevant to readers, compared to topics that are more trendy or related to current events. Evergreen content like “Why X is so important to your organization” or “The Value of a Strong Strategy” draws in readers over a long period of time. On the flip side, more current posts like “The 15 Best Practices in Industry X Today” are important to show that you have your finger on the pulse of the industry and can share up-to-date information with your readers. These posts help to draw in short term traffic or take advantage of trending topics people are searching for. Traffic = Brand Awareness!

Which blog post idea are you going to run with to help promote your brand? Once you have it written, feel free to link your blog post in the comments below. I’d love to take a look at it.