Hey, SEOs! AJ here!
If you’ve lived your life reading through the billions of blog posts available out there, you may have a more clear perception of what you would consider an article that sucks a lot and one that hooks you right from the start.
Today, we’ll be talking about content. And we’ll be visualizing the creation of it with a Youtube video made by How To Basic.
See how that went off the rails in one sentence?
If you’re not into YouTube videos and all that, just stay with us. This can apply to text or any type of content that can be used online today.
When you search online, you see topics like “Top 10 Corporate Gifts Available Online” and can already imagine what you will be reading: It’ll be the same old list type of article enumerating all the different items the writer thinks should be on a list of the greatest, most bad-ass, edgy corporate gifts available today.
But what if you see something different inside? What if that article also features futuristic items that you can get as gifts, complete with GIFs and videos? Going through an article filled with that amount of rich content will simply be very satisfying.
This is completely the case with How To Basic’s recent post boringly titled “Face Reveal”
For a little background, How To Basic’s content is basically a parody of how-to videos. These (in my honest opinion, completely deep and meaningful performance art) range from parodies of cooking videos like “How to Quickly Defrost a Turkey”, to various other things like “How to Morph Into A Chicken”.
Yes, this is definitely one of the weird channels found on the weird side of YouTube. But a simple video with the title “Face Reveal” clearly shows how you can make content rich. If you’re familiar with this channel, you’ll know that the host/creator of the show only shows his hands. And there has been a lot of talks (more like conspiracies, actually) of who really is the creator of this channel.
Spoilers for the ones that still haven’t seen the video – it starts as if Michael Stevens from Vsauce, another highly popular channel on YouTube, really is the creator. But as the video progresses, we see that it slowly dives into these hastily edited montages of some of the coolest creators in YouTube, claiming to be How To Basic. Among of which were Jack’s Septic Eye, Ethan and Hila Klien, iDubz and a lot more.
I was surprised that Joji and Pewdiepie weren’t in it. Hmmm… *Conspiracy Intensifies*
The point here is that you should not be afraid to push the boundaries of what you should place in your article. Don’t put garbage in it of course, but try to utilize other forms of content tidbits like GIFs or videos.
Remember Cracked.Com? Did you ever notice why it’s always fun reading articles off of that site? It’s their clever use of pictures and one-liners — they can talk about any topic and not make it a boring trip for the reader.
Also, if you’re an #edgySEO like us here, there was probably a time where you tried to study what you’re competitors are doing or what they’re writing about on their blogs.
Though it’s a good idea to have a multi-part series of articles pertaining to one topic, it’s really boring and sad if you do that out of desperation just to keep your daily blogs running.
Not mentioning any of our competitors here, though we see you. And we see your techniques.
Moving on. There’s also the fact that you can make your title a bit more punchy. Remember one of our recent posts here about Robots.TXT and Sitemap.XMLs? Would you have clicked on it if it wasn’t titled as “Robots TXT and Sitemap XML: The Infinity Stones of SEO’s Infinity Gauntlet“?
Remember that in our industry, a lot of the things that we write about are already common knowledge to a lot of us, so the topics are technically already boring. That’s the time you need to consider stepping up your game by actively making your content more exciting and fun.
If you aren’t used to creating content like this, that’s okay. Look for people that are naturally creative to help you out. And if you’re inherently a creative person, you can actually step off the edge every once in a while when creating your content.
Like what Jordan Peterson once said: “to live your life, you need to walk that fine line between chaos and order.”
Don’t play safe all the time. Even when creating content.
