Social Bookmarking 201: Finding (Or Making) Killer Content For “Boring” Niches

Social bookmarking is one of the more effort-intensive things that our SEO specialists” do for their clients — it requires content to be bookmarked, and content always takes more work than ‘brainless’ links. One of the biggest challenges we have is in creating social-worthy content for niches that seem frighteningly disinteresting. Here’s one way we go about doing it:

Find BIG Numbers
People are always interested by large numbers, especially when they have something in their personal lives to compare the numbers to. For example, if you’re writing for a greeting card company, the fact that people in Britain purchase eighteen times more greeting cards per capita per annum than the US can lead you to some fascinating speculation — and that makes killer content.

Point Out Industry Problems
Every industry has it’s foibles, and almost every industry has foibles it would rather not talk about. If you can bring one of those foibles out into the open — especially if your company is doing something different that makes you exempt — you win. Dollar Shave Club did this perfectly by pointing out the fact that razor blades cost almost as much per each as the razors you attach them to — and went on to sell cheap razor blades by mail, turning shaving into an interesting topic.

Find A Relatable Subject Related To Your Subject. Talk About That
This is a big one, and examples of it are everywhere. Nature’s Valley had a website up for a while that was just an interactive map of cool afternoon-long hiking trails around the nation. What does that have to do with granola? Why, what are you supposed to eat on the trail other than Nature’s Valley granola bars? Or, you know, trail mix? From the same company, naturally?

Social bookmarking is just the end of a long and involved process — but there’s no need for that process to be dull. Every topic in the world has something interesting that can be said about it — just find that, say it, and bookmark the hell out of it.