Where in the blogosphere did you hear that idea? Oh, on every other blog?

Once when I was leapfrogging from blog to blog, I saw a pattern. 

The first time I read a post on using Adsense to make money I stopped, skimmed, then moved on to the next topic. A few blogs later and I find a post discussing Adsense using similar language, similar examples, and similar conclusions. All in all it was very, well, similar.

How then can we create something new? Over at Scribbles and Words, Jay delved into the topic with a post where he asked if your blog has a voice. He talks about the universal truth of there being no new ideas, only voices. After all, we cannot siphon water from an empty bucket.

Does our interpretation of the world indeed create our foothold in the blogosphere?

Spinning with Politicians

The recent caucuses and election hubbub has caused me to hear a lot of political rhetoric. This discourse usually begins sounding sweet, and then ends sounding similar. It’s similar to other candidates, previous candidates, other elected officials, until it becomes Hollywood — scripted.

Each presidential candidate tends to communicate better than the average American. They can spin issues in their favor, masking their failures in logic and past performance, or illustrating a point with vivid language or boisterous remarks. We follow each candidate to see where they stand, over by the workers or in the high rise away from view. But what we know of them we hear them tell us and divulge from popular media.

We follow blogs because they carry us with their words. We buy into their information, lessons, tutorials, voices, and want to learn from them. When we go out on our own to blog, we carry with us the lessons we learned from our online tutors.

How to Sound Dissimilar

A blogger may write posts that sound similar to other blogs. How could this happen? Well, we live in an intellectually cramped world. I realized this when I thought up great names for domains, only to realize, after a quick search, someone else already thought of celebritney.com or callaflower.com. How could I have known? I thought I was being original.

I often hear bloggers suggest we read popular blogs to gain inspiration. This doesn’t mean we copy content, but we see how successful bloggers put words to page and cycle through traffic like an inner city freeway. That’s the stuff of sheer joy, right? We all want to be successful. We all want traffic. But without good content, we will be stuck behind a big rig, honking in frustration.

If You Build It…

We build originality from what we know. Originality can be viewed as standing on the shoulders of the work others have done, but we are not standing on just on one shoulder - but on many. When we write about organizing our lives, and we also know a little bit about zen, then we create a blog about finding peace in modern society. When we love humor and also making money, we can build a blog out of our knowledge and humor. You get the idea. These people did not invent writing about organizing our life and soul or satirizing the successful for our own gain, but they do it well with everything they know.

I feel like my own blog comes from my experiences, the writings I’ve done as a freelancer, the blogs I read regularly, and the information pouring in through every crevice of my life.  It’s all come together in one climactic boom. I’m here spreading it to all of you. I’m sure you’ll pick up something you like, think about it, and use it in your writings, blog, or work. It’s how this originality thing works.

An original idea is like a multi-colored Playdough man, stretching his arms to the sky.

Have you seen the CopyBlogger exercise where they have you write blog post titles using Cosmopolitan magazine’s cover headlines? The exercise was interesting to say the least. Remember that post was lingering in the innovative parts of my brain when, suddenly, I checked my email. There was nothing new in the inbox. However, the spam folder was reaching close to two hundred. I investigated.

We’re all familiar with spam titles with characters and numbers to bypass the un-l33t spam filters of most mail clients. But Google mail has a smart spam killer. It doesn’t fall for such juvenile attempts. In fact, I don’t remember the last time a spam message made it to my inbox.

I scanned the folder of caught spam. I found only one affiliate blog feed in the midst of all the junk. Note to self: Do not sell too ardently in my posts, otherwise, the Google spam gods will strike it down. Aside from the integer messages, I found little of interest in the spambox. Then I saw it, the golden spam title glowing amidst all the rubble.

Don’t Wait for a Miracle

Out of close to 200 messages, only one title had any resonance. Yes, don’t wait for the miracle. It was a decent call to action. Of course, it is a bit trite, but we are talking about spammers here. They couldn’t charm the pants off a hamster.

The title also had an undercurrent to it. From the title, you know they will offer a quick fix to a problem that you otherwise thought would take a miracle to reconcile. Now you can do it with whatever they’re selling. Assuming you bought the title, you would be one step closer to believing the subsequent sales pitch inside the email. Did I open the email?

What Miracle?
A title is only a good title if it is followed up by a decent message. Not surprisingly, the spam message fell flat like a pancake on a plate. It was served cold too. The miracle was just as you can imagine — sexual in nature. How miraculous!

The miracle for the rest of us? The dissection of this message tells us that strong titles act as the good smelling food down the hall, while the unfolding of the article fills the stomach. The post’s message should not – ever – make us vomit.