As long as the internet has existed, so have platforms for everyday people to express their thoughts. While once reserved primarily for individuals to share their thoughts and observations with the world, blogs can now be found pretty much anywhere. Even some of the biggest brands in the world use blog posts as a way to improve content quality and attract more traffic.

There are many ways that you can craft a blog post to be successful, but every blog post has a few common ingredients that help make it successful. Below, let’s look at the basics of writing a great blog post and how embracing these tips can dramatically improve your standing among audiences.

Hammer Out the Precise Topic

The first step in creating any great blog post is to evaluate your options. In most situations, you’ll already have a focused, broader niche or topic that forms the basis of your post. From here, boiling down the broader idea into multiple, specific topics is necessary. Once you’ve devised a few potential blog post titles/topics, the process then turns to evaluating viability: which ones are likely to get the most attention and/or rank easiest in search results? After determining which idea you can most effectively start pinging search engines with, the process then shifts to content creation.

Create an Outline and Rough Draft

It’s never a good idea to just start writing and then shortly after publish. The very best blog posts on the internet are cultivated through several steps and are extensively evaluated. Inherently, there is no reason to rush any one blog post to publication: by spending time creating an outline first, you’ll be sure to cover all the important points.

Once an outline of everything the post is to include is finished, then you can shift to creating a rough draft. This rough draft will by and large be the finished product, but more work is still necessary to ensure it is optimal for audiences.

Solicit Feedback

With your rough draft in hand, now the process turns to soliciting valuable feedback. Whether it be through a family member, a friend or a colleague, ask for input about the quality and content of the post. We can sometimes become so absorbed and attached to our own work that we miss valuable opportunities to elaborate or potential areas of confusion. By getting some feedback beforehand, you can ensure that the post in question is up to par. Afterwards, you can pivot to perfecting the content for publication.

Format and Post

Before you start pinging search engines with your refined post, you need to consider a very important component: formatting. While you’ve almost certainly used paragraphs and headings throughout the creation of the post, further formatting may be necessary. This can include but is not limited to the inclusion of images to break up long sections of text, bullet points to help summarize information and bold/italic emphasis on key points of the content. Once you are satisfied with the formatting of the content, the only thing left to do is post it!

In short, building great blog posts follows a fairly simple yet important strategy. By narrowing down your topics to include the most viable options, creating outlines and rough drafts, soliciting feedback from others not vested in its outcome and ultimately using good formatting, you can create the basis for many successful blog posts to come.