Your Business is Not Boring – Your Content is

People often ask me: How can I promote my boring business using SEO and social media? What they really mean is: I don’t want to create engaging content.

In fact most business is boring when you take that approach. Who cares for blenders for example? Why anyone in their right mind would ever share a blender site on social media?

Yet one of the most successful social media campaigns of all time I would describe as “SEO 2.0” is about blenders.

Boring content ahead! Do not read.

This is #3 in my 10 content strategy mistakes series. I have covered #1 the content definition and #2 content quality. This is #3 boring content.

To me there is no such thing as a boring business.

In a way SEO itself is the most boring if you use the definition these people use. I mean there is nothing spectacular about SEO. Only a few experts understand it at all.

There are no great visuals. You can’t make viral videos about SEO. After all it’s not skydiving or something. Mere mortals do not care about SEO, only webmasters do.

I don’t want to explain how you overcome the boring business syndrome again. I have done that in the past: How Can Websites about Boring Topics Succeed on Social Media?

In this post I just want to show that every business is potentially interesting to a much larger audience.

You just have to spice your content up a bit.

Some of my colleagues do it all the time and call that linkbait. Thee days the buzzword for is content marketing.

I prefer the matter of fact flagship content creation. It sticks out like a flagship but it’s just about creating the right content.

Real life example: toner refills

One of my clients in the early years of my freelance SEO career was selling toner refills. Now that’s a boring topic! Back then blogs were still so cutting edge that I couldn’t sell one to him.

I did article marketing back then by writing for so called article directories. I have written dozens of articles about toner refills.

I never even hesitated before starting to write one. Sometimes it took me just half an hour to write an intriguing one.

This German site still has its top rankings years after we parted. The client employed another consultant for a few months but asked me half a year later to come back.

The site still ranks after years despite article directories being virtually extinct in Germany after too many people abused them submitting low quality “spun” duplicate content.

What we also did was adding content to the site itself. Your content strategy needs to combine both off- and onsite content.

One issue with toner refills as and still is the impact on health. It’s not only the refill process, it’s laser printers by themselves.

Conflicting studies claim that they are harmful or not. We didn’t dismiss the warning I just compiled a list of all the press articles from reputable sources.

This simple list of press articles is still ranking number one or two for half a dozen of relevant search queries.

For many “boring” business and markets all it takes a a bit research, creating a few pieces of valuable content and that’s it.

Prominent successes in the wild

You don’t have to create viral videos about blenders blending iPhones or highly popular infographics about Amazon.

Those can propel you to rank for competitive terms though. BlendTec, the company behind the hugely popular “will it blend” videos ranks behind the

1. software called Blender
2. Wikipedia
3. an entertainment site called blender.com

as the first producer of blenders. Thus think twice. Your business is not boring – your content is. You can change that. Create new better one.

On a side note: you can create viral videos about SEO. There is even an SEO song created for exactly that purpose.

The company who made the video ranked on now at #6 for [seo] behind Google, Wikipedia and a “false friend” site. Only SEO.com and Moz outranked them.

Last updated: April 18th, 2018.