One of the most common objection we at Revenue River run into with current clients is they don't know what to write about for their blog. More importantly, they're worried that no one will read their articles because they'll certainly be boring.
Who wants to read about invoice management software anyway? I can rattle off the rest of the list of excuses another time, let's talk solutions today.
One of the most difficult things to do is create interesting content with 'boring' topics. Very few people truly care about Denver IT support and the "17 sweet features and benefits your company can't live without". Not a lot of people are interested in learning more about business continuity planning, remote monitoring, or virtualization.
So how do you make boring topics like IT or AP automation interesting? I'm going to give you....
5 SUPER HINTS to make boring blog topics readable
Hint 1: you don't write about the keyword
Wait, come again? Yes, you can put together an article with all of the details and features of AP automation. Yes you can optimize it and it can certainly help your search engine optimization. But who the hell wants to read about it? I don't. And won't.
Hint 2: what I really want to know is what's in it for me!
Let's be perfectly clear, that's in everyone's mind as they scan the days myriad of articles on every social channel they visit. Entertain me or make me money or quit wasting my time. Everone is in a constant evaluation similar to this:
- How will I benefit?
- Will I save money?
- Will my employees perform better, be happier, and more productive if I implement?
- Will having electronic invoicing enable me to be more scalable and profitable?
- Will it give me a competitive advantage?
- Will it come with a cool sticker for our office fridge?
The key to writing about difficult topics is writing about stuff that people are interested in, and tying them to your services and keywords. Try developing your topics around relevant what your prospects are actually interested in and convince them that they can have more of what interests them if they would only get to know the boring stuff.
Hint 3: everyone is interested in money, tell them what you know and how it can make them some
E-invoicing could be very attractive to me if it put enough money back in my pocket to hire another great marketing employee to help us grow even faster! Spend some time truly putting together profit scenarios for your relevant readers will help them connect the dots and keep reading to the end of the article.
Hint 4: write about what you love, and tie that passion to something no one gives a crap about.
If you can make it funny or relevant you'll have a better chance, but you're more likely to get a bunch of Soccer Nuts reading your article and commenting when you tie inbound marketing to soccer like @marcherschberge did in this recent inbound marketing blog article. No I do not condone rooting for soccer teams, or being passionate about it.
In a much more mainstream effort I wrote 4 ways Marketing is like College Football. I didn't write this last week mind you, I wrote it during the national championship game (sorry Notre Dame, you were dominated and bored me). Relevant, timely, interesting, unexpected parallel. Mix in a little LinkedIn sharing ad the views have been good. To date it ranks as one of our most popular articles.
Give it a try, it's not as hard as you think it is once you dig in a bit and get used to it. Don't be afraid to start a post, build an outline, and come back to it later. Don't be afraid to change direction (I never intended this article to contain 5 hints?!). Wait, need another hint.
Hint 5: download our blog template, open it, brainstorm topics, write an outline
Want some more help? Want to see if we can write a few articles to supplement your efforts? Contact us and we'll work it out. And we're fun to talk to, we consider ourselves to be the funnest digital marketing company.
