Shareable Content

“Meanwhile, back at the copywriting ranch…”

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“The longer [the evangelist] can hold interest, the more people he can convince — and the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk forward and ‘hit the sawdust trail.’ The less able he is to hold interest for a sufficient time, the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk out.”
Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement

The most memorable lesson I learned from my former copywriting coach had to do with keeping the reader’s interest. It was most memorable because it made so much sense. And yet, it went against all my instincts for how I normally write.

It’s actually a well-known writing trick.

I’ve come across the same idea in an episode of Every Frame a Painting, the YouTube video essay series. The episode in question actually revealed behind-the-scenes secrets — the underlying structure that made each essay so interesting.

Among other tricks, there was something called “Meanwhile, back at the ranch.” In a nutshell, each episode would have multiple story lines. When one story reached a peak of interest, it would cut out.

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”

… and another story line would pick up. When that reached a new level of interest, it would cut out again, to switch to another story line. And so on.

This might seem silly simple when I lay it out like this. After all, that’s pretty much how every soap opera and TV show works.

But like I said, it’s not how most people write. At least that’s not how I naturally write. I usually want to express my point in a logical, linear — and boring — order.

Which brings me back to my former copywriting coach. He likened the structure of a sales message to a spiral that winds around the linear, logical skeleton of the points you need to make. The reader should never know for sure what you’re going to say next.

If you do create that winding spiral, you will keep your prospect interested. And like Vic Schwab wrote above, the longer you can keep your prospect interested, the greater the chance he will walk the sawdust trail. That means more conversions made… and more shekels in your collection box.

No collection box here at the moment. But if you want more of this kind of evangelical content, here’s where to sign up for my email newsletter.

Shooting the literotica arrow into the bullseye of fame and sales

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“I went to the beach on my own. It was a warm and nice day. There was another girl there. She had come from another island because our beach was sunnier and more secluded. We lay there completely naked and sunbathed… dozing off and on, putting sunscreen on. We had silly straw hats on. Mine had a blue ribbon. I lay there… looking out at the landscape, at the sea and the sun. It was kind of funny. Suddenly I saw two figures on the rocks above us.”

That’s a bit of monologue from a movie I just watched called Persona. One of the main characters recounts how she had an impromptu orgy at the beach with three strangers. Post-orgy, she goes home and has sex with her fiance. “It had never been that good,” she says, “before or after.”

“I know this script!” I told myself while watching this. I didn’t know it from this movie or any other. I knew it from a book I read a long time ago called Sperm Wars.

Sperm Wars was a kind of “Selfish Gene” applied to human sexuality. It was all very well researched and very scientific. And it was very popular when it came out. I guess partly because of those interesting scientific insights… but more importantly, because of the format.

Because Sperm Wars wasn’t your typical pop science book. Instead, each chapter started out with a story, setting up the science that was about to go down. The above scene from Persona was something straight out of Sperm Wars. In effect, Sperm Wars allowed you to read literotica, but you could pretend you were learning something enlightening about human biology.

So what’s the point of this?

Well, I’ve been collecting examples and ideas for spicing up ye olde regular content. I gave you one example a few days ago with that medieval warfare blog. I think literotica + [your topic] is another great arrow to keep in your quiver. Like I said, Sperm Wars definitely shot that arrow into the bullseye of fame and sales.

Of course, maybe literotica isn’t your kind of arrow. So give it some thought. Maybe another lurid genre would work better. And maybe you’ll get lucky and come upon a real winner. Something that makes you say, “It had never been that good, before or after.”

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How to make your dry expertise sexy and shareable

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A few days ago, I saw a tantalizing clickbait headline, which read,

“Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?”

I clicked and landed on a blog post, which took me for a spin. It turns out there was no PTSD way back when. But that doesn’t matter as much as what I read at the top of the post.

At the top of the post, the author, one Brett Deveraux, gave a recap of the first year of his blog. He started in May 2019. He’s written several dozen posts since then, mostly on ancient military history.

But get this… Deveraux’s blog has had 650,000 visits so far. The number of monthly visitors keeps growing. Each post gets dozens of comments. And Deveraux’s even got 93 Patreon subscribers.

Just in case I am not making the astoudingness of this perfectly clear:

This is an academic historian. Writing on things like PTSD in the Roman army. Who will soon get a million eyeballs on his blog. And who, if he were just a tad better at marketing, could pull in thousands of dollars from his hobby site each month.

Doesn’t this sound like 2010? Is the long tail still alive and well? Does Google have a crush on Brett Devereaux for some reason?

Here’s my theory.

The most popular content on Deveraux’s site, by far, is a series of posts analyzing the siege of Gondor. (Lord of the Rings movie 2, in case you’re too cool.)

In other words, Deveraux used a popular movie to illustrate his arcane knowledge. Knowledge which would otherwise be completely indigestible to the vast majority of people.

This reminded me of another popular content creator I’ve been harping on about. I’m talking about movie editor Tony Zhou. Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting on YouTube has the exact same structure as Deveraux’s blog. An expert in a specialized field, using fun pop culture to illustrate the basics of his craft.

As a result of this pop culture + expert mashup, Zhou and Deveraux had their content massively shared. For Zhou, it was through YouTube and on sites like Reddit. For Deveraux, it seems the nerds at Hacker News really like his stuff.

That’s how both Zhou and Deveraux got all that traffic and engagement.

So what’s the point of all this?

Well, I would like to suggest that this is a model you too could use. If you have any kind of dry, industry-specific knowledge nobody seems to care about, then pair it up with sexy pop culture illustrations. Show a clip from a movie. Then explain what really happened there, seen through the lens of your unique wisdom.

And write me a year after you publish your first post or video. Let me know how many millions of views you’ve had in the meantime. And if you need help monetizing your site at that point… well, that’s where my own dry expertise comes in.