Research your market to identify what makes your blog different.

Identifying a niche or something that helps differentiate your blog from other competitor blogs makes a massive difference in accelerating your blog’s growth. This involves doing your research to find out who your competitors are, what they're writing about, what gaps exist in areas that they don’t write about, and how popular the content they create is.

First search Google for keywords relevant to your product or service to see who appears regularly. Check out their content and see what they write about. Also research the competitors you already know to see what they write about.

Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to rank yourself and your competitors. This tool ranks websites and pages of websites out of 100. The higher the scores, the harder it will be to beat the competitor in search results when you are competing for the same keywords. Next, use tools like Compete, Quantcast or SEMRush to get estimates of your competitors' traffic.

Next, use Ahrefs or similar tools to find out which blog posts on their website have the most links pointing to them. Content that's popular will be linked to by other websites. Then use SocialCrawlytics to analyze the volume of social sharing on your competitor’s blog content. Popular content gets shared a lot.

You need to determine what topics your competitors are writing about that are popular but that they're not focusing all their attention on. Then you can come up with better content and deliver it from a different angle to end up with really popular blog posts.

VISIT ENTREPRENEUR TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE.