For many freelance writers with bylines across multiple publications, the key to success is not in thinking up a million disparate ideas but in finding ways to put a new spin on the ideas they’ve already covered. By finding multiple ways to write about the same idea they get more mileage out of everything they write and speed up the research process.
Here’s a look at strategies for breathing new life into old ideas.
Zoom in
If you’ve covered a topic in a broad, sweeping manner, consider zooming in on a specific aspect of that topic. Maybe you wrote about neurodiversity in the workplace (a movement that stresses how people with learning differences such as ADHD or autism can bring skills to the workplace that their neurotypical coworkers may lack), but you didn’t have the space to get specific on how companies are adapting their recruitment processes for neuro-diverse candidates. That could be its own story.
Zoom out
Or perhaps you could take the opposite approach. If you wrote about a local company that’s brewing beer out of stale bread, you might zoom out to look at the broader trend of reducing food waste and how other companies are carrying out this mission in other ways.
Change the point of view
If you wrote for a human resources magazine about how to recruit and interview Gen Z employees, you could flip the POV by writing about that topic but from the job candidate’s point of view for a general interest publication or a job search website. What does Gen Z need to know about the hiring process at a startup versus a mid-sized company or a large national company? How can they stand out from the pack?
Add new information
If you’ve covered a topic in the past, there may be new wrinkles that warrant revisiting the topic. If you previously wrote about a local company that was acquired, how is the company faring a year after the acquisition? What’s changed or stayed the same? If you previously wrote an explainer on 529 college savings accounts, are there newer options or provisions of the law that consumers should know about now?
Check your contracts.
Some publication’s freelance contracts prevent writers from covering the same topics for a specified time period (for instance, 90 days after the magazine is taken off newsstands). If that’s the case, you should negotiate to define the topic as narrowly as possible so doesn’t limit your ability to write for other publications. But if you’ve already signed the contract and you can’t negotiate, follow whatever terms you already agreed to.
Pitch to non-competing publications.
Don’t sell a story on the same topic to competing publications. Even if you write different stories, your editors may not appreciate seeing your byline on a similar article in a competing publication. Instead, look for non-competing publications. For instance, you could write about the benefits of branded merchandise for a coffee industry trade magazine and cover tips for launching a branded merchandise line for a website that caters to gym owners. Coffee shop owners and gym owners probably aren’t reading publications in each other’s niches.
Don’t recycle quotes.
To avoid overlap between stories, find fresh quotes (and write new transitional text) for each story. You may have material left on the cutting room floor of past interviews. You could also schedule additional interviews or interview completely different sources. Also try to find the newest statistics on your topic each time you cover it.
