Whenever I need inspiration for a new blog post I put on my headphones and listen to Classic Yes’ “Tales from Topographic Oceans”. The music inspires me although the words are kind of freaky.
I listen to music when I need to be creative because I have a problem with creativity: I’m not the most creative guy on Earth. In fact, most of the time what I create can be boiled down to “crap”, “mediocrity”, and “rehashed aphorisms”. Or maybe I just spend a lot of time quoting my favorite books and movies (as in “Well, Samwise, what do you think of the Elves now?” — although that was technically neither in a book nor a movie).
My creativity flatlines when I need it most: when I am confronted by a problem in real life. For example, when my cable modem failed I spent six hours reconfiguring my computer, downloading wifi diagnostic software, rebooting the modem, and otherwise killing time while I waited for the cable repair guy (call him Miracle Max) to show up with a replacement modem. I knew the modem was bad but I kept hoping against hope that I would pull a miracle out of thin air.
I was not being creative, I was being rotive. Rotivity is the practice of going down the list of standard operating procedures whenever you have a problem. When I was much younger I took a job as a computer operator (that was a guy who was responsible for turning on a $250,000 piece of equipment that was capable of doing less than your average smart phone today). If by some odd chance or cosmic ray burst the $250K box suddenly locked up I had to get out a notebook and decipher a row of lights on the side of the box, writing down hexadecimal numbers. Then I was free to flip the “ON/OFF” switch.
Rotivity is what every high school backyard mechanic learned to do with his car. You stuck a pencil in the carburetor to keep it open so it got enough air to burn a good mix. You filled the battery with water. You tightened the belts. If you had a timing light you checked the timing. You checked the oil, the lubricant, the coolant, and at the end of the day you called your best friend’s older brother (who was a “Professional Mechanic”) who would say on the phone, “Did you check to see if the plugs are sparking?” And, of course, the plugs were filthy and disgusting and incapable of sparking ever again — but meanwhile all the hot chicks who had sauntered by to watch you work on your car realized you had no clue —
But I digress. Rotivity is the process you use when you don’t know how to solve a problem. You hope the problem magically resolves itself if you go through the Rotive Ritual. You could say that about 90% of the search engine optimization that is practiced every day is rotive, consisting of people going down checklists and checking their favorite blogs for advice they may have read in the past but forgot about.
Got a penalty? There’s a blog post that tells you how to confirm that and what to do.
Been downgraded by Panda? There are hundreds of blog posts and forum discussions that tell you all sorts of things to check, change, and otherwise mutilate (although, technically, this form of rotivity is relatively unproductive).
Hit by Penguin? You know what to do. Go hit them blogs so you can find one that says, “Well, you don’t REALLY have to get rid of the links (or spammy keyword-stuffed content)”.
SEO bloggery thrives on rotive pseudo-creativity. If you ever need to change a light bulb the SEO blogosphere will have 2-300 articles telling you exactly how to do that, mostly in a straight-forward fashion with no attempts at humor (and God help you if you land on a blog with affiliate links).
We have a plethora of solutions and a real dearth of problems. Seriously, think about it. When did you last read an SEO article that identified a new problem for which there weren’t at least a dozen popular “fixes”? If you can say “within the last 30 days” count yourself lucky — or maybe you just started out and haven’t found all the rotive bloggers yet. Trust me — they are out there, waiting to fill your days and nights with checklists and audit tips and keyword research patterns and — I can’t do this any more.
Where are the hot girls wandering by looking to see if I know how to get the car to start? It’s just a damn blog, one that has to produce some sort of meaningful article, and I’m struggling to say something meaningful because I’m waiting for an audience like you — someone who wants desperately, needfully, for me to solve a problem for you — to offer a solution you haven’t already tried in a rotive fit of frustrated problematic problem resolving mediocrity.
And it’s not like I don’t have problems I can share with you. Did I tell you about the wave of brute force dictionary attacks I have been fighting off? The things I do to stop the dictionary attackers are pretty cool — but I’m not going to share them with you because I’m a heartless bastard who would rather see you suffer than help you compete with me.
Instead, I might offer you some long-winded diatribe on the problem with “content marketing” (disguised as a metaphorical rant about problem solving). “Content marketing” doesn’t solve problems, so when you ask yourself why your “content marketing” doesn’t seem to be working, you have to understand that the cute girls have stood in your driveway, watched you call your best bud’s brother on the phone, and concluded you just don’t have enough life experience to check the damn spark plugs.
Where’s Megan Fox when you need someone to start your engine anyway? (I’m not being metaphorical — I’m referring to the first “Transformers” movie, you geekless mundane example of cruel mediocrity.)
Whether you are just blogging for fun or trying to get a “content marketing” campaign off the ground, if you don’t solve a problem (preferably in a quick, easy, resourceful way) you are pretty much wasting everyone’s time.
The bully pulpit of the blog MUST be used to make someone else’s day a little bit better; it must reach out and find the loose wire, drawing attention to the best possible solution. Blogging is our way of sharing but sharing means giving and not accepting.
Business owners grudgingly agree to put blogs on their Websites but they don’t want to solve any problems. “I’m not in the business of solving people’s problems,” one business owner told me a few years ago. “Not on the Web.”
What I wanted to say to him in reply was, “Well, then, you’re not in business on the Web.”
What is the one thing every business owner takes pride in, if it’s not solving their customers’ problems and fulfilling customer needs? And if you’re going to use “content marketing” (whatever the heck that is) to promote and boost your business on the Web then I submit to you, O Wise Guru, that you MUST solve problems with your bloggery.
If all you do is offer advice then offer practical, actionable advice that anyone can use. You may have to listen to “The Best of the Moody Blues” seven times over to come up with the right article, but in the end when you solve someone’s problem they will remember you. They will reward you silently, quietly, patiently, in the way that only a good reader knows how to.
Find the unsolved problem and make that your priority. The mission is only over when people recognize you as the top authority on solving that specific problem.
And then it’s on to the next mission.
And, trust me, the cute girls will come by to listen to your engine purr like a kitten and roar like a lion.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
How Long Does It Take SEO To Work?
Guest Post Link Building: Why It Hurts the Web
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness for Non-expert Websites
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