How Can Websites about Boring Topics Succeed on Social Media?

A white goat looking pretty bored. A very funny image.*

A reader asked a very important question in the comments! Indeed many people ask it:

how can websites about boring topics succeed on social media?

Indeed for many people it’s already an assumption that they can’t!

The myth goes: “so-called boring topics can’t succeed on social media.”

Well I don’t agree. Let me explain why: first off no topic is really boring!

There are social media audiences for all types of niche topics.

What’s boring and what’s not? Who decides? Who matters?

Do you want to reach millions of people or just the few who really buy from you?

What my readers and others probably mean is “popular” or rather “not popular”.

What’s boring for me is not boring for someone else.


SEO is Boring

Personally I might not care for scanning electron microscopy! Who cares?

Some people probably love that topic and spend half of their life dealing with it.

In fact SEO is the most boring topic on earth if you ask me! Yet I loved to write hundreds of article about it!

Most people do not even know what SEO is or the acronym means and only recognize it when it went wrong.

  • You can’t see SEO
  • You can’t photograph it
  • You can’t even let some beautiful women dress as SEOs to make the topic more appealing

Nonetheless I made my blog popular beyond the small niche of SEO geeks. I get not only visitors from the

  • SEO industry
  • the blogosphere
  • the web developer community

but also perfectly average people who do not care for SEO at all.


What is Social Media Anyway?

There are basically two ways of making so-called boring topics succeed on social media:

  1. Either you find your niche audience
  2. or you appeal to the general audience by broadening your scope

and/or making your topic more attractive for the average person.

You do not even have to resort to the beautiful ladies dressed as [insert your boring industry here] specialists.

Let me start with the niche finding approach though.

Many people err in that they assume social media is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

There are also forums, groups and niche communities for every topic.

They are not always popular enough but there are also blogs for all topics which matter to more than a few people.

Additionally

  • Q&A sites like Quora
  • shopping search engines
  • test, review and testimonial sites

cover every conceivable topic.


On Unpopular Topics

When you find a topic that’s not covered enough yet you are lucky!

Maybe it is so tiny that it’s just not covered enough yet to make an impact in the marketing sense.

Then you can basically do two things:

1. Either be the first to create and popularize the niche.

I did with SEO 2 (before that nobody cared)!

2. Or you “target” the general public by broadening your scope.

The “will it blend” campaign is a perfect example of this approach.

Now how do you spread the word when your topic is not popular?

To be honest my reader Patricia gave us a very bad example: she called the topic of “outsourcing” a boring one.

At the same time it’s a booming industry and gets covered by a hugely popular book and blog called “The 4 Hour Work Week“.

Let me take on something that’s not as easy.

  • Something that’s more than boring or unpopular
  • something that people shy away from
  • something that’s even ugly but nonetheless very important.


Real Life Examples

I want to show two examples, plumbing as the easier one.

Everybody needs a plumber from time to time and plumbers have to deal with dirt sometimes.

As the second, the more difficult one, I want to use colon cleansing.

Yeah, I see you cringe but it can even save your life.

Thus now I introduce to you the five most common techniques to make a boring topic popular with social media:

  1. Beautify
  2. Harness humor
  3. Scandalize
  4. Employ fear and loathing
  5. Transfer popularity
  6. Geekify

#1 Beautify

it’s the most commonly used way. Display beautiful people or beautiful things. OK, with plumbers it’s easy.

Just take a few guys who do some body building and who happen to be plumbers and make a calendar.

Also display the images on your website as the “12 sexiest plumbers of the year”.

Now what about colon cleansing? Well, there even is a blog about it but I won’t link it as the images there are not good for your appetite.

In fact the beautify method doesn’t work here for several reasons, the foremost being that you just do not want to see any of it.

#2 Harness Humor

for the plumber this is easy again: The 10 strangest things found in a pipe (a cat, a hand, an old laptop…).

Laughter is very good for you health and humor helps very much in dealing with health issues, especially those of the least desired kind, like colon problems.

You also want to maintain some integrity here and won’t make a list of “the 10 strangest things found…”

Instead you can do something more appealing and it already has been done, something like the strangest things said during a colonoscopy.

#3 Scandalize

scandals are all around us, you just have to pick one up.

Something like “Police offers, plumbers and nurses most underpaid professions in the EU:

Do you prefer crime, no running water and people being left to die?”

This works very well with the second topic too: “Worse than terrorism: 20.000 deaths could have been prevented” you guess how…

#4 Employ fear and loathing

Check out “Help, I got flooded! How to prevent your flat turning into a cess pool”.

The same “Worse than terrorism” article as above also could apply here.

Something more personal would be even better: “My trial: The most painful weeks of my life” where a colon cleansing could have saved him.

Just make sure to stay ethical. Do not employ fear to somehow trick people into buying.

Use their fear to get attention just to dispel it not to strengthen it.

#5 Transfer Popularity

This is an easy one for both: Just take famous and acclaimed people and connect them with your topic.

This can be entirely metaphoric like “The Ernest Hemingway method of fixing your pipes” (note, it’s also humorous).

It can be more intriguing “10 celebrity plumbers speak out”.

Also consider this headline: “Hollywood stars saved from cancer by colon cleansing.”

#6 Geekify

I always say “when in doubt add Star Wars to it”.

There are of course myriads of other universes you can refer to! Star Wars is one of the most popular.

The Young Jedi Guide to Cooking might sound better than simply “Cooking for Beginners”.

Cosplay is even better. People dressing up as their favorite fictional characters always turn heads.

Both plumbing and colon cleansing are prone to be associated with the “dark side”. Why?

Some evil force resides in the pipe or colon and can be destroyed by some fearless rebel.


Your Industry May Be More Popular Than You Think!

Now don’t tell me your industry is boring or not popular! Be optimistic!

You can popularize everything when you want it.

Unless, of course you don’t want it. Then you can resort to the niche social sites.

For colon cleansing you’ll find plenty of forums and questions on Q&A sites.

Also people will want to recommend doctors who made it painlessly.

For plumbing also local SEO is very important as you’d might expect!

* (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Richard P. J. Lambert

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Last updated: August 5, 2023 · , , , , ,