When you consider the fact that blogs that post content to their site on a daily basis receive 5x more traffic than those that post weekly or less, one thing is clear: maintaining a blog is hard work.

There is, however, a certain methodology you can follow to ensure that you are consistently collecting and creating quality content. For all intents and purposes, this can be broken into two simple parts.

First, you must find content that is already succeeding.

Second, you must raise the bar on the content.

How do I find ideas?

It’s easy, really. Find articles within your niche that are doing well on social media and get your ideas from them. There are several ways you can go about doing this, and all will lead you to quality information.

You want your article to succeed, so we’re going to put most of our energy onto two key factors: we’ll look at social media trends, and we’ll look at what is doing well on search engines.

First, to find out what’s buzzing on social media, head over to BuzzSumo and get to searching.

For the purposes of this example, I searched “social media”. On the right, you will find the most successful social media-related stories. I refined my search to the last week, as I only want to write about relevant content.

If we wanted to focus on getting shares on LinkedIn, …writing about LinkedIn tips is the way to go.

Find an article that has both done well and iis interesting to you, read it over, and then get to making your own.

Before we do that, let’s take a look at Google. After we have the key word we want to search, we’ll stick it into google and let them do the work for us.

Right there, Google has given us some great ideas of ‘tending’ stories in our niche. Just as we did with our BuzzSumo results, we can find something interesting and expand upon it.

How do I make it better than what’s already out there?

Here’s the million dollar question: how do I make it better? There are a million and one things you can do to make your blog stand out among the competition, but there are a few fool proof tips that almost always do the trick.

Make it longer. If someone is looking for information on a given subject, chances are that they want something that’s long and comprehensive. If the blog you found is ‘25 New Social Media Trends’, expand upon it and make yours ‘35 New Social Media Trends’ instead. More information means more viewers.

Include graphics. No one, not even the most seasoned professionals, enjoy staring at block after block of text for hours on end. If you include a few graphics (an infographic, a pie chart, even a gif!), you’ll break up the writing and make it easier on the viewer’s eyes.

Go in depth. Why should someone read 10 different articles on one topic to get all of the information they need? If you create an ‘ultimate guide’ to something, you’re ensuring that your viewers will come to you time and time again because you’re building your brand as a one-stop-shop.

Present a problem and solution. Don’t fix people’s problems for them. Instead, tell them how they can fix it themselves. ‘How To’ articles are all the rage now, and people aren’t looking to have things handed to them on a silver platter. Teaching someone a valuable skill is worth its weight in gold.

If you’re still stumped, here are 101 ideas for ways to improve your blog post, as well as this handy infographic for those of you who are more visual learners: