What does every blogger want?
It is not a secret that every blogger dreams about getting more traffic, more visitors, more social shares, more activity on a blog. In other words, it is essential for any blogger to pine after for seeing the blog go viral on the Internet.
But it is not as simple as it sounds.
You must put a lot of work to create a blog that will be successful. It is a real challenge for newbies and not an easy task for the “old campaigners” as well.
What will you need in this case?
High-quality content and visitors who will like your blog. The scheme looks generic, doesn’t it?
However, you still need to know the exact steps you should follow.
In this very post, I am going to share the core strategies that will help to make your blog viral in 2017.
1.What Does It Mean “To Go Viral”?
I would give you a synonym to the notion “virality” first. It is pretty much the same to “popularity.” But it has some unique criteria in contrast to the plain “popularity” concept. Let me give you a few definitions of this term that I found on the web.
“Virality is the tendency of an image, video, or a piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another; the quality or fact of being viral.”
Or
“Virality is the popularity of something (such as a story or a web page) that is spread quickly and usually by direct recommendations rather than advertisements or news media.”
As you see both definitions of this notion have a common element – “the speed of expanding.”
In other words, virality is all about the time of spreading the information about your product, brand or a blog on the web.
I’ve mentioned above that “virality” has specific criteria it could be characterized by:
- Buzz. Your blog and content you publish on it should be highlighted on different popular blogs, social media platforms, forums, etc.
- Longevity. The information you post on your blog must be memorable, so people could get back to it again. (Don’t forget to refresh your content)
- Viewership. This criterion concerns the videos you embed to your blog posts; the more people view your content, the more it goes viral.
- Followers. No, it doesn’t mean having followers on Twitter. It means having people referring to your content.
When you see that these criteria have been achieved, congrats – your blog goes viral.
Now let’s get back to the meat. What should you do exactly to gain the results for your blog?
2.Keep an Eye on What Is Trending Now
I am sure you are familiar with the statement “everything old is new again.” This expression can be applied to the content as well. And I can assume your first thought was about the “evergreen” content. Yes, this type of content performs great; people like to get back to those topics that are always on-trend.
Nevertheless, only brand new topics can bring more exposure to your blog. Thus, it is important to track all new tendencies popping up in your niche.
You can find new insights using Google Trends, Twitter, and other useful online platforms. Though, I prefer to search for fresh content ideas using Content Explorer tool.
Ahrefs tool will help you figure out what people are concerned about in a particular niche. All you need to do is to put a query you are interested in and reap the benefits. Let me show you how to do it.
Supposing your blog is related to content marketing and you want to write an outstanding piece of content on this topic. Put a query “content marketing” into Content Explorer, filter the period of publications (for the last month), and sort out by “total shares”:
Now you can see what topics got more shares on social media channels. So, go ahead and write something relevant that will draw public attention.
3.Create Different High-Quality Content
Blog equals content. Mediocre content tends to restrict your blog’s popularity. High-quality content is your ticket to the ‘your blog goes viral’ show.
While this might seem easy to achieve, writing high-quality content is a real challenge. However, if you want to impress your readers, you should stick to writing different types of content. Let’s view out these types:
- “How-to” articles
- List articles
- Case study articles
- Review articles
Additionally, post more visual content on your blog. Images, infographics, charts, and images – use all of them. When your audience notices that your blog has a “catching picture,” it will boost blog’s position automatically.
4.Call Emotions
My question to you “what content are you willing to share?”
I suppose your answer will be “content that provides with useful information and calls some emotions.” You are right!
People like to read and share content that can make them smile, laugh or even argue with something.
Perhaps, nobody likes to read articles that are based on some technical aspects only. If you want your blog to be popular, you should publish content that would resonate with the audience. Don’t be afraid of joking, sharing your thoughts, and having one-sided conversations with readers. Use rhetorical questions and try to build dialogues with the audience. People love it!
5.Share Your Content on Social Media Channels
Social media platforms are a wonderful way to reveal your blog to the audience. Just imagine that thousands of people notice your content, visit your blog, and it goes viral eventually.
I am sure you know such social media channels as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google . These platforms work great for notifying people about the updates on your blog. Furthermore, I recommend you to submit your content to Reddit. I know it is hard to get on the front page of this platform. But thanks to the “upvoting” system people can push your writing up. Another one awesome opportunity you will get, is to be involved in the Reddit community. Make friends, find business partners, attract casual users. Reddit is a good “rocket site” for your blog.
The Inbound.org and Growthhackers sites are also worth mentioning. These two websites are the places where different marketers publish their pieces of content. Each article gets upvotes, comments, and shares on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google . It is an outstanding way to add some popularity to your blog.
6.Evergreen Content Rocks! But Don’t Feed People with Outdated Stuff
Do you want to get your blog go viral? I am sure you do. Thus, try to impress your audience with catchy, interesting, and brand new content.
There are lots of blogs on the web that highlight almost the same “hot topics.” Yes, these blogs have their audience, but they will never go viral because of one simple reason. They can’t offer anything unique.
You can ask “What about evergreen content? Doesn’t it work anymore?”
It works. It will always be in-demand. However, a constant submitting of articles on topics that had been covered before by almost every blogger, won’t lift up your blog to the top. Your blog is doomed to be among the outsiders following the “evergreen strategy” only.
Your aim to make the audience like and share whatever you publish on your blog. It is possible with the help of fresh, interesting, engaging, and uncovered before content!
7.Contests May Help You as Well
Engaging content is only a half the battle. If you want to move your blog ahead, you should interact with the audience. So, be ready to prepare some contest for your visitors.
Different contests make people participate, compete, and win. Think about a valuable prize you can reward your users with. It could be a payment for the best guest post of the month or sharing some “secret” course from you for free. Whatever! The trick is to involve people in your competition.
8.Promote Your Blog
This step is a general one. There are plenty of ways to promote your blog. Every blogger chooses the strategies that fit him or her better. Nevertheless, there are a few standard and the most actionable ways that are popular so far.
Let me list them for you:
- Guest posting. Submitting guest posts to different blogs is a great way to say a word or two about your blog. Furthermore, guest posting allows you to draw traffic, show your writing skills, and establish contacts.
- Submit your posts to popular communities. It doesn’t mean to post each article you’ve written before. No. Do it wisely. Feature only the best articles from your blog. Share other useful and relevant to the niche pieces of content. Take part in discussions. Vote for other material. Become a real community member.
- Make references to top influencers in your niche. I know sometimes it seems unreal to reach out some influencer and ask him or her to participate in your roundup for the upcoming post. Nevertheless, you should try this strategy. If the influencers share their opinion with you, don’t forget to notify them when your post will go live. You can be sure these influencers will share this post on their social media channels.
- Republish and update the content on your blog. Not every post gains popularity among readers. That’s the truth. But if you republish or update it, the article might attract a new audience. Why don’t you try to apply this tactic?
- Send outreach emails to promote your content. Email outreach requires to be focused on creating well-structured personalized templates, to be able to find proper email addresses of recipients and to track the progress of each outreach campaign. This strategy really takes lots of time and efforts.
Using these 5 basic promotional strategies will help you make your blog viral by all means.
Over To You
Unfortunately, there is no a universal formula on how to make your blog viral. It is still a spider work that requires lots of time and efforts. You won’t succeed using only a few strategies separately. Your key to success is in applying all of these tricks at once.
I am quite sure that these 7 steps will help you achieve your goals and your blog will go viral in the short run.
If you found this post useful, please, share it with your friends on social networks.
Don’t forget to comment!
I would love to hear your thoughts on this piece of content.
Author’s bio:
Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing Manager at Ahrefs.
Apart from working at Ahrefs he likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts and plucking fat bass guitar strings.
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