Back in 2018 a guy told me to stop chasing viral content

I was at a local marketing meetup in Portland and this old timer who ran a small agency said I was wasting time trying to make every post go viral. He told me to focus on just answering common questions from our target audience instead. At first I thought he was boring and outdated. But after about 6 months of switching to Q and A style posts, our leads went up by about 30 percent without any of the burnout. Has anyone else found that boring content actually outperforms flashy stuff in the long run?

3 comments

3 Comments

avery_flores171mo ago

There was a guy in my woodworking group who spent weeks building an elaborate spinning shelf and got like three comments, but his video showing how to fix a wobbly table leg got 50,000 views. Sometimes the boring stuff is just what people actually need.

tara6421mo ago

That's actually a really good point @avery_flores17 but I gotta push back a little on calling it "boring stuff." Fixing a wobbly table leg is not boring, it's practical. People search for that because their own table is wobbling and they're about to throw it out. The spinning shelf is a flex piece, it's impressive but nobody's googling "how to fix my spinning shelf from falling apart" because most people don't have one. That's the thing about content creation, sometimes you gotta give people what they need right now, not what looks cool.

the_linda1mo ago

Yeah no kidding. I've fixed more wobbly tables in the last year than I can count, and it's always the same story - someone's about to trash a perfectly good table over a loose screw or a bad glue joint. The fancy stuff is fun to look at but the boring fixes pay the bills, right?