What should you write about on your blog?

It’s not enough to just create content every week. There are over 30 million bloggers in the US alone and WordPress powers over 75 million websites. Nobody really knows how many blogs are out there but one thing is clear: you have millions of websites to compete with and thousands of direct competitors in your niche.

If you want to take blogging seriously and actually use it to get customers, it’s important to be clear on what you’re blogging about.

Create a high-quality blog that readers will adore

The blogosphere is massively oversaturated with the same old regurgitated content. How to’s, top tips and beginners guides can be found for every topic under the sun. These kinds of pieces aren’t enough if you want to really stand out.

Here’s what you need to do to create quality content.

Three Main Elements of Quality Content

There are no fixed rules for creating great blog content, but ideally, each post should be unique, valuable and written on-time.

1. Make your content unique

This is probably the biggest challenge for any blog writer. There is so much content out there that it can be hard to think of something truly unique, even if you work in the most obscure niches.

It’s probably not too late, though. By doing thorough competitive research, you can see what your top competitors are writing about and what topics to avoid. Who knows, it may even give you ideas of your own. There’s nothing wrong with tackling the same topic from a different angle or offering more depth where people have only covered something lightly.

2. Make your content valuable

One major rule of blog writing is to always keep your audience in mind and write specifically for your reader. Too often, bloggers can get caught up trying to write for Google and forget to create valuable content that readers can actually use.

Let’s look at a pretty niche situation. Say you’re a makeup artist with an audience who includes women who want to learn how to do their own makeup. You could offer tips on choosing the right makeup for their skin tone, how to apply different types of makeup properly and write reviews on the latest products. If you are a makeup artist who specializes in special effects, however, you might have a different audience. Your readers wouldn’t be interested in general tips, they’d want things specific to special effects.

Creating high-value content is the single best way to have readers coming back week in week out and to earn backlinks.

3. Up-to-date

It’s important to create a blogging schedule and stick to it. How often you blog may depend on the kind of site you have — news sites need to be updated more frequently than normal blogs — but typically once a week should suffice.

The key is to develop a content calendar, get a few weeks ahead of schedule and then to keep writing a new post every single week.

Soon you’ll have a blog readers love.