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
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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

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