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Every once in a while a client will tell me that they’ve been reading my website, and I think to myself “Uh oh, who knows what I put on there recently!” 🙂

This is a business website which ranks extremely well. When potential clients get to an important page on my site, they’re already 95% of the way through their journey because they found me at the top of Google, and people trust Google’s results (in many cases, more than they should). Once they get to the site, they may read a paragraph and then either leave or make contact.

That said, I do put some crazy things on here! Below is why.

This site is the perfect example of why you need a variety of content.

I have only 10 or 15 important “money pages” on this website. There are 700 more which will never (directly) make me a penny.

Important points:

  1. The important pages perform well because this site has many links.
  2. But, nobody wants to link to my important sales pages.
  3. So, what am I to do? Write about all kinds of stuff!

My most linked to page on telapost.com is about Yik Yak Arrests. This page is simply a chronological list of people who have arrested for doing things they shouldn’t have been. Yik Yak is a social app for college kids to – mostly – say very stupid things; sometimes they say very bad things which results in their arrest. That is an evergreen piece of content which has been linked to by major news organizations. Due to the links to my website, other very competitive pages perform wonderfully. This is organic, holistic SEO (and a fun experiment).

As for Yik Yak and other social media: I think social media is a gigantic waste of time for 99% of us and a terrible place to market most businesses. However, once in a while it is neat to see how Jurassic Park markets themselves to people on Snapchat, how Jim Beam markets whiskey to the next generation of drinkers, or how Kim Kardashian carefully models products on  Instagram. Sometimes a model will simply be holding a purse; it is very, very interesting to me, and, it helps me stay sharp on things like when the FDA cracked down on Kim’s post on morning sickness. Online marketing takes place all the time in very inconspicuous ways. I like it!

Examples of highly successful random content:

I work with multiple law firms. One attorney I work with covers local events in their area. This is genius. Yes, they cover laws and their target area, but then they also have well thought out and interesting pages on injuries which can be a result of a car accident or someone’s negligence, and other articles which are even further removed from their practice such as “fun things to do in the community”. The more content you have on your website about a person, place or thing makes your site more topically relevant to search engines. Also, it doesn’t hurt to raise awareness with locals in a fun and helpful way. Nothing bad ever comes from having lots of great content.

A successful real estate broker that I work with recently began getting leads from people selling land due to an article we came up with about nuclear reactors. Who would have thunk it?! It turns out, no matter how safe a nuclear reactor is, people hate seeing it out of the kitchen window, and it lowers land values. We simply put this content onto their website and leads began coming in from people looking for a bargain and others who wanted to sell land near the nuclear reactor. If we had been doing keyword research and putting out articles about “how to stage your home” like every other real estate broker around, he would have missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in listings.

There are  even more examples in this article: Keywords – To Research or Not To Research.

Content spaghetti

Content is like many other things in life. You have to fail at it, and you have to enjoy failing. 99% of your articles will never obtain a natural link, and 80% of them aren’t going to get read very often, and it is always completely random things which take off. For example, I recently documented Google Podium, and I was the first person covering it. I thought that it would be a hit. It wasn’t. In fact, I don’t think anyone has read about it at all.

At the moment, my most read article is about Yahoo’s failed web hosting. Hundreds of people have chimed in to express their anger at the problem – the comments are great! Take a look at the article- with the user generated content, the page is a mile long. I didn’t even know this problem existed until someone told me about it after reading about this problem with Yahoo business listings. It turns out that people on the Internet love to research and complain about problems. The downside to that article is that 5 people call me every day to yell at me thinking I am Yahoo! I am not Yahoo, but, it goes to show that most people don’t read.

Learning from blogging outside the box

There are very few people out there willing to blog outside of the box. From it, and my bizarre infatuation with analyzing traffic, I can tell you that:

  • lots of people research neck injuries
  • kids in Texas are most active online at 10PM
  • stay at home moms do their shopping online at 1PM
  • people use Pinterest after supper
  • at night while watching TV people like Googling questions about TV characters on iPad tablets
  • college students with iPhones like businesses with good reviews
  • most 8 year old kids don’t know Google provides more than 10 results
  • people over 50 rarely visit a second page online
  • teenagers get what they need from Siri and don’t even like visiting websites if they don’t have to
  • articles displayed in Google news get lots of traffic for 72hrs

I could go on all day. Literally.

Armed with this knowledge will only make you stronger at getting seen in Google search, which is extremely valuable, especially if your goal is to obtain traffic from the Internet.

There are many benefits to blogging outside of the box. Of course, not all businesses or professionals can stay as far off the course as I do here (or on one of my other army of websites) but there are always untapped content niches out there. Don’t take your site too seriously and never make the mistake of giving up!

Len
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On April 1, 2016   /   Content Creation   /   Leave a comment

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