Ugh. Content. It’s the king right ? You’ve heard it before, but you’re not convinced. You’ve pumped out a lot of content over the years, and no one seems to notice. Everyone’s got a secret to help your content get out there. But maybe you don’t need wider distribution. Maybe what you need is more
interesting content.
Use Research Papers
Research are boring papers. No one reads them. Plus, they’re difficult and demanding to wade through. However, if you can translate research papers found on PubMed or the SSRN into readable content, most people will be love you. Why? People do yearn to geek out on stuff – they just aren’t smart enough to.That doesn’t mean that your audience is necessarily dumb – reading research papers is hard work. Take health and nutrition, for example. While you could whittle away your day creating a post about the wondrous benefits of acacia berries or some scam my weight-loss pill, you would probably be better served getting on PubMed and digging up information on calorie restriction.
While you’re at it, do some research on low-carb diets. There’s a lot of information out there on low carb diets, but few blog posts actually bother to translate the science into plain English. Do this, and your readers will love you.
Tell Stories
Everyone loves a good story. Just look at the popularity of soap operas, movies, and prime-time television. Even so-called reality television is often set up in a story format. When you tell a story, you draw your readers into your world. As long as you have a point to your story, and they can relate to what happens in the story, you’ll hook them and keep them coming back for more.Good story formats include The Hero’s Journey and The Saga. The Hero’s Journey is a format where you tell about some personal obstacle you had to overcome. Heroes often go through stages – they’re living a normal life, evil forces mount a strategy and work against the hero, and the hero is faced with the problem but resists being a hero at first. The hero fights evil and loses. Then he must go on a quest to discover himself – in the end, he vanquished the evil.
It’s a classic format that’s been done over and over, but people love to hear that kind of thing. The Simple Dollar is a classic example of this. On his blog, Trent tells his own personal story of debt, living the high life with debt, crashing, rediscovering himself, and then helping others overcome their own demons. He has thousands and thousands of fans and followers.
The Saga is another, similar, format. It’s a sort of soap opera format where you have a running storyline than spans multiple blog posts.