No, its not being boring. I can handle boring if its informative and useful. The worst sin in “How-to” blogging, or article marketing, as it perhaps was known in older days, is the crushing banality of the how-to that is filled with self-evident and the blatantly obvious.
Here’s an example.
“How to make sure you get your fly always stays zipped up!”
Step 1: grab your zipper
Step 2: pull up the zipper
Step 3 (and here’s the special step) — LOCK the zipper!
Or, how about this one?
Would you like to know how to use StumbleUpon to maximize it for traffic and business potential?
Step 1: Register an account at StumbleUpon
Step 2: Try “stumbling” on to sites of interest
Step 3: Submit your own content and follow the instructions.
Step 4: Participate in the StumbleUpon community by making friends
Did I just write anything you already didn’t know? Or were thinking of? Did I suddenly suprise you with some amazing insight? Did you just fall out of your chair, amazed at that shining pearl of wisdom?
Well, I hope not.
I acknowedge that its difficult to create worthy and decent how-to articles. But for the love of Pete, please don’t bore me with the amazingly self-evident. And yes, Tamar Weinberg, I am talking directly to you. Don’t worry though, you’re in good company — Neil Patel has come a long way since I last called him out a few months ago. I’m guilty of it from time to time as well, but all I’m saying is that we should all try and rise to our best every time.
What do I mean? Here’s a list if you’d like one.
– Three Ways to Make Your How-To Article Rock –
1. Make it Wide: if there’s nothing under the sun that’s new for your given topic, let’s say, baking strawberry shortcake, that’s fine. But you can make your article or post better by making it comprehensive. Give a shockingly long list of things you should never forget to do, from A-to-Z. Provide a resource list, even. A practical example? I wrote an article on “marketing your blog in 2007” over at ProBlogger. Any one tip was nothing to yawn at, but I tried to include every single thing I could on the topic.
2. Make it Deep: give a thorough handling of one aspect of your topic, and even better yet — reveal novel information that very few people know. If you can’t produce something entirely new, that’s fine. Provide some new analysis or insights to an arena that hasn’t yet been explored. “Strawberry Shortcake — 3 Ways It Can Be Used for Breakfast!”
3. Make me Laugh: So you don’t know much about your topic, and you don’t have the time to research things to make it comprehensive. That’s fine — but at least, entertain me! Make me think! Make me laugh, make me sad, or make me angry. But please, don’t bore me if you don’t have anything new or worthwhile to say.
StumbleUpon has been written about before. Neil Patel wrote about it 6 months ago. Now, when I read another article on StumbleUpon, I’d like to read about something that goes a little beyond the obvious. I’d like to see a posting that details or answers stuff like:
- Do certain stumblers have more influence than others?
- Is there a way to influence how the Stumble algorithm chooses sites to “stumble upon”
- Are there easy ways to get your site banned from StumbleUpon?
- What kind of people use StumbleUpon? How are they different from Digg? Is there any data to support this?
If anyone can find this kind of information, please let me know. Because until something like that shows up it’ll be hard to convince me that there is an “ultimate” guide to StumbleUpon anywhere.
February 25th, 2007 at 12:01 am | Permalink
Wow thats great Tony!!! Lol u cracked me like hell with the starting….
Its really true that please give the readers something other than news…if they want news TV or even BBC is enough….
I will keep them in mind
February 25th, 2007 at 7:00 pm | Permalink
You picked one of my favorite rants. THANK YOU for having the guts to lay it out on the table and label stupid and short-sighted as stupid and short-sighted.
THANK YOU!
February 25th, 2007 at 7:01 pm | Permalink
Tony, you make a good point, but it’s not incredibly out of the ordinary to make those real simple “how-to” posts since they often are helpful to the readers, many of whom are still beginners and have not even heard of SU (our blog has readers who don’t!) Your posts on problogger.net like this one are introductory and we could make the same argument that what you say is obvious. Still, not everyone is an advanced reader and it could provide value to them. It seems from the comments of my particular blog post that I have succeeded.
February 25th, 2007 at 11:58 pm | Permalink
Tamar,
I guess the difference is that I never claimed to write the “Definite Guide” to anything. And titling something that way certainly would lead *me* to believe that it was offering something more than introductory.
Good luck with things though — DJI is just one blogger’s opinion, afer all. ;)
Cheers
t @ dji
February 26th, 2007 at 1:20 am | Permalink
Hey Tony,
I don’t know about getting your site “banned” per-se, but there is a limit of how many times you can stumble posts on any particular site. Like Neil says, their algorithm seems to be pretty sophisticated.
That limit is somewhere around 10 to 15, and it only applies to your particular StumbleUpon account.
As far as demographic, I think Stumbleupon is more of a general population demographic representation than the predominently technical Digg audience.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
March 15th, 2007 at 8:42 am | Permalink
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October 10th, 2007 at 8:55 am | Permalink
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