“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
– Abraham Lincoln
You don’t have to be creative to make money
If you run a blog most of your content is going to be unoriginal.
This doesn’t mean that you went out and stole from someone else.
You might not even know you did it.
Your unoriginal content might even be hailed as “revolutionary” and “unique.” It’s happened before.
The 4-Hour Workweek doesn’t have a single fresh idea in it. People have been outsourcing jobs to others since the dawn of time. Anyone who has ever eaten at a restaurant or hired a plumber has “outsourced” a task.
Despite this the book managed to expose people to ideas they had never considered before and changed plenty of lives.
How to find interesting information
Unless you choose to blog about a super obscure niche, like the best harmonicas for cat owners, you will be facing some stiff competition.
Lifting weights, making money, politics, and traveling are all over-saturated markets. A guru would probably tell you to avoid these at all costs.
And that would be a huge mistake.
You might have a lot of competition, but how many of your rivals actually have good content?
Men’s Health is one of the big guns in the fitness/dating/fashion genre. They have millions of dollars to spend on content and marketing. Big-name celebrities show up to do interviews with them and they have all kinds of “exclusive” content from exercise gurus.
Do I read them?
Of course not.
That site sucks. The content might, theoretically, be useful, but it’s presented horribly. There are plenty of one man operations that can run circles around this giant.
The overall tone and delivery is too politically correct and generic, making it impossible to stick around. Articles like “Why you need to take gym advice from your girlfriend” disengages guys like myself and keeps us from coming back.
Being a big name isn’t all that
30 Days To X is in the top 300,000 websites worldwide. I’m closer in popularity to Facebook than I am some obscure niche site.
With that said, there are a ton of great blogs and writers that are bigger than me. 30 day challenges aren’t that unique and plenty of bigger guns have done them. Yet there are a lot of people who prefer this site’s tone and content.
With zero marketing and almost no knowledge of how SEO works, I’ve still cultivated a great group of readers.
Writing about a topic in a saturated market isn’t always a death sentence. Blogging about something that has been done to death won’t ruin you either.
As long as you have a unique voice and deliver interesting content you’ll be fine. People have favorite authors for a reason. They like their style and they like their personality.
Stephen King wasn’t the first guy to ever write horror stories. A skeptic might have said that the market was too crowded, people have been scaring each other for fun for as long as humanity has existed, but King eventually grew and became the horror icon. By injecting stories with his own personality he was able to give himself a unique angle in the genre.
Even when King tackled “generic” stuff like vampires or swamp monsters, he let his voice and style transform the subject into something new and one of a kind.
If you like exercise, or movies, or giving dating advice, there’s no reason not to start a blog about it. You might not have the marketing team and bankroll of a major corporate website, but you can still win fans with your personality.