How to Make Your Content Stand Out When Everyone Posts the Same Advice
Here's how to make your content stand out when everyone in your industry posts the same advice: stop competing on the advice itself. Anyone can post "5 tips for X", and now AI will write it for anyone in seconds, so the advice alone won't make you stand out no matter how good it is. What can't be copied is the stuff around the advice: what you actually think, who specifically you're talking to, and the angle you take that other people don't. Getting clear on those three things - your identity, your audience and your positioning - is the actual work. We cover these four stages in Find Your Voice in more detail, but this article explains each step so you can see what's involved.
This isn't just about feeling more original either. Edelman's research found that people who trust a brand are more than twice as likely to buy from it first, 53% compared to 25%. And people can't trust you if they can't tell you apart from everyone else posting the same things. Standing out is where trust starts.
Why everything sounds the same
Everyone learns from the same sources, so everyone ends up repeating the same frameworks. Everyone copies whatever performs well, so the formats that work get copied until they stop working. And AI has sped both of these up, because it's trained on the average of everything that's already out there, so it produces more of the same.
The upside is that when most content sounds identical, you don't need to be louder or cleverer to stand out. You need to be more specific, and being specific is something nobody can copy from you.
Step 1: Identity - put yourself back into your content
Generic content is what you get when you take the person out of it. So the first step is putting yourself back in. That means sharing your actual opinions, including where you disagree with the standard advice in your field. It means using your real experiences, like the client situations and mistakes that taught you what you know. And it means writing the way you'd actually explain something on a call, rather than the tidied-up version you think content is supposed to sound like.
A useful check: could someone else in your industry post this word for word without anyone noticing? If they could, there isn't enough of your own expertise and story in it yet.
Step 2: Audience - write to one person
Content also goes bland when it's written for everyone. "Business owners who want more clients" describes half the internet, and anything written for that many people has to stay vague to fit them all. When you write to one specific person instead, with her situation and her exact version of the problem, the content gets sharper on its own.
A post that makes one reader think "how did she know that?" will do more for your business than a post that ten thousand people vaguely agree with, because that one reader is the person who might actually buy.
Step 3: Positioning - have an angle, not just a topic
Topics are shared by everyone in your industry. Your angle is yours. Anyone can post about content marketing, but your take on it is what people remember: the thing you believe that runs through everything you post, the common advice you push back on, and the way you'd explain what most people get wrong. Positioning means deciding this on purpose, so that after a month of reading your posts, someone could describe your angle back to you.
Once your angle is clear, even familiar topics stop sounding familiar, because they're coming through your point of view.
The work is underneath the content
None of this is a writing technique. Standing out is a clarity problem: who you are, who you're for, and what you stand for. Once you've answered those, everything you write sounds like you without extra effort. If you skip them, no template or hook formula will fix it.
Find Your Voice takes you through all three steps - identity, audience and positioning - with a Notion template to capture your answers as you go. It’s only takes an afternoon, and it's how you make sure the next thing you post doesn't read like everyone else's. I promise it will be worth it.
