In the world of writing, there is no such thing as a monopoly.  Competition is everywhere.  There are writers that are doing exactly what you’re doing only they’re a lot better at doing it.  The layout of their site is more attractive.  They have a lot more visitors.  Their explanations are a lot better than yours.

And do you know what?  That is perfectly fine.  Competition is a good thing, and if you understand your competition good enough, you can learn to set yourself apart from them.

There are many writers, but only one you.  Nobody else can write the way that you write so learn that uniqueness and execute it.  When you start to do this, you begin to build a personal brand that sets yourself apart from everyone else.  The more unique it is, the more it stands out, the better.

How do I learn that uniqueness?  This is not something that you learn overnight.  Rather, this is something that is developed over time.  write everyday and read everyday.  Have your words reflect the personality that you portray.  Are you direct? Overly opinionated?  Reflect that in your writing.  Are you soft-spoken or quiet?  Make that confession in your writing.  As you begin to build your website, you will begin to learn the different facets of your own uniqueness.

Now for the other important matter.  If you want to be successful with your writing and with your website, you need to find out what your competition is doing.  Go to their site and read what they’re writing.  Don’t copy their posts word-for-word but go to their site to learn what they are doing.  Are there any topics that they covered that you forgot to cover?  This is where you want to take good notes.  They may have written a post about this or that, but here’s the good part where you have the advantage.  You can write that post a lot better than they can.  They have already published that post, but you haven’t published yours yet.  Maybe you have a different perspective on what they covered.  A new idea to add to what they covered or a totally different opinion.  Maybe their punctuation was off (It shouldn’t be, if they have a good blog).  So go and do that.  Read and learn about your competition.  Their ideas will help you to better your own.  And if you’re starving for ideas, go to their blog. What you have is an all you can eat buffet of ideas.  Feast on them and add your own unique ingredients to make them better.

What I covered in Ideation was mapping and springboards.  I looked at my competition to see what writing exercises they already had.  While I have already done some of them, most of the ideas were pretty new.  Help yourself to your competition’s smorgasbord and spice it up.  Change the recipe and now it’s your own.

Next week, I will go into more depth about your competition and exactly what you need to look for when you are making your visits to their sites.  Getting the right information is important, as is the execution if you want to have a good blog.  Stay tuned.  It’s starting to get good.

See you next week!

Your friend in writing,

Kyle