Why Marketers Should Mix Content on a Small Business Blog

When I started writing frequently for this blog, I thought most posts would be pretty much the same: Concise, concrete tips about how to do inbound marketing and how companies can use it to market their medium and small business blog.

I was wrong.

While that may be a consistent theme of posts on this blog, there is no single type of post that succeeds. Like any medium or small business blog , this blog thrives on a healthy mix of content.

You can see the importance of varied content on large news sites like NYTimes.com or  WSJ.com . They thrive on their mix. Their homepages are grab-bags of news, features, videos, pictures, graphics and who-knows-what-else. Even if you have a small team working on your small business blog , you can post multiple types of content for your readers.

You can also see this by looking at the posts that succeed on this blog. Below I've listed our top articles over the past three months, sorted by inbound links and page views. (I pulled this data from HubSpot's blog analytics tool .)

Top Posts by Page Views (Last 3 Months)

Top Posts by Inbound Links (Last 3 Months)

 Looking at this data, three things jump out:

(1) Lots of different types of articles. There are cartoons, a big report, a viral video, how-to stories and some bigger thought pieces.

(2) Little overlap between the two lists. You'd expect the articles that got the most traffic to also get the most inbound links. But that's only true in one case. Both metrics are important, so you need to create different types of content.

(3) Lots of surprises. The report, the video and the cartoons are not surprising, but the others are. It's hard to tell how these posts are any different from the dozens of others like them that we ran over the past three months.

The takeaway here is clear: Just like a venture capitalist or a movie studio executive, you never know which projects will be most successful on your medium or small business blog . The only way to deal with such uncertainty is to create a portfolio of different posts -- you gotta mix it up!

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Photo:  Eric Hamilton