MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Last week, I blogged a post about a concept I call "Social Polarity" and how you can infuse it into your blog's marketing.

Create an enemy and don’t be neutral. Remember, what we want is polarity, not neutrality. Neutral is boring, and boring is unattractive. It’s as simple as that. In fact, I remember Frank Kern talking about creating an enemy too in his excellent Mass Control course.

Some worry that going down this road will cause them to lose “balance” and “fairness” but this isn’t necessarily true. It depends on how you justify portraying the enemy the way you do.

Today I came across a cool list of 21 awesome tips over at Copyblogger on how to be interesting. I'd classify many of those useful tips as conventional wisdom, but a few ones stood out by not being so conventional and I thought they deserve to be highlighted. Two are also related to Social Polarity.

1) Be wrong: The world is full of people trying to do the right things. It’s become so common that many of us are bored by it. We long for someone that is willing to do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, be the wrong thing. If you have the courage to be that person, you’ll find lots of people paying attention to you.

I like the first one because it's about going against neutrality and the status-quo and that usually does get attention. Like I said, neutral is boring. Again though, I must emphasize, that you need justifications, and not just do this for the sake of merely doing it.

6) Make people laugh: Bloggers are far too serious. We’re so busy trying to teach that we forget to entertain. As a result, large portions of our readerships fall asleep. And what’s the best way to wake people up? Humor. Public speakers have been using it for ages, and as long as it’s appropriate for your audience, humor can wake your readers up and get them paying attention again.

Writing a blog post should not be like writing an academic paper for a scientific journal. It should be fun and if you don't enjoy it, chances are you're blogging about a topic you're not passionate about or you're just being way too serious.

8 ) Show a (half) naked woman: Ever noticed that a disproportionate number of advertisements feature a scantily clad woman? That’s because it works. It draws the attention of not only men (as you’d expect), but also women. For whatever reason, nearly everyone finds their attention drawn to it. Here’s proof that it even works with blog posts.

Ah, I don't need to elaborate on this now, do I?

Not too long ago, we were experimenting with blog posts that can hit the frontpage of Digg. We managed to get lots of traffic from a particular blog post. Besides humorous content, the post had a picture of a hot AND wet chick in a wet T-Shirt. In fact its title was "How A Wet T-Shirt Can Shoot Up Movie Sales."

14) Be irreverent: Want to stir people up? Make fun of their god, their politics, their family — anything they hold dear. Yes, they’ll be offended, but lots of other people will think it’s hilarious. If you can’t stomach being hated by a portion of the world and loved by another, then you don’t deserve to have a blog.

I thought this one was absolutely hilarious! To what degree you want to do this, is something that's up to you but it's certainly something that works when done skillfully. Just don't go overboard and end up offending your core audience heavily. Be relevant and frame your content in a manner that can grab attention.

A final note...

For the sake of clarity, doing the above won't necessarily bring success. There are some very successful bloggers out there (and I consider them exceptions) with writing styles that I personally find pretty boring but I still read them anyways. Why? Simply because they compensate the lack of fun style with superbly useful quality content. Still though, good marketing is about standing out from the crowd, so it never hurts to always improve in that area.

Last 5 posts by

• The 5 Profit-Exploding Secrets of "Passion-Based Integrated Social Media Marketing" - January 1st, 2009
• Valleywag Amuses MindValley - November 27th, 2008
• McAfee Magic: How One Tiny Tweak Boosted Sales by 15% - November 20th, 2008
• The Key to a Winning Sales Angle - November 5th, 2008
• Testimonials Sell. Email Them. - September 9th, 2008

About the Author

Having been invited for conferences co-organized by Harvard University and attended international ones, Amir is a blogaholic and a passionate observer of the blogosphere who's built a number of successful blogs. On top of that, he's obviously a full-time web junkie at MindValley where he focuses on blogging, SEO and social media marketing trends.

Check out other posts by Amir Ahmad

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.