15 Blog Examples To Inspire Your Own Successful Blog - Shopify (2024)

Starting a successful blog can help you connect to new audiences, generate recurring inbound traffic, and promote any products and services while building your brand.

Blogging also gives you room to experiment with content, tell customer stories, educate readers, or target key words and phrases to help your website rank higher on Google.

There are lots of ways to make money blogging, but many entrepreneurs struggle, because it takes time, care, and effort to get it right. Simply publishing a few posts a month isn’t enough to regularly bring traffic to your site.

That’s why we’re going to take a close look at 15 blog examples. These blogs all have unique strengths that will help support you as you develop your own, no matter what topics you plan to cover.

What is a blog?

A blog is a digital publication that can complement a website or exist independently. A blog may include articles, short posts, listicles, infographics, videos, and other digital content.

15 successful blog examples

The following 15 blog examples are successful in their own unique ways and offer inspiration for your own blogging initiatives.

Marketing and social media blogs

1.Brilliant Business Moms

Brilliant Life Shop sells digital products aimed at helping small-business entrepreneurs—particularly those who are moms—find more success in their endeavors. Its blog, Brilliant Business Moms, features content to complement the paid resources—and it’s pretty much an entity of its own.

The Brilliant Business Moms blog has more than just articles with business advice and ideas for marketing strategies. You’ll also find podcast episodes, free templates and printables, and a list of recommended business tools and resources. When blog readers are ready to upgrade their freebies, they can head over to the shop to purchase more comprehensive templates and downloads.

2.RetroSupply Co.

RetroSupply Co. sells high-quality, professional grade brushes and textures for digital photo editing and graphic design software. Its blog features content about new products and behind-the-scenes glimpses, as well as articles on art and design history. The art and graphics are on-brand—especially important for a company with a target market made up of designers themselves.

Personal finance blogs

3.Bravely Go

Bravely Go is a personal finance blog run by money coach Kara Pérez. She publishes content about how to save, manage, and invest your money in a sustainable, ethical way. She also has videos and money tool recommendations, and provides money coaching services for a fee.

Tech blogs

4.RenewedMacs

RenewedMacs is a website that sells refurbished Apple phones, computers, devices, and accessories. It also publishes a blog with tech advice. Posts cover everything from how to choose and purchase a device to caring for it or troubleshooting issues. The design is simple, showing a feed of the most recently published posts and a sidebar of the most popular ones.

Photography blogs

5. Path

Path is a virtual clipping path and photo editing studio that offers basic Photoshop edits for ecommerce product photos. Along with its services, it also publishes a blog featuring content about photo editing and product photography in general.

Articles include tips on how to shoot, edit, and optimize product photos for the most sales and best ROI. There are also several Photoshop tutorials—including articles and videos—to help businesses learn how to edit their product photos themselves.

6. Pretty Presets and Actions

Pretty Presets and Actions sells digital products on its Shopify site, offering presets, filters, brushes, and actions for Lightroom and related software. Its blog helps readers learn how to use Lightroom themselves, a perfect complement to the products the brand sells. Readers will find tutorials, how-tos, and other inspiration for their own editing processes.

Health blogs

7.The Squeeze Magazine

Press delivers plant-based goodies like cold-pressed juices and kombucha. Its blog, The Squeeze Magazine, provides tips for living a healthy lifestyle. The blog’s simple, bright, eye-catching design, and hero images follow the same color palette of the juices it sells.

The Squeeze supplements the brand’s juices and cleanses with advice that educates readers on making healthy choices. Topics span from switching to a plant-based diet to healthy recipes to suggestions for how to improve digestion while traveling, as well as video interviews with influencers.

8. The Maudern

Maude sells essentials for sexual wellness with a mission to “make intimacy better for all people.” The Maudern, Maude’s blog, is key to delivering on that mission. Its accessible, honest articles cover playful topics. Articles aim to make topics such as sexual health and intimacy accessible for everyone.

Categories include arts, history, culture, living, dating, people, film, relationships, food and drink, science, health, and sex education. The company also sends out new posts in an email newsletter of the same name to increase distribution of its content.

Food blog examples

9.Great Jones

Great Jones makes cookware for home chefs. The goal of its blog is to empower people in their culinary journey. Digest has real-world stories where they interview a guest who makes a meal of their choosing. The “Recipes we love” section features recipes created by different chefs, the stories behind them, and the Great Jones items you’ll need to make the dish.

These two approaches to storytelling make for unique content. Posts also create a sense of community for readers: Digest+ feels more like a home kitchen than an ecommerce blog. It’s a place where readers can come to read a story, learn about a culture, or try out something new next time they’re in the kitchen.

Learn more: How to Monetize a Food Blog (Even if You're Starting From Scratch)

10. Partake Foods

Partake Foods is a brand of allergy-friendly vegan packaged snacks. It uses its blog to share its passion for healthy food through recipes, food allergy resources, and snack ideas. Readers will also see notes from the Partake Foods team, including founder and CEO Denise Woodard, who started the company to provide her own family with healthy snacks.

Travel and outdoors blogs

11. BioLite

BioLite sells outdoor energy gear like solar panels and camp stoves. Its blog does an excellent job both quietly promoting its products and offering value to its readers. BioLite’s blog has a conversational and friendly brand voice, a simple design, and articles that tell stories, educate readers on outdoor activities, and offer behind-the-scenes looks at products for prospective customers.

BioLite’s blog excels at guides and building reader trust. It brings in the experts to tell the story, offer the advice, and walk readers through the “how to.” It’s a well-rounded, thoughtful approach to blogging that blends infographics, videos, and storytelling into genuinely helpful reads.

12. Seea

Seea is a sustainable swimwear brand made for active women—surfers, in particular. As such, its blog features those surfing women, dubbed Seeababes. Along with inspiring stories of women in the water, the blog publishes advice on how to connect with the water, behind-the-scenes looks at the brand and its products, and tips for surfing.

Lifestyle blogs

13. Consider the Wldflwrs

Consider the Wldflwrs is a fine-jewelry shop in Nashville that sells heirloom-quality pieces, including everything from bridal jewelry to everyday essentials. The brand’s blog is a well-designed collection of articles.

The blog is simple and helpful, and it strikes a good balance between educational content and product promotion. Topics range from new products, a guide to cleaning fine jewelry, teammate features, product spotlights, and roundup guides. The shop also sends out an email newsletter that announces new products and sales.

14. Kirrin Finch

Kirrin Finch is a brand of gender-neutral clothing. Its blog creates an emotional connection with customers through inspiring content. Along with video interviews, styling tips, and behind-the-scenes content, the Real Weddings series highlights the nuptials of non-traditional couples.

15. Talking Crap

Who Gives a Crap offers sustainable paper products and donates 50% of its profits to improving sanitation and building toilets in developing countries. Its blog, Talking Crap, has a simple design, custom hero images with bright colors, and quick-hit posts.

Building on the brand’s silly personality, its voice and tone is comedic, lighthearted, and fun. Topics include notes from the CEO, updates on the company’s progress building toilets, the history of paper towels, and information about bamboo paper products. The team even wrote one post in the style of a poem.

What makes a successful blog?

A necessary part of an organic marketing strategy is building a blog, whether it’s educational, SEO-driven, simply fun, or full of inspiring stories.

Organic marketingis when you advertise on your own channels, so you’re not paying for eyeballs—you’re creating content on your media channels or your website without putting dollars behind them. That means it’ll take longer for folks to see your content, but as you gain traction, the traffic, or people coming to look at what you’ve created compounds on itself. Over time, potential customers will look at your free content to help them make purchasing decisions, big or small.

You need to develop a blog strategy in order to get to your content to that point. Here’s what you can do to make your blog successful:

Add value

Your blog should contain content your target audience wants to read. Entertain them, educate them, share news, or do a little of all three. Just remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your customers’ wants and needs.

Have clear goals

What do you want to get out of blogging? Ideally, you should focus on bringing in readers through search engines, social media, and qualified leads, building a relationship with them and eventually driving sales.

Focus on brand building

Blogs can be used not only to support your brand, but to help establish it. Blogging gives you a voice, and you can harness storytelling to connect with your audience and make your brand stand out.

Be consistent

If you can only put out one post a month, that’s OK. Just remember to make time to hit that once-a-month mark consistently.

Why study other blog examples?

There are three reasons why it’s a good idea to check out other blogs:

1. Inspiration

It can be difficult to come up with ideas for your blog, especially if you’ve never done it before. Seeing what else is out there can provide inspiration for your own blog, whether it’s the design and layout, post format, blog post templates, or tone and voice.

2. Insight

It’s always a good idea to check out your competition, be it their blog, products, pricing, or even marketing strategy as a whole. This gives you insight into what might be working—or not working—for them. For example, if a competitor started a blog series but you only see two or three posts for the series, it could indicate it didn’t perform well or was difficult to execute. But if you see a competitor doubling down on behind-the-scenes videos, you might think of developing your own unique approach to similar content.

3. Ideas

When it comes to topics themselves, looking at other blogs can help you come up with your own ideas. If you sell baking products, for example, see how Great Jones and Partake Foods publish recipes—you might consider posting your own recipes as well.

Use these blog examples to inspire your own

Blogging has a lot of potential if you want to build your brand, increase email subscribers, establish relationships with potential customers, and drive sales. But it can only yield these benefits when you put consistent effort into every post.

The blogs we highlighted are all from vastly different industries, targeting different audiences, each using different approaches that worked well for them. As you get started, remember your blog will need to speak to your customers and target audience in ways that are most interesting and accessible to them. Setting up interviews with your customers to gauge their interests is a great place to begin.