The episode was about Brad and Randy both writing for the school newspaper. Brad, the classic jock, wrote a column called “Hey-yo!”, and it covered topics like who didn’t take a shower after gym class. Randy, the intellectual, wrote a well researched, passionate article about environmental change.

“Hey-yo!” got first page coverage in the paper, the environmental article was in the middle of the paper underneath that weeks school cafeteria lunch menu.

Obviously a fight ensued between Brad and Randy. Wilson, like always, saved the day with one of his own stories about when he was a journalist who wrote serious articles about rocks and how he was bumped from the front page of his newspaper buy a guy writing a famous gossip column.  But, Wilson took advantage of the opportunity, because he realized the gossip column brought more readers to the paper, which meant more readers learning about his precious rocks.

What’s the takeaway?

Vary your marketing content to appeal to multiple types of people. If you are cranking out “Hey-Yo!” articles and materials, can you mix in some meatier topics that will drive your business agenda more? If you are always, deep, well researched meaty topics, can you throw in some “Hey-Yo!” to draw more readers?

What is your audience? Obviously for the high school crowd the “Hey-Yo!” was what they were looking for, not in depth environmental coverage. Are you speaking your target audience’s language?

Are you thinking about what is linkable? When I was working on my first website, I was trying to write a killer piece of content about a certain destination. I did interviews, got great quotes, wrote really well and was sure this article was going to draw links from other websites that would in turn give me visitors to show my product to. Wrong. In the end, I need to scrap the article because it was actually getting in people’s way and didn’t draw a single link.

When you building your company website are you thinking about what is going to actually get links for your site? This is one of the biggest flaws I see for most business websites is that they have nothing that is linkable about them. They have focused on being Randys, and not Brads. Brad was writing about what is audience wanted to hear and talk about, Randy was writing about what he was interested in, but wasn’t very buzzworthy.