If you’re a content writer who often needs to write articles or blog posts for your business clients, you’ve probably been called upon to write fascinatingly on something that would bore anyone to tears. You must have wondered then if there was possibly a way you could make your boring assignment to write about shoe inserts or AAA batteries interesting.
There is an answer
Many writers feel that the only way to bring appeal to a sickly topic would be to bring in external sources of interest – creating slick videos or illustrations, finding a way to interview interesting and famous people to do with the subject and so on.
While these could certainly add great appeal to any boring subject, these aren’t really necessary. You could take nearly any topic and arrange it so that it has intrinsic appeal merely with one step – by asking a bunch of common questions about it and then answering them.
Take the shoe insert topic
What kind of questions could you ask about shoe inserts that could liven your topic up? At first, it might occur to you to think that since no one wants to know anything about shoe inserts, no kind of question could matter. Look at these questions, though:
- What was the name of the person who made the first commercially successful shoe insert and what inspired him?
- How hard did he have to work to get people to accept that shoe inserts were necessary?
- What are the best-selling shoe inserts today on Amazon and why?
- What would people miss today if the shoe insert industry suddenly were to shut down?
- How cheap is it to manufacture shoe inserts in China or elsewhere and why do the manufacturers feel that they can sell them for $20?
Anyone could take up any old topic and conjure up a bunch of questions about them, just like these, in a matter of minutes. You just have to use the who’s, why’s, and how’s on the topic you have on hand and begin to research answers – result: instant interesting article.
What questions are your readers asking?
There are plenty of websites that people head to, to ask their strange questions – Yahoo! Answers, Quora and many others.
On Quora, for instance, people have shoe-insert questions like these:
- What kind of insert should one use for flat-footed people?
- What can you do about inserts that squeak?
- Do too many doctors prescribe shoe inserts for no reason?
All of these give you ideas for things that people actually want an article for. You would have a ready audience if you wrote about these things.
Saying no to tunnel vision
These questions probably look familiar. They have the ring of the popular articles you see on websites like Huffington Post, MSN or Slate. Those magazines get plenty of readership for such articles. The answer to the boring topic problem is simply this – you need to find ways to ask a bunch of questions. If all you can think of is that shoe inserts are smelly and boring, you need to shake yourself up and see all that is possible.
