W-Shadow.com

I spent a while today wondering what to post about.

I have an aptly named file on my desktop – “arggr.txt” (apparently I had misspelled “arrgh”). That’s where I store most of my ideas. Since I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a “feeling” for the audience/people in general, I looked through some of the topics generated by my automated tools – at least they’ve got search volume (demand) analyzed and competition determined.

Hmm… “how to recover deleted files” looked pretty good. It fits my interests and area of expertise well enough. So I did a bit of research and discovered somebody has already written a good article on the topic. Oookay… how about something unusual? Recovering deleted webpages! Nope, there’s already a nice post dealing with that, too.

So did I just go and give up the niche just because somebody else was there first? Not exactly. It’s all about quality – the quality of the content that’s already there and the content you could create (with a certain amount of effort). I realized I couldn’t write a noticeably better article on data recovery than the one that I found, at least not in the amount of time that I’m ready to spend on a single blog post.

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with “reinventing the wheel”, if your wheel is going to be better. If you can improve the wheel, go ahead! But re-creating the same old wheel is of no value.

If I was making a whole new site dedicated to data recovery, I wouldn’t be intimidated by a few good articles found online. Still, I’d appraise the largest related sites before starting out. The same principle still applies. Well, unless you’re famous, in which case you can write about pretty much anything and get away with it, or you’re really passionate about the topic – then nothing can stop you.

By the way, I use PC INSPECTOR File Recovery (freeware) to restore deleted files 😉