Stop Shooting Viral Marketing Blanks, Stupid.
“Social media this”, “social media that”, “web 2.0-ify your site”. If you’ve been marketing online for even the shortest amount of time, you’ve surely heard that the web is social, and that your marketing efforts should be social too…to the point of viral marketing.
An internet marketers goal is to create downright viral content, right? Wrong. Content going Viral isn’t necessarily the goal, it’s often a byproduct of well positioned content. The goal is to create well positioned content and prep it for at least some viral success.
How to Prep a Blog Post for Viral Success - Your Viral Marketing Plan:
Success is not instantaneous for most marketers.
Not everyone can gain thousands of eyeballs to their content. Fewer can make their content stick long enough to achieve backlinks. Instantaneous success often comes from careful planning and calculated steps towards achievable goals. Receiving hundreds of visitors to new content from del.icio.us, mybloglog, or any social site often comes from successful marketing of yourself and your blog generally. If you haven’t begun these basics, instantaneous success in making content viral is unlikely.
Improve your chances for instantaneous success.
Carefully plan and take calculated steps towards achievable goals, such as becoming a Digg user and amassing 20 friends who actively promote their own and other’s content and can be reached by IM, email, or your favorite form of communication. Join networks. Spend time developing your profile, then use the system. Come back tomorrow and use it some more…repeat. Engage regularly. Make friends on the social sites by digging, plugging, sphinning, and stumbling. Spend time developing your del.icio.us bookmarks into a resource for yourself AND others.
Identify your targets.
Is Digg the best place for your content? Or is a traditional, laser-focused forum a better idea? BTW, one of my greatest marketing successes came from a forum.
Prepare content with multiple titles and descriptions.
Digg and Reddit users like different things. You can’t just write one title and description and expect it to be acceptable everywhere. I’ve seen it happen where users of both see the duplicated effort and vote down content. Study and practice copywriting.
Pre-launch content, if possible.
Mention to your friends that you’re going to be posting something that you hope they’ll comment on. Mention in a blog post that you’re excited about upcoming content.
Launch!
1. Title sticks out in a crowd.
If you’re writing titles like, “Internet Marketer’s Viral Suggestions,” which this post could have been called, you need to rewrite your title. Try some action words, and think about using “tips”, “tricks” or “toolbox.” Aim at viewers emotional needs and desires, if possible.
2. Content that can be easily scanned.
Write for someone with the attention span of a gnat.
3. Posted on a blog which has been claimed in Technorati.
Help others find your blog. It’s easy as pie with Technorati, and it’s a humongous database of blogs where people actually search and surf for blog posts by topic.
4. Post is tagged with appropriate words for Technorati.
Your blog can be found, but take some extra steps to have your blog post tagged for the right keywords.
5. Bookmark it with del.icio.us and/or similar bookmarking services.
Like Technorati, bookmarking services categorize their content according to tags and relevant keywords.
6. Stumble it on stumbleupon.com.
Submit your blog post to stumbleupon.com and let others stumble upon it and vote it up or down. This can drive a slew of traffic some of the time, and people are more likely to stumble through than actually vote you down.
7. Submitted to citizen/mob voting sites like Digg, PlugIM, etc.
The more eyeballs to your content, the better. Just remember, not all audiences are equal. If at all possible, avoid submitting your own content.
8. Comment on other blogs.
If someone has a higher profile than you, and often talks about the same things you do, become a regular commenter on their site. Similarly, link to their content and get into their trackbacks.
Have any of these launch steps helped your content go viral? How much preparation do you estimate it took to go viral? I’d love to hear in the comments. Free backlinks when you comment because I follow.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
“Identify your targets.
Is Digg the best place for your content? Or is a traditional, laser-focused forum a better idea? BTW, one of my greatest marketing successes came from a forum.”
Excellent. I get so tired of seeing people tell any and all to be sure to submit their site to ___________. With no idea if anyone of the people that read what they write have a site appropriate to ________. Digg, most of all. There is a very defined and very entrenched demographic at digg, and if you don’t cater to them, the best you can hope for is they bury you and never burn your monthly bandwidth leaving hate mail on your blog.
Nice to see SOMEONE pointing out that not all of these sites are appropriate for all blogs, though I’d still like to see a few more people make the point a little more strongly.
Dane @ Blog Strokes
December 27th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
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