You produce content but don’t get the results you want. Why? Perhaps you just don’t understand how to successfully create top-level content within your niche. There’s no need to feel ashamed, as creating the crème-de-la-crème of content takes painstaking hard work and dogged determination. Even skilled and experienced content creators throw every ounce of their blood, sweat, and tears into their content to remain at the top. Yeah—it’s that difficult, especially in these modern times featuring hundreds of posts, videos, animations, podcasts, and infographics on exactly the same topic.

With this in mind, let’s examine a truly astounding blog post to help you understand what to shoot for.

First, Provide Truly Unequalled Value

Brian Dean’s Backlinko blog is unquestionably one of the top two or three blogs in the SEO niche. In fact, the guy is pretty much worshipped as an SEO (and content) demigod. Although he sometimes writes rather lengthy posts to the tune of 20,000 words, it’s not so much about the length but the advice these words deliver—which is what keeps people coming back for more and inspires thousands of shares (along with hundreds of comments). Well, these words combined with Brian’s pre-existing status as a leader within his niche I suppose.

While it undoubtedly takes him hours to write these lengthy posts, he prefers publishing one to two monthly. These days, he may not even publish that frequently. The bottom line is that Brian puts a massive amount of effort into a single post that perennially dominates the competition.

Visual Appeal

In many niches, blog posts sorely lack any true visual interest. This isn’t a complete post popularity killer if you don’t take the time to do it, but it will hurt.

In the SEO niche, specifically, blogs do a better job on average of zeroing in on their visual appeal than in most other spaces. If you can find the time and/or money to add useful and engaging visual appeal to your post, this will make a huge difference with respect to the number of links, shares, and comments you reap.

For example, upon first visiting this classic Backlinko post, a simple (yet engaging) image greets you:

When you scroll down, you see a graphical menu that allows you to click and navigate to various chapters:

While I’m not sure of the overall investment needed for this design, you can bet Brian didn’t skimp on costs given his popularity within the niche and desire to maintain that status.

Don’t Feel Constrained to This Ideal

Now look, this represents the upper echelon as the very best stuff on the web (with respect to written content). There’s no need to match it yourself, which quite frankly is possibly out of your budget. Yet, the closer you can come to this ideal, the better off you’ll be. Not only that, but your search rankings will enjoy security not just for the next few months but in the years ahead while your competitors figure out what to do.

By the way, other great blog examples to study and imitate include:

• SmartBlogger
• Moz
• Neil Patel
• Content Marketing Institute

You may have your own favorites, too! For now, it’s important to understand what your blog should look like to dominate your niche.