Are some industries so boring they literally have nothing to blog about? That’s the question I set out to answer a few days ago.
Over the last few years, one of the most common types of push back I get from people on blogging is that their industry is too boring to write about. Some people claimed that no one was interested in reading about their industry online. I’ve never sought out to truly see if this is fact or fiction until now! (Keep in mind the techniques I use are just one way I go about researching blogs and topics. There are many ways to research)
I started my search on Twitter asking my followers, “What is one industry you think is too boring or obscure to have a blog on?” Being the awesome followers that they are, I got some of the most boring industries I would have NEVER thought of. Here’s four that I decided to focus on:
- @merylecorbett – actuarials
- @jaredsinclair – life insurance sales
- @jasonrmoore – health it
- @MKMartin – the barge industry
Yes, I’ll admit I had to look up what actuarials actually are. I found out the word pertains to actuaries as, “the actuarial value of an annuity.” So I decided to use the term actuaries for my research.
The next thing I did was figure out how many times these words are searched every month using the Google Keyword Tool. This gave me a sense of how popular the words were and helped me figure out if anyone searched for the word itself at all. Here’s what I found.
Not too bad! Even the phrase “barge industry” gets searched a few times per month! So armed with this info, I decided to press on to figure out what the intent was when people seared each phrase. If I could put some context around the way people search for the terms, it would be easy to figure out if creating content for any of these industries is worth it.
I headed over to Google and used their handy predictive search feature that lists the most popular searches below the Google bar when you start typing. It’s one of my favorite tools for generating fresh content. Here’s what I found. The results of these boring industries were actually pretty interesting!
I discovered that for each of these “boring industries” the top searches weren’t boring at all. The majority of all related searches above prove that people genuinely want to learn more about the industries. Of course there are always going to be off-topic phrases that you might think are useless such as “Actuaries in movies” but even that has it’s place. The main thing it proved is that it’s worth it for a business to create content around these topics on their website.
If you want an excellent example of a company that makes a ‘boring’ industry interesting through their blog, check out Strasan, a Healthcare data analytics company founded by @jasonmoore. They’ve done an excellent job pinpointing what their audience wants and giving it to them post by post.
So before you tell me there isn’t anything to write about try doing this simple exercise for your industry and see what you come up with!
