5 Tips for How to Be Original Even When Re-Blogging

 

If you want to enjoy any sort of real success as a blogger, you need to set yourself apart from the thousands or even millions of other bloggers on the web. You need to dare to be different and you need to be original. This can be accomplished, at least in part, by coming up with completely original blog post ideas that no one else has written about, but when you consider the vastness of the Internet, this is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge.

And at the same time, you may be interested in sharing recent new stories and commentary with your readers. The concept of re-blogging is when you take a blog post or an article from another site and give it your own spin in some way or another. This is very common, particularly in niches that are focused more on breaking news, as would be the case with tech blogs, for instance. But if everyone simply writes the same thing about a new iPhone, how are you going to make yourself different? How are you going to separate yourself from the crowd? How are you going to be unique and original?

There are several different tips and approaches that you can keep in mind to accomplish this goal.

Be Yourself

First and foremost, it is of critical importance that you stay true to yourself and use your own voice when writing your blog posts. After all, the single most unique feature about your blog is you and that’s what you really want to showcase. Your individual personality, idiosyncrasies, experiences and preferences will come through in your writing and thats whats going to make your blog post different from all the others that may be covering the same bit of news.

It is through this sense of a unique personality that successful bloggers like Perez Hilton and iJustine have been able to propel themselves to where they are today. You dont necessarily need to be as out there as those two individuals, but you do need to be special or unique in some way.

Be Interesting

You need to not only capture the attention of your audience, but you also need to retain it. Your blog posts should be interesting to read. They should be engaging and captivating. This can be accomplished in several different ways, many of which lead back to the original point about being yourself. Your posts can provide facts and information that your readers might find interesting. Your posts can be funny, giving your readers some much needed levity in their lives.

Remember that you are writing a blog post and not a college essay. A dry presentation of the facts is never interesting. Relate the information back to the readers, even if you’re re-blogging, so they understand why what you have to say is relevant to them.

Be Opinionated

When reporting on current events, its easy to get lost in the facts. Yes, the facts are certainly important and youll want to share some of the key tidbits of information that you glean from the newspapers and magazines. However, simply regurgitating what these news outlets have to share is not enough. You need to offer an opinion.

This isn’t to say that you should seek controversy for its own sake, but it is to say that you should provide your own personal perspective on the news. Using the hypothetical example of re-blogging on the news of a new iPhone, you can comment on what you like and dont like about it. Explain why you feel the way that you do.

Be Creative

Allow your own personality and creativity to shine in your blog posts. A great approach to re-blogging that can help to boost your originality is to take the existing information and present it in a different way. Re-imagine the information and tell your readers about it in a format that is different from the original.

A great example would be if you wanted to comment on a recent article that involved a lot of stats and figures. If you took those raw numbers and presented them in a more visual format, like an infographic or a pie chart, you are giving your readers something more interesting to read. Presenting the information in video format, perhaps uploaded to YouTube, is another great idea.

Be Valuable

The main problem with the majority of re-blogging is that the writers just re-state what’s already be written. Thats not enough to be special, different or unique. The biggest key here is that you need to add value to the existing material in some way. This could involve some of the strategies described above, like offering your opinion or re-formatting the story into an infographic, but you can go even further.

Rather than simply taking the single story and reporting on it, perform additional research and give your blog post more substance than your competitors. Seek additional resources that can make your blog post the definitive article on the topic, making it more comprehensive and complete than other blog posts on the same topic. What’s the history and background? What are the predictions moving forward? What do some of these included terms mean? Whats the context? How will this impact other businesses and industries?

Answer the questions that your readers may have, so they don’t have to seek those answers elsewhere.