Whether you’re an experienced blogger, or you’re fresh on the scene, you are working hard to produce original, inspiring content that connects with your audience.
You want people to link to you. You want recognition. You want traffic. You want to genuinely help your audience. You want to lead.
With millions of blogs and many niches saturated, it’s difficult to make your blog posts stand out. There is quite a bit of pressure on you to write unique, compelling content. It feels absolutely essential to your blog’s success.
Fortunately, to write original content with any consistency requires only one thing: a blog writing system—one that pushes your uniqueness, develops your thoughts, and drives your blog forward. Let’s put the pieces together.
Your Blog Writing System: Capturing and Developing Your Ideas
There is no wizardry that will magically gift you with unique concepts, but there are ways to generate fresh ideas with regularity. Here is how to come up with new ideas, grab them, grind them into gunpowder, and pack them into bullets that form the ammunition of your blog:
- Internalize Your Subject – This is the base you start from. Know your niche inside and out. Be clued into where the innovation is happening. Put yourself in the flux of new ideas. Educate, then look to push your knowledge to the forefront of your subject. At this edge is where new ideas live. This is where you discover them.
- Collect Your Unique Thoughts – Capture your ideas as they grip your mind, as you encounter problems, and as you come up with intuitive solutions. This is a critical component of creating unique content. Have a system in place to grab your ideas and collect them in a master list.
- Develop Your Personal Ideas – Have a space that you write in, where there is little pressure, that you can develop your personal opinions on subjects. A journal works really well for this. Connect the topics you will cover on your blog to your own personal experiences. Tell idiosyncratic stories from your life, capture case studies from your own projects, and add to this material daily. This is the ground you dig in; this soil is where you lay your seeds and grow your posts from.
- Improve Your Independent Thinking – Take a stance and stand your ground. Have a fucking opinion. There is so much me-too in the blogosphere. Instead, go against the conventional thinking when your train of thought leads you there. As you research, take notes, consider counterpoints and work on crafting your own solutions to problems. Be brave and be bold.
- Push Your Core Message – Discover what’s important to you. Figure out what you want to be known for and what matters to you, then align that with your audience’s needs. This is your unique purpose. Use this as the core message to color the topics you cover with your unique flavor. Thrust that message to the forefront of your content.
Bloggers channel their thoughts. They are focused on the audience they serve, the topic they cover, and the core message they are pushing.
With this clear purpose and focus, your ideas are always moving. You’re constantly turning problems and shaping solutions in your mind. You need a reliable system to capture you insights, as well as the space to brainstorm and develop your thoughts.
Turn these ideas over in your brain, make use of your noggin’, but don’t loose these thoughts. The worst thing is when you have a killer idea, only to loose it. Have a system in place that collects these thoughts and packs them into the ammunition you need.
How to Write Unique Blog Posts
Not all topics are unique. Some are well-worn. As bloggers, we can bring a fresh perspective to these topics with our unique insight and voice. Bring it.
There are trending currents out there. Tap this electricity. Cover the bleeding edge of technology that is shaping our lives. Look at where innovation is occurring. Plug into it.
Whether you’re beginning with a truly unique idea, aiming to put your spin on a current trending subject, or covering a well-worn, pillar subject, there are effective techniques you can take advantage of to write original, gripping content, such as:
- Act Quickly – The quicker you act in the blogosphere, the fresher your content appears. If you’re reviewing an application month’s after it releases, then you’re not creating content that is likely to set the trend. Newsworthiness and keeping your blog bleeding-edge is a surefire way to stand out in your reader’s minds. The faster you act to cover new topics, the more your blog will be seen as a must-read, leading site.
- Connect in Your Voice – Don’t shy away from being unique. Write in your own voice. Revel in your authentic approach to writing blog content. People are compelled to read a blog because they identify with the blogger as a person, as much as they have a problem they need to solve. Be real, be distinctive, be a character, and your unique perspective will shine. This makes really anything you write on have it’s own flavor of uniqueness.
- Experiment to Innovate – Brainstorm, mold, stretch, and pull your ideas, like electric taffy. Set up controlled blogging experiments, test your hypothesis, and calculate results, much like a scientist incrementally pushes until reaching a breakthrough. You’ll only advance your blog, if you take risks, and are always pushing your thoughts forward.
- Develop Your Hook – Give your post a clear purpose. Make it gripping. Grab your audience by the shirt and shake the shit out of them. Hook them with your title, make every sentence compel them to read the next. Every paragraph is uniquely yours; make it count.
- Dig Deeper – You have a unique idea for a blog post, a compelling hook, now dig deeper. Do research, pull together data that backs up your point, and compile quotes from industry professionals, counter the counterpoints, and reach for depth. Shovel until you reach the molten core, dig until you feel blazing-hot lava in the grip of your bare hands, then shape it with your fists into hardened steel.
Writing unique content is difficult. It’s one of the most challenging things you can do. It requires tenacity. You have to hammer, and hammer on an idea until it forms a sharp point—one that cuts and leaves scars.
Originality Versus Clarity of Purpose
We tend to look at original ideas as groundbreaking, revolutionary solutions that propel all of mankind forward. But, not every individual blog post you write has to break new ground in the blogosphere. In fact, much of it won’t.
We aren’t inventing a cure to cancer here, but we are changing lives. What is uniquely you as a blogger—your voice, your approach, your ability to connect with your audience—needs to fuse behind your mission.
It’s more important that the posts you write are clearly aligned with your blog’s purpose, and that purpose aligns with your audiences’ needs, than every post you write will reverberate. Every niche demands a varying degree of newness: pushing the latest ideas forward versus covering well-worn topics. This approach doesn’t require you to be a visionary, but rather an astute blogger.
Keep in mind that what’s original to Google is that you’ve strung together words that other content hasn’t. It doesn’t require breaking new intellectual ground for you to write unique sentences and appear fresh in the SERPS. Also, what feels important to your audience is that you solve the problem they just searched for, the problem that brought them to your blog post, and that you do so while connecting with them authentically.
Writing well as a blogger doesn’t require original solutions for every post, though originality is a clear differentiator for your blog. It allows you to stand out in a see of sameness.
After bringing a new reader to your site, what will keep them there? After you’ve solved that first problem, what will bring them back? What will compel them to sign up for your email list? What will turn them from a casual browser into a returning fan? What makes your content and blog stand out? What is the deep value you have to offer?
Each post you write, each experiment you conduct on your site, this forms the totality of your blog project. Take a hard look at your content. How unique is it? What makes it remarkable?
Original, thought-provoking content is:
- Fresh – It’s filled with your unique voice and your brand of blogging. The more novel your approach and writing style, the more potential there is for readers to engage with your content—either love it or hate it.
- Noteworthy – It’s memorable. The more your content stands-out in your reader’s minds, and feels different in your niche, the more reader will return to your blog. Remarkable content builds fans.
- Sharable – It’s a spark that lights fires. The more unique your content is, the more your audience will want to share it, which means more Tweets, Facebook likes, engagement, and links back to your site.
The benefits of writing original content are clear: these are blog posts that connect with your audience, uniquely solves their problem, and lights a fire under them.
Writing compelling, fresh content from your own unique perspective is how you create posts that resonate. Writing a truckload of these posts will establish your blog as a leader in your niche.
Let Originality Grow
Just write down the word original a few times on a piece of paper. It feels so bland. Who the fuck cares about originality, really? Don’t let the dickhead idea of being a unique snowflake corner you, give you anxiety, or slow down your writing.
It takes quite a bit of just doing—making lots of mediocre crap—before something unique starts to take shape. It needs to happen over time. Just create and enjoy the craft of blogging, appreciate the lives you touch, and let the original inside you grow on it’s own.
Educate yourself on your niche. Own your topic, really live and breath every nuance of it. Do that, and original ideas will naturally move to the forefront of your writing.
Be yourself and you’re being unique. It takes time to grow into your own skin as a thinker and writer.
It’s takes real effort to become an original blogger—OB.
Bleed All Over the Page, and Connect
To be original, with any bit of consistency, requires real passion. You have to feel the importance of your words in your bones. You need to harness the electricity that runs through your veins. You need to take out a razor blade, cut your wrists open, and bleed all over the page.
Say something you fucking believe in. Write it to an audience you care deeply about. Push the crazy, weird ideas you have—experiment. Throw up funny stick figure drawings on Facebook, interview a deranged individual, let your ideas fly in a rant, or turn a video camera on. Be creative and just try shit.
The original isn’t just in you, it also lies outside you. It forms in the connections you make. Where you becomes we. Help people, be genuine, and above all else, make a meaningful difference in peoples lives.
Graphic Credit: Fountain Pen designed by Mark MacKay from the Noun Project.
