How to find a viable blog topic that’s not already crowded at the same time

   Is your niche of interest much overcrowded?

Put aside the notion that building a blog takes a long time. This is a fact you just can’t escape, so you should definitely stick it out for the long run.

If you are establishing a new blog, it will only ever have a chance of succeeding if it is written from an unique perspective. However, what exactly is unique enough of a perspective, or how can you present factual information in an unique perspective, if you are just another sports blogger out there, and there is no denying that a game has been won by one team, and not the other?

The basic formula (which is not wrong) goes that a unique perspective means adding your own personal insight into a story. But frankly, there’s only so much perspectives on a certain issue.

Still, if we look at some data about how ‘revolutionary’ ideas are formed (i.e. the science of creativity), we can find that the best recipe is best structured like this:

Inhabit a somewhat new niche, but one one which touches on the existing and familiar topics for your readers to draw its conclusions.

       So how can this be fixed, exactly?

I think of the Sparring Mind blog, which is written by a marketer, but focuses on psychology, or even BrainPickings in this context, where literature meets philosophy and ethics etc.

If you look at these publications, the first is from a content marketer, but with a focus on psychology, while the second is about book recommendations, the art of writing… But in fact, it could be a more fascinating read for anyone interested in philosophy, psychology, history… neuroscience.

There is a risk in such an approach for picking your focus, admittedly, because you may be tempted to aim your blog at both marketers and psychologists, and that makes you an expert in none of the fields, or so your audience would likely presume.

Hence, defining your native space, your one and only area of passion (the word expertise is possible to use instead, although the more provocative words you use, the more proof you’ll need to get to keep them).

What I am getting at here is that (in case of content marketing) people will undoubtedly already know about Copyblogger, Men with Pens, etc, and when they arrive at your blog, assuring them that they have found a completely new take is important.

And your unique selling point lies in the fact, that you’re not a content marketer yourself, so you are not exactly what your audience is as well, but a psychologist, or a data scientist, or a lawyer, with interest in writing, composition and style. The depths that you can explore here are endless.

Yet if your fantasies are running wild at the moment, I may as well set the record straight before we move on: Not every profession can offer valuable advice to every other profession.

This may seem obvious, but actually, stripped down of a few widely impossible extremes, this is the idea of the article that you’re reading right now. The extremely impossible examples of careers advising other careers (and doing so invaluably), may be if an accountant writes about animals, or a biologist writing about accounting.

             Which markets are the most overcrowded?

What comes to mind first, from my personal end of the spectrum, is copywriting, technology, health, fashion, and sports blogs.

Frankly, I can name you so many of these, that even referencing a post on overcrowded blogging areas turned out to be a necessary little promotion for one content marketing blog (seriously, no clean data, like a white paper on this sort of thing were to be found). Now, the approach that I present is simply this:

It works both ways, and enables you to multiply your one expertise (like being a writer, for me), into nearly infinite number of wholly separate blog projects (and only one, or maybe none at all have to actually be about good writing).

You see, it turns out that lawyers need to write too, and there just may not be that many blogs for lawyers (or astronomers, environmentalists…) to tell them what is the appropriate terminology that they should use in their profession, let’s say.

How to properly document a case, interrogative questions that the defendant won’t perceive as an attack on their personal confidence, and is therefore more likely to answer honestly (this would depend on whether you are asking questions, issuing commands, utilising negative, or positive words, and it therefore has a whole lot to do with grammar, style, and psychology).

Since I have stated that this blogging strategy works both ways, then you can possibly forge two blogs out of just one combination of professions.

As a writer (if this is your ‘core’ passion) you can help lawyers, or psychologists, or whoever else it might be, to find relevant expressions, appropriate tone of voice and such, but as a lawyer, also you can have a blog sharing and discussing legal challenges of various kinds of writers under different publishers in different states, stages etc, what is controversial, how to abstract and generalise etc.

Very often, it is precisely because two disciplines are merged in one post, you are able to create an interesting piece of content out of what would separately be but mediocre ideas.

One has the ability to focus on the aspect of the problem from a first discipline, and before the content becomes too generic, or simple, mix in some knowledge from the second field, and finish the article, without actually being a completely nuanced thinker in any of the areas that were mentioned.

Personally, I believe that the second method (the one that embraces your native identity as a lawyer and focuses on a possible struggle with law, copyright etc in writing (your passion), is essentially the age old formula of ‘writing what you know’. Kind of narrowing down the focus of your discipline.

But I recommend the first approach more as an experiment, because it is the one where your native discipline is a bit hidden, since you are concerned primarily with writing, and hence a legal becomes your unique selling point in this new world of a completely different niche that you have created. Actually, for the sake of clarity, this cross-disciplinary enterprising is not strictly applicable to writing blog posts, it can be books, podcasts mind you.

And people understand both disciplinary concepts of writing and law in a basic sense already, so you’ll not be taken for a complete freak with your perspectives, even when they turn out to be unconventional. (The ‘Nautilus magazine’ regularly mixes together music and time, or health and language, and their approach is insanely compelling for years now, they may be the best proof yet.)