Help! All the topics I come up with are already used!

You know that feeling when you come up with a great blog post topic. It is something you never read before and you are excited. This is going to be a great new original blog post! Just as you decide to start writing it, you decide to do a google search. And there it is. A blogger has written a post on it just a month before you did. Your topics are not unique. What are you going to do now?

I have been here a lot of times. I am walking down the street, I think of a great idea and I write it down on my phone and I am all excited to my amazing original blog topic idea.  But then when you start researching it suddenly isn’t as originals as you hoped. Worse case scenario, there is a blog post with the same title you just came up with. No kidding this has happened to me!

But don’t despair. We are going to go through how you can deal with this!

Include yourself 

The first thing to remember however is that YOU are unique. If this topic is personal, your story is personal and therefore unique.

If you were thinking of a more general topic your voice can still make the difference. It’s your voice and your look at things that can make a topic into something entirely new.

Want to know how to make your blog sizzle with personality? // Twelveskip

You can include our own experience and story as an introduction. Or if you can make it work just base your entire post on that. There is nothing more unique than your experience in life!

Separate your topics

Another trick is if you were thinking of making a list.

Say you found two new blogging tools that you are loving. Now you think “let’s do a list of favourite blogging tools”. Of course, this topic has been done thousands of times. But if your 2 new blogging tools are so exciting, then why would you hide them in that list. You can create amazing posts about just those two tools.

The benefits; 

1. The content looks more unique
2. You have two posts instead of one list-post!

Like I did with my organizing tools;

Habitica; The site that makes productivity easy and fun! and Organise your blog and business using Trello

You can always make a list afterwards, to sum up, all those amazing posts you made!

Don’t fall for self-doubt 

Just because someone else covered a topic doesn’t mean you can’t cover it just as good. Your insight is just a valuable as someone else’s. Even more, if you can add something you haven’t read anywhere else!

New strategies, tips, and stories surface all the time. If a big blogger covered a topic months ago that only means that the entire conversation might have changed by now.

You probably came up with the idea to cover the topic because you had a unique thought on it. Build on that and expand.

Build on the conversation

Don’t repeat what has been said before, but add to it!

When I wrote my post on Pinterest tactics I didn’t write about what all the tactics were. I tried to talk about which worked for me and what didn’t. This way I did not just write an article that has been written a lot and that many people have more knowledge about than me. I actually added to the conversation for people who are looking for people who are trying these tactics and are new to Pinterest. 

Building on the conversation can be done by replying to previously written articles. Adding to the conversation on bigger topic by just talking about your struggle or what other blog posts were helpful for you is also a great tactic.

Don’t be discouraged by the big amount of things that have already been written about. It is not about coming up with unique topics, it’s about making topics unique. 

Don’t be afraid to make things more YOU or to try out new things. Your blog can only stand out if you make it stand out.

Let me know what you do when you find out your idea has already been written about! 

And don’t forget to share this post with bloggers who also struggle!