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 which many people ask: how can websites about boring topics succeed on social media?

Indeed for many people it’s already an assumption that so called boring topics can’t succeed on social media. Well I don’t agree. Let me explain why: First

no topic is really boring, second there are social media for all topics.

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

I might not care for scanning electron microscopy but 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, most people do not even know what SEO is 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, Twitter and Pinterest.

There are also forums 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

cover every conceivable topic.

 

On unpopular topics

When you find a topic that’s not covered enough yet or is so tiny that it’s just not covered enough yet to make an impact in the marketing sense you can do two things:

Either be the first to create and popularize the niche, like I did with SEO 2.0 (before nobody cared) or you “target” the general public.

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

To be honest 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 one of the currently hugely popular books and blogs “The 4 Hour Work Week” deals with it.

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 methods of making 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: “Famous actors who were 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 just being 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” where some evil force resides that can be remedied by some fearless rebel.

 

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

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.

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

 

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Last updated: September 28, 2018 · , , , , ,