As one pundit once said, “Coming up with an original idea? That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.”

A recent e-mail we received at Screaming Garlic proves this point. It was from a third-party vendor (who will go nameless) who probably had good intentions of making our lives easier. They were offering essentially a short-cut to content.

The "Ultimate Kit of Content Creation." Free templates to easily create Ebooks, Blog Posts, Infographics, and More.

Their pitch was that organic content creation is hard and time consuming and that one needs to keep up with one's competition by outputting more stuff, faster.

So instead of doing things from scratch they offer a fill-in-the-blank solution to so you can publish more content to generate inbound traffic to your site.

Of course, nothing is original. Most things are re-packaged ideas from previous creators. Anyone who says they're original shouldn't be trusted. But don't you think one should make a little effort in trying to be meaningful and perhaps a little unique?

If everyone starts using these "time-savers", everything may start looking alike and then the content one is trying to generate will be, well, just boring, cookie cutter-like, and devoid of authenticity. In the end, one's brand suffers.

A colleague of ours noted the same thing is occurring in the push to create mobile-friendly websites. After spending time and creativity designing your now traditional "www" brand site, putting it into a responsive type "m" theme strips it of any individuality. As you may have noticed, the mobile-friendly sites are actually just mobile-uniformed -- the menu lists are the same, most of the graphics are gone and the brand has been watered down. All of this is done in the name of better, faster load times on your small screen, and, of course, to keep Google happy.

Originality doesn't have to take a lot of effort, but it does take a little effort. Perhaps, it's not about where you take things from, but where you take them to.

"A poor original is better than a good imitation." -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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