“You can’t do that! It’s like weighing air.”

The first Queen Elizabeth made a bet with Sir Walter Raleigh.

The Queen of England learned something from this and I’m betting you’ll have something you can implement with your technical content right away.

Raleigh had introduced tobacco to England and she asked him if he could weigh smoke.

Here’s what happened next, according to William Hurt’s character in the aptly-named 1995 movie Smoke:

Sir Walter was a clever guy. First, he took an unsmoked cigar. He put it on a balance and weighed it.

Then he lit up. He smoked the cigar, carefully tapping the ashes into the balance pan. When he was finished, he put the butt into the pan, along with the ashes.

He weighed what was there. Then he subtracted that number from the original weight of the unsmoked cigar…

The difference was the weight of the smoke.

You can see the scene here.

I had assumed this was a myth, like the Russian space pencil… but apparently, this really happened.

What’s appealing about the story is how Raleigh reframed the problem from something impossible to a plausible solution.

What if you could reframe the problem of needing more content?

Maybe you could attract more of the right audience without writing a bunch of new content?

One tactic I’ve used successfully is even called “reframing.”

You find a new angle for existing content—or add an angle to blog posts that suffer from the “curse of the generic.”

Do it successfully and maybe we can muse about how you’ll weigh the additional pageviews coming your way.