Comfort Food Blogging

Photo by roland

I spent some of today listening to a talk by Mac productivity leader Merlin Mann. One quote in particular won’t seem to work its way out of my mind. It went something like this:

“It’s amazing how many people will read a blog about productivity that updates twenty-four times a day.”

While funny, it’s also poignant. Another irony wasn’t lost on me: that I’d spent an hour and a bit listening to a talk on “Attention Burglars & Time Sinks”, which I found via Lifehacker (the hyperactive productivity blog in question) while reading feeds when I should have been writing a post very much like this one. I was, effectively, wasting time learning how not to waste time.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who procrastinates by reading blogs about productivity.

But it speaks to a bigger idea. I don’t want to call it a problem or an issue, because I’m not yet sure that it is.

We’ve now arrived at a point where aspirational marketing reigns supreme in the blogosphere. I can’t visit my feed reader without seeing at least one post that promises to solve all my problems, turn me into a master at something, make me wealthy, make me fit and otherwise put me on the path to success.

It’s actually quite amazing — not because every post in this mold sticks out at me like a sore thumb, but because of the opposite: aspirational marketing is so ingrained in today’s blogging culture that I was being ‘marketed to’ in this way on a daily basis and, without realizing it, using aspirational marketing methods in my own posts and headlines without even thinking about it.

Aspirational marketing says: buy this product and you’ll be more attractive, or fitter, or richer, or more productive, or smarter, or more enviable, or the best at something. This book will help you become rich, or become the best at doing ______, or solve all your problems. That sort of thing. It’s all too familiar.

The kind bloggers consume and utilize isn’t too different: read this post and you’ll be more attractive, or fitter, or better at _____, or smarter, or more enviable, or a master at something. This blog will help you become rich, or become the best at doing _______, or solve all your problems. Each niche will have its own familiar variants.

Is that a bad thing?

Not necessarily. I’d rather the blogosphere be consumed by aspirational marketing than mediocre posts about nothing important — even though a majority of those posts which bank on your aspirations won’t do most of what they claim for most people. If a thousand visitors read a post called ’15 Ways to Become Wealthy’, it’s unlikely that the post alone will make any one of those people wealthy.

Having said that, you might occasionally find a really cool tip or a useful bit of advice buried in-between the stuff you know and the stuff you don’t need to know. The tips probably won’t change your life, but they can be quite useful. (And yes, productivity blogs have made me more productive).

Our aspirational marketing habit does present a few potential problems, though.

Real Value vs. Comfort food blogging

(Note: comfort food here’s means the stuff some people eat when they’re feeling crappy to make them feel temporarily better, i.e. tubs of icecream, big slices of cake and so on.)

How many bits of advice do you read, versus the amount of advice you actually act upon?

The honest truth: aspirational marketing is not pervasive because all bloggers are manipulators. It’s pervasive because it works like a charm.

Combine something a lot of people aspire to with a post addressing that aspiration and you’re likely to get comments, links and traffic. I suspect this popularity hinges around two points: 1. it appeals to our desire to better ourselves and 2. with so much content to choose from we have little time left for anything that makes modest, seemingly insignificant promises.

The danger I see is this: if we’re suckers for aspirational marketing at every turn it becomes easy to start treating those posts like comfort food. We feel as if a given post or blog is worth the time investment because it makes us feel like we’re becoming better at something, but if you never actually do anything as a result of what you’ve read, if you don’t make changes and act on advice, if you’re not inspired or meaningfully informed by it (meaningfully being information you later use), you’re doing the digital equivalent of eating a bucket of ice-cream.

In fact, I’d guess that at least one blog you read regularly is digital comfort food. It produces content you think is important, but when you judge it by the above criteria, you come up blank.

Photo by FeastingMadeEasy

There are two possible traps you can fall into: reading comfort food and writing comfort food posts.

Reading comfort food

Posts that use aspirational marketing methods aren’t all comfort food. In fact, posts in this mold have the potential to be some of the most useful and helpful you’ll read. When aspirational content delivers on its promises with solid, non-intuitive advice, the result can be nothing short of amazing.

With that in mind, here’s a simple three question test you can use to identify comfort food tips and advice blogs:

1. Have I ever changed a habit or had positive results because I followed a tip from this blog?
2. Has it ever changed the way I thought about something?
3. Has it ever inspired me to create or do something?

Ask these questions honestly and boldly of every blog you read regularly. If you can’t truthfully answer yes to any of those questions, you should unsubscribe. If you’re very worried about comfort food taking up too much of your time, you can make the criteria even more stringent and ask whether a given blog does any of the above often enough to make it worthwhile.

By using this process to prune my feed reader, I discovered that a number of blogs everyone seems to love were nothing more than comfort food for me. I stress that because what is comfort food for one person could be life-changing for another.

Writing comfort food

I’ll admit — this is a tricky one. Comfort food content can be very popular and, as stated above, not everyone will derive the same value (or lack of value) from content.

A truth: most people don’t have any idea that the post they just read, linked to and voted for on social media is comfort food. This kind of content won’t cripple your blog. Readers often enjoy comfort food and it may even be enough to gain you a new subscriber — or many.

You will find, though, that your blog’s most stellar aspirational content will be the stuff that motivates people to do one of the following:

1. Act.
2. Think differently.
3. Create.

You’ll know it from the comments. People will say: “I’m going to try tip #2,” or “I never thought about it that way. That makes a lot of sense.” Or, something which can be best of all to see — you’ll discover a trackback from someone who was moved enough to build on your ideas in a post of their own.

I’ll leave you with a few things to think about:

• Do I need to cut some comfort food from my diet?
• Am I creating comfort food content?
• Are there effective alternatives to aspirational marketing? (We’re going to need them. Everything gets boring sooner or later and particular formulas lose their punch.)

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.