How to Make People Care About Your Content: Find the Right Angle

Jan-Erik Asplund

6 years ago

This article originally appeared on Risk Capital.

In 2004, psychologist and neuroscientist Ullrich Ecker ran a study on article headlines. Participants were asked to read either a fact- or opinion-based article and answer various questions about its content.

Half of the participants received a version with a headline designed to slant their perception one way, and the other half received a version with a headline designed to slant it the other way. People’s perceptions of the subjects they were reading about were biased by the slant of the headline they were given—but that wasn’t the surprising part of the study.

The surprising part was that the headline a person read changed which details they were able to remember, and how well they could remember them. People remembered the actual content (whether factual or opinion-based) differently, depending on the way the title framed the piece. Framing, in other words, dictates recall—and not just people’s memory for rote details, but for people’s memory of what your post was all about.

Angles don’t just decide whether we click—they decide how we read.

Framing Is What Gives Insights Their Power

The SaaS world is full of truism like “build things people want” and “hire for culture.” For the most part, people take such truisms at face value, but when they’re given reason to question those base beliefs, they listen.

It’s easiest to see this tactic at work in thought-leadership content. Chris Savage, founder and CEO of Wistia, is one of the best at leveraging this kind of curiosity in his blog posts. His titles routinely play off straightforward-sounding startup values in subtle, pointed ways. They’re contrarian without being outwardly so, and that’s what makes them both clickable and impactful.

The insights that Chris conveys in the posts don’t run aggressively counter to your average lines of thinking on leadership or work. But each title above takes that core insight and stretches it around a lazy, familiar concept that we all think we know. By framing the insight against those familiar terms, it becomes more important—and makes us want to click.

We don’t typically think that we should slow down when our competition goes fast, nor that “thinking” is work we have to actively make time for. That’s why these titles work so well on that curiosity-gap level. Also, we may not profess to believe that “busy = successful,” but we recognize (and possibly resent) the truism lurking behind that statement enough that we click to see how Chris unravels it.

Hiten Shah is another great example:

Each one of these headlines plays against our expectations of how SaaS and other startup businesses should think about growth, their markets, and building products.

The thought that Trello “failed” is patently absurd on the face of it—as Shah acknowledges—but it makes sense when you actually read the piece and think about it in the context of contemporary venture capital and how startups are expected to grow.

Then there’s the idea that “copycatting” would be something to try, a premeditated tactic rather than the desperate move of a dying business. It may sound wrong, but it’s been borne out many times in the last few years that copycatting is one of the most powerful strategic moves a startup can make.

Hiten and Chris have written some of the most memorable content on business and startups in the last several years. I remember these posts not just for their titles but also for the arguments within, and how their logic worked in order to convince me of their specific points. That’s not a coincidence—that’s the power of framing.

How to Find Unique Angles

Finding a unique angle to take on a topic is the hardest and most important part of writing a blog post.

When you’re writing a post, you know what you want to cover. You probably have some personal experience that informs your understanding. You know you have interesting things to say about company culture, organizational structures, hiring developers, or whatever it is.

Without an interesting angle to match, however, it’s unlikely that what is interesting about what you have to say will shine through. It doesn’t matter how hard-won the understanding or how subtle the intelligence: Unless you frame the topic in the right way, your post is not going to have the reach or the impact that it could.

Here’s a simple exercise you can run to generate blog-post ideas as well as to “prime the pump” on unique angles to hit in future blog posts. It should take about an hour. By the end, you will have at least one high-quality idea for a blog post—from the content to the angle to the title.

First, put together a list of at least 20-30 perfect (or as close to perfect as possible) truisms about the industry or field you want to write about. It can be helpful to have someone else put this together to avoid bias. It’s even better if you can source your truisms from a definitive relevant institution, like YC’s Essential Startup Advice guide.

It’s really hard to argue with many of these points:

Build something people want.
Do things that don’t scale.
Get sleep and exercise—take care of yourself.

They’re best practices for a reason. Look for the kinds of statements that guide people’s thinking about a topic, both the little stuff that people tend to take for granted and the foundational stuff they believe without actively thinking about it. “Show, don’t tell.” “Retention is king.” “Hire for culture.”

Here are some example truisms you might use, borrowed from YC guide linked above.

SaaS businesses need to be aggressive about sales to win
You should do tons of user research before you start working on your product
Startups are more productive than large, enterprise organizations
You should never really think about your competitors
Raise money as quickly as you possibly can and get back to work
Avoid conferences unless they are the best way to get customers
Sometimes you need to fire a customer
Don’t start a company by thinking, “What kind of company can I start?” Think about “What kind of problem can I solve?”
It’s better to build something a small number of users love than something a lot of users like
When there are multiple directions your company can grow in, you should always choose the more ambitious path
Iterate your product and company as quickly as you can, especially early on
Avoid making big deals with big companies when you’re first starting out

Then go through the list, preferably with a partner you can bounce ideas off of, and set up QuickTime or Zoom to record.

For each item, you want to think about whether you have any reason to believe the opposite. Think about whether you can imagine interesting edge cases in which the truism might not hold. Maybe hiring for culture makes sense early on, as you build out the future leadership of your company, but becomes less important later on. Maybe not. The idea is to prod at these truisms, see whether holes can be poked in them, and, most importantly, whether your thinking can do anything to fill in the gaps in new, illuminating ways.

If you picked your truisms well, you probably won’t have much to say for most of the items on your list. Skip items liberally and often—this is why you should put together a list of 20-30 truisms if you want to find one or two good blog-post angles.

The one or two points where you find yourself passionate and engaged in the reversing of convention—those are your angles. The title of your blog post will probably emerge organically from that angle. If you’re rethinking the classic instruction to “show, don’t tell,” then you can start brainstorming with something like, “When Telling Beats Showing.” The titles write themselves when you use this technique to come up with ideas for blog posts.

This might sound like clickbait, and it is, in the sense that any blog post on the internet circa 2018 needs to do a bare minimum of “baiting” to get people to read—but it’s also more than that. The truth is that when you take the ideas rolling around in your brain, the collected experience and war stories and insights that you feel could be valuable, and just write them down in honest, truthful, stream-of-consciousness style, they usually come out sounding generic. No one wants to read them.

The insight isn’t what’s going to make your posts land. The angle is.

Why Should Anyone Care?

When you write a blog post, you’re saying that you believe you have some take on a situation or problem that is unique enough that your voice should be heard. Whether or not you actually believe it is irrelevant—when you sit down and publish that post, that’s the message you’re sending.

The problem is that for most of us, our problems aren’t all that unique, nor are our ideas for solving them. Ninety-five percent of startups have dealt with the question of hiring for culture and changed how they approach hiring over time. Everyone has dealt with the challenges of scaling as they grow, and a lot of those challenges don’t differ all that much from startup to startup. The problems and solutions are not the interesting part here.

How you frame your points—the angle you choose—is the interesting part.

Your post is inevitably going to be compared to a hundred or a thousand other posts people have already read, so if you want people to click, read, and remember what you said, you have to know people’s expectations and subvert them.