100 Content Types That Content Writers Should Know

At this point, you have finished designing the business products along with the service schemes for your customers. However, you have yet to find the perfect formula to wrap them up in an inviting, impressive content. You should know that there are various ways of utilizing content marketing for your own products, from blog postings to the state-of-art marketing strategy such as podcasts.

It is highly advisable to not only employ one content pattern as the main marketing strategy, but to also try mixing cocktails of contents for a more diverse approach. The more baits you throw to the sea, the more fish you can catch in one scoop. That’s more or less the metaphor. Therefore, the more variation of content you use, the more possibility of customers reaching you and your business.

What are the types of contents available out there and their definitions? This review will probably help you to gain deeper knowledge on the newest types of contents you can utilize to maximize your business.

1. Article

Publish an article about stories that are worth telling, such as the latest update of company news, recent service notifications, your newest products, and more. Don’t overlook the fact that users often stop by on many online news portals such as detik.com, kompas.com, which always provide up-to-date articles. Now you don’t need any further explanations on why updating your articles on your own site is significant.

2. Audio

Written contents can always be converted into audio ones. There are various activities you can do such as recording yourself when reading a blog post, an e-book, or others.

3. Blog Postings

Blog contents can be arranged using many patterns, for example description of procedures, lists, description of facts, and many others. It needs to be kept in mind that blog postings are educational, therefore they require longer words, around 1500 in general. Wouldn’t it be a lot better if customers were directed straight to your website when they need more information without having to drop by other websites? Again, what you need here is consistency; keep writing worthy blog posts consistently.

4. Case study

Have you ever watched customers’ testimony videos after they enjoy a specific product or service? Customer’s review is one beneficial method you can utilize when you want to plan a case study. Strong testimonies can force customer candidates to challenge themselves in trying your business products for sure.

5. E-book

E-book offers practicality in delivering information digitally. Through e-book, you can divide long contents into several chapters that are shorter and easier to understand.

6. E-course

Another interesting type of content worth trying is electronic course. You’re the one to decide whether it will be a free or paid course equipped with several benefits for your customers.

7. Email marketing

Indeed, email is an effective media to establish connections with your candidates -- it is supported by high intensity users in utilizing email as a communication tool. Try having casual and friendly conversations with these people, and do not be too formal either.

8. Infographics

Infographics use collages of pictures, numbers, and writings to display the content. This is one of the most effective ways to help your candidates understand the service your company offers quickly and simply, especially in this era where everything needs a quick fix.

9. Bulletins

It is true that bulletins are so simple, but did you know that recently e-bulletins are on the bandwagon and customers can utilize them easily in a zap?

10. Photos

Aside from audio, podcast is another content type similar to the former but is more state-of-the-art. But what differs podcasts from radio? Podcasts are recordings -- no ads of some sort. Listeners can choose their own topics and listen to them whenever. You can choose easy-listening podcasts into a one organized playlist as people tend to listen to podcasts in any moments, like when they are trapped in a traffic jam, or when they take a bath even.

11. Podcast

Selain audio, tipe konten lain yang serupa tapi bisa dibilang lebih kekinian adalah podcast. Lalu apa bedanya podcast dengan radio? Podcast adalah rekaman. Tidak ada selingan berupa iklan atau semacamnya. Pendengar bisa memilih sendiri topik apa dan kapan mereka mau mendengarnya. Susunlah podcast yang easy listening karena orang-orang sekarang suka mendengar podcast dalam momen apapun, bisa jadi saat mereka sedang terjebak kemacetan, atau bahkan saat mereka sedang mandi sekalipun.

12. Presentation

Planning to attend a meeting? Or a conference? It is undoubtedly that you need a presentation as a tool to present your business clearly. Do not miss the chance to speak in front of a wide audience like this. Decorate your presentation as captivating as possible; write out the bigger picture, add some illustrations in your slides to clarify your ideas as well as to make them less monotone.

13. Promotion

Promotion through digital media is another effective method to reach out your consumers, especially in this modern era. This type of content can give you higher chances to disseminate information faster and cheaper. This method also allows people to observe your products from their phones or laptops.

14. Social Campaigns

Social campaign is an approach where you use campaigns or movements by taking advantage of specific hashtags to draw your consumers into acknowledging your business which leads to increased sales in the end.

15. Video

Choosing videos as one of media promotions can be a very interesting option, indeed. Video offers a more lively presence closer to audiences. The contents can be product description or company service, customers’ testimonies, or the CEO’s story himself. Take notes on how the viewers respond to your video, then you can reflect on their comments accordingly.

16. Webinar

This term may still sound odd to the ears. Generally, Webinar can be considered as an “online seminar”, in which its mechanism utilizes video calls that other people can watch through the medium of Google Hangout, Facebook Live, and others. It sure has several benefits; one, to facilitate a demonstration of your company’s specialty, and two, as a media to announce the newest products of your business.

17. Web Contents

Contents on a website can be an influential trigger to enhance sales.

18. White Paper

White paper often consists of explanations on the benefits candidates will receive when they use specific products or services from your company. This method is frequently employed to push the chance of a customer's decision.

19. Guests/Columnists

What it means by guests here is that if you accept, publish, and share the contents of your company to be published outside. You can invite these guests to post their writings in your own blog on how your contribution benefits them.

20. Collaborations

In this type of content, you can collaborate with other businesses to create contents together. Here, you are utilizing external skills to make contents and try to reach even wider audiences. Some collaboration examples include preparation of e-book, webinars, and free templates.

21. Interview

Interview is another appealing collaborative content. This concept can run smoothly on most digital media such as podcasts, videos, and even blog posts.

22. Question and Answer (Q&A)

Question and answer will always be an effective content type. Ask your audiences what they want to improve from you in the form of questions, then make a content to answer them all.

23. Quotes

Quotes are motivating, inspiring, entertaining as well as educating sentences which most of the time come from an influencer. This can also be a good approach to invite candidates to acknowledge your products better.

24. Testimonial

Testimonies are customers’ direct reviews stating their experience with your service or products. Testimonies can also be seen as stories to persuade candidates, that is why testimonies need some sort of power to influence others. To get satisfactory testimonies, you can start with this question “What kind of results did you get from buying this product?”, or “Are there any specific features you like the most from this product?”.

25. Company news

Understand that every increasing sale from your business is a story worth telling to the audiences. They can come in the form of articles, press conferences, and others.

26. Product announcements

In a blog site, give space to organize features to announce your products. Here, you can discuss the increased sale of your company, or announcement of the most recent products and service from your business.

27. Comparisons

Are there product competitions within your own niche? There is nothing wrong with creating content based on the comparison between your product and competitor’s. Audiences will really appreciate the comparison done objectively and professionally.

28. Contests

The concept of a contest is quite similar to quizzes. You can ask the audience to do something, then they will show the results to you, which leads to chances of them receiving rewards of some sort.

29. SEO

You can optimize various types of contents to help audiences find whatever you have published from the search engine. This type of model is often applied to online contents to achieve higher traffic which can sustain a longer period of time.

30. Calculators

Calculators help your audiences to find out how much time, money, or resources they can save up from using your product or service.

31. Forum

Owning a self-proclaimed forum will give audiences a safe place to interact with their colleagues. This type of content can give you a higher possibility to bring forth a community for your brand.

32. Press Conferences

Is there anything interesting happening recently from your company? A press conference is still an effective way to obtain a worthy broadcast for the media and invite the curious eyes’ of candidates.

33. Landing Pages

Landing pages help you to inform product and service benefits in your company. It includes testimonies, case studies, and many others.

34. Feature Pages

Feature pages are a type of landing pages consisting of a specific product or service. This page will work smoothly if combined with a paid marketing system through search engine to direct keyword traffic specifically to your own website.

35. Microsites

Microsites, or mini websites, are a content type in a slightly smaller scale than a website. It functions as a promotion and branding tool. Microsites show the flow of information in a more focused, concise, and easy to understand perspective.

36. Dictionary

You can also add a dictionary feature surrounding the industry on your website. It will be more impressive if users utilize your website when they need further information on your niche. Here, audiences can share knowledge together in one place.

37. In-App Messages

If you administer extranet (a website specifically controlled to offer contents to authorized customers once they are logged in) or SaaS products, in-app messages function amazingly to reach your users.

38. How To’s

This is one classic educating strategy where you teach your audiences how to solve specific problems. This method includes providing steps, advice or guidance to audiences to help them finish the challenge themselves.

39. Lists

Posts about lists often offer ideas rather than educating. Think about persuasive, inviting titles for the readers to help them yield ideas after reading contents on your blog.

40. Questions

Headlines on your blog posts can be in the form of questions, and the content underneath is the answers. This type of content is quite successful especially for the amateur content creators as the main foundation of their own blogs.

41. Why(s)

Blog posts with a “why” pattern can be considered effective to explain how a phenomenon exists in the first place. This blog post pattern can be used to explain factual exposures.

42. New Methods

Brian Dean of Backlinko shares a process he created himself to achieve a high quality backlinks, in which he named it Skyscraper Technique. It is still a state-of-the-art method, but its impact has influenced many content marketing and SEO communities to use it as the reference. Having this method licensed, Brian obtains a lot of credits and backlinks to his original contents.

43. Accumulation

Every week or month, choose the best contents of your niche on specific subjects, then write a post consisting of a list linked to those sources.

44. Research compilations

There will be a time when your audiences ask questions which you can answer by providing data to a comprehensive, dedicated blog post. You can compile all of these research on a specific subject, then summarize them into one concise yet informative blog post.

45. Original research

Try to look for general questions your audiences often submit and compile them as materials for your own research.

46. Best Practices

Sometimes no suitable data pops up to support the information your audiences need to know. This is the moment where you publish “best practices” content. You can use blog posts with “best practices” patterns to share step by step and many others.

47. Transparency

Transparency is a great content to share “behind the scene” moments to your audiences. This approach is very efficient to build and maintain trust with them. As most marketers understand, people will buy something from someone they know, like, and put their trust in.

48. Opinion

Most newspaper editorials often have an “Opinion” column to accommodate thoughts based on subjective values. These controversial contents will be the bait for other readers to jump on the bandwagon, which eventually leads to the increased clicks on your site.

49. How Do I...

Most of the time, this type of content contains stories of someone’s personal success of their experience solving specific problems. You can do the same -- write your story in a form of a blog post to encourage audiences to solve the same problem.

50. Product Reviews

Did you know that audience reviews can also be your blog post content? Lure them by rewards if they want to share their product reviews. This will benefit you into reaching a bigger audience in the future.

51. Culture

Contents value “culture” which holds philosophy from your business’ “behind the scene”. Write a blog about the cultures you cherish in your business.

52. Metaphors

Blog pattern with metaphor allows you to write a familiar case using a completely different perspective.

53. Predictions

Not only metaphors, prediction is also a type of blog content worth discussing. Here, you can present opinions on specific topics, for instance what will affect your industry next year, or what evidence you can give to ensure your company will be bigger in the future.

54. Failures

Contents about “what to do” may sound like a bore. Hence, there is nothing wrong with sharing your failures when starting the business as a blog content. It can also be a good reading for your audience and influence them to look on the brighter side of the failures you experienced in the past.

55. Reprinting

There is nothing wrong with remaking your past blog posts to become new ones, which is definitely more attractive than the former. Restore the content and then post it again as if they are newly written. This trick can save you time, as well as recondition your traffic site in search engines.

56. Commentaries

Often than not, audiences like to leave a trace of comments underneath your blog posts. Well, they help you to find gaps before planning for another content. Reflect on their comments, then organize your writing into a more comprehensive one accordingly. The comments are your precious materials for the ideas to develop in the future.

57. Audio Blog Posts

There are times when your audiences need to understand the contents using a whole different method than the usuals. Try posting an audio blog once in a while, assuming you spin a yarn verbally to them.

58. Podcast Interviews

In this very type, you can invite a guest, then do an interview with a Q&A concept with them. Try throwing a ball of different questions to each guest based on their backgrounds.

59. Podcast Segment

Have you listened to This Old Marketing with Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute? This is an example of podcast segment with two co-hosts.

60. Podcast Solo

This time, you are the one speaking solo. The activity can be in the form of answering general questions within a brief episode.

61. Audio Books

Remember the e-book you wrote earlier? To convert them into an audio book, you can record your own voice when reading it out loud, then turn it into a content for your blog posts.

62. Blog Posts Email

There is absolutely nothing wrong in sending emails to audiences to announce them your newest blog posts to read, but don’t turn it into useless spams either.

63. Email Automation

This type of content targets new people to follow your content. Once they are registered, send them a heart-warming welcome email; afterwards, try testing them with an attached link to one of your blog posts.

64. Vlog

Vlog is still a blog post, but the difference lies on the fact that you need to convert the content into a video

65. Demo

Product demonstration may aim for the growing purchase intention, but this kind of video can also become a how-to process which audiences expect from your product.

66. Live Stream

For those who do not get the chance to be present in your event, live streaming can be an effective alternative. Facebook Live is one of the media options for you to casually interact with the audiences.

67. Culture

Video about culture can be a great choice for you to expose what is actually happening behind the scene of your company to audiences. They can acknowledge your employee, observe whoever has interacted or communicated with them and understand how you and your team cooperate to solve problems together.

68. Countdown

Find out what your company can do to have fun by counting it down.

69. Workshop

Workshop will operate smoothly if complemented with courses and conferences. In this session, you teach something thoroughly rather than just give a brief explanation about some topics. The best environment possible is to make a two-way communication, just like the usual teacher-student interaction.

70. Conference

Conferences can be in the form of personal or high level conferences. Think about the invited speaker, presentation, building, as well as the workshop session.

71. Meetups

Aren’t conferences a tad bit serious? Convert it into something more casual and informal through Meetups.

72. Twitter Conversations

Choose specific time and day to meet regularly, and make use of hashtags to facilitate you in controlling the people who want to join in the conversations.

73. Academy Certificate

You can arrange an academy certificate event, where audiences will take part in a series of programs to obtain a certificate. This is an educating model to encourage many followers to attend.

74. Challenges

Make a challenge with specific communities as the targets, so that they can reach the objective your company has decided.

75. Livechat

More often than not, this feature is displayed in a website page as a marketing technique to collect feedback, data, or ideas for marketing projects.

76. Quora

Quora is a well-known question and answer platform. You can show off your leadership value when answering questions on Quora. Don’t forget to attach the name of your company to enhance your business credibility in audiences’ eyes.

77. Up-voting

Marketing industry and startup have several examples of successful up-vote communities, such as Product Hunt, Inbound org.

78. Social Networks

There is no way you do not recognize any of these famous social networks; Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

79. Content Syndication

Syndication is about taking your articles and re-publishing them in a popular publishing website. This can be an efficient method in uplifting your business exposure.

80. Guests’ Blog Posts

You can and must accept guests’ blog posts for your own blog, therefore, you can and must write contents for other blogs as well.

81. Podcast Guest

After becoming a host for your own podcast, now it is time for you to volunteer as a guest in other’s podcasts. There are certainly advantages you can yield from this experience; you can cut the budget off for building your own podcast, and also, you can have instant access to bigger and wider audiences.

82. Webinar Guest

Not only you can visit via podcast, but you can also be a guest of a webinar. This is a moment for you to share your knowledge with other business audiences as well.

83. Handover

If you are a SaaS company, give your users referential URLs that they can share with their friends for a discount reward of your software. This method is a great mouth to mouth marketing to increase your business sales.

84. Pitch Package

In this type of content, you can collaborate with an influencer by sending them a package of your product. Ask for their reviews, in hopes that you get a new publicity by said influencer and their followers.

85. Public Service Announcements

You can utilize public service media to give beneficial information to audiences. This should be done to build your company brand image.

86. Award

Give awards to the best business partners as a thank-you appreciation for the collaboration and cooperation you have affiliated with them.

87. Polling

Polling is a survey where you can launch a question with a list of options for audiences to choose. You can use Twitter for polling when you need feedback about your newest content ideas, for example.

88. Survey

You can give out surveys for research purposes, content ideas, product enhancements, and many others. Survey is a great tool to help you understand your audiences better.

89. Quizzes

Aside from its entertainment purpose, quizzes can strengthen the information you offer through content marketing.

90. Curated Content Hub

Applications such as Uberflip and Pressly exist to help you provide priceless contents to your audiences. Curated Content Hub acts as content references you specially curate for your audiences, sourced from the whole web.

91. Swag

In CoSchedule, there are three different stolen packages we sent to our subscribers, fans, and great people who have helped us. The kit consists of a tee shirt, a poster, stickers, a handwritten thank-you letter, and more.

92. Magazines

Most people like reading physical magazines more than digital ones through their phones or tablets. You can also print out a monthly magazine to engage closer to your audiences.

93. Pamphlets/Brochures

Physical marketing strategy using pamphlets and brochures, for example, can not be forgotten when it comes to certain moments.

94. Sponsorship

Are there any conferences that your audiences are familiar with? You can sponsor those events to support the industry and enhance credibility within your followers.

95. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads have their own charms in inviting bigger audiences to be attracted to your product or service. You can map the content ads by audience locations, intentions, or their behaviors.

96. AdWords

Ads uplift your site to appear in the top front page of Google.

97. Sponsored Content

Here you pay for publication fees to place the contents you already made.

98. Remarketing

Imagine visiting a direction page of a website about how to pour a cup of coffee, but you do not buy it. You go to another web site, and now you’re seeing that same site again. That is the power of remarketing.

99. Ads/Billboard

The installment of billboard, ads, or the like is a traditional marketing technique beneficial for providing information for you to track where your audiences know about your product or service.

100. Guidelines

The guide can be in the form of blog posts of PDF version. Guide is necessary if you write a long blog post.