Marketing Ideas&Management Stuffs

http://ibrahim.cn/2010/08/20/creating-launching-viral-content/Creating & Launching Viral ContentMarketing Ideas&Management Stuffs

Blogs are a terrific platform to launch viral content. Because the voice of blogs is more “natural” (in comparison to a corporate voice that many people are used to on the typical business website), blogs are one good soundboard for perfect linkbait – that is, “the art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links to your site” (source: SEOBook). Should you craft your blog posts to go “viral?”  At times, yes.  You will definitely need to consider strategies for why you should or shouldn’t proceed in this way.  (For a more in-depth look at viral marketing, refer to our guide entitled Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web.)

Pros and Cons of Viral Content

Pros of Viral Content:

l  Traffic Boost: Without a doubt, if your viral content piece takes off, you can get hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website in an incredibly short time span.

The benefits of this are tremendous; beyond brand awareness, people may subscribe to your blog feed (if they find other content that is interesting), they’ll know what you have to offer, and the traffic will spread like a virus (hence the “viral” categorization) as they continue to tell their friends.  When you think of traffic boosts, it’s not only about Digg; the longer tail (StumbleUpon and niche social bookmarking sites) also brings regular traffic, and often over a longer period of time.

l  Linkability: Great content gets linked to.  People want to show off their funny finds and share the best of the Internet with the rest of their readers.  If you write something informative or hilariously funny, you’ll drive some valuable links to your site, which in turn will translate to better rankings.  A note of caution, however: try to focus on content that is remotely related to your business or blog.  Don’t write about the 30 largest hot dogs if your blog is about donating clothing to the needy.  After all, while powerful links can cause other parts of your site to be more trusted in the eyes of search engines, the most relevant links are the usually the most critical, so stay on topic.

Cons of Viral Content:

l  Choose your linkbait wisely: Not everything you write is “Diggbait,” so don’t overindulge in viral content strategies in a short period of time, as this can turn off your social media audience.  It’s unwise to write every post with the intent of getting each promoted on popular social news and bookmarking sites (especially to a wary social media crowd who may see your brand new domain on these sites all too often and will discover your true intentions).  Scatter your viral posts with normal posts that will engage a natural audience and subscribers.  Each of your readers will have different wants and needs, so don’t tailor your message to one type of reader for a prolonged period of time and forget about the other group.

l  Don’t ostracize your community: As mentioned in the previous paragraph, viral content is useful if done in moderation; if you always write for a specific audience (e.g., the “linkerati” – folks who own authoritative websites and blogs and are prone to linking to various content), you may lose your normal subscriber base.  Focus on building both slowly but surely, but aim to keep the number of viral posts at a minimum, particularly when people least expect them.  On the other hand, if you attract the minds of the Digg audience and post viral columns every weekday at 12:00 noon, they’ll already be waiting for you to post your content. This is a strategy you may want to consider as well.  Just make sure that’s not the only piece of content you post on your site.

Predicting Viral Worthiness

Is everything you post viral?  Probably not.  Most of us are inherently imaginative but our creative juices don’t flow like a waterfall.  Content that feels viral to you may not attract a larger audience.  In social media, and when crafting your content for the community, you need to research the social media sphere and learn what works and what doesn’t.  For inspiration, check social news and bookmarking sites to decide upon well-performing content.  An excellent tool for this is Patrick Altoft’s Hot Topics lookup, which performs the research for you on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Google News, del.icio.us, and Technorati.  Simply type in a search phrase (e.g., “blue widgets”) and hit the search button.  The tool will open 7 individual tabs to show you popular content with that phrase on a variety of social media sites.

Once you learn what works, you can craft your content to work just as well as top-performing content, if not better.  Ideally, if you’re going to blog about something, look into older topics rather than newer topics.  The fresher the story is in the minds of social media users, the less likely they are to vote upon something that is similar (especially if they don’t read the content and the title and headline reads like a “dupe story”).   This is more important for informational pieces of content rather than news stories.  On the other hand, if you do feel that you have something compelling to say about an existing story, it is very possible that you can add your fresh perspective and new spin onto the newer topics in order to stand out above the crowd.  For viral content to be worthy, it is incredibly important to offer original research or apply a brand new perspective on existing research.

If you don’t find something that fits your blog directly, that’s okay.  Brainstorm and generate ideas among friends, coworkers, or family.  Write every single idea on paper, no matter how silly and outrageous it sounds.  Sometimes, the silly and outrageous content is just what a social media audience needs.

Your content still may not feel “popular,” no matter how hard you try to spin it.  Apply some of those creative juices to your post and give it an angle that you may not have thought possible.  For example, give your business-to-business content a tech focus – even if your B2B blog isn’t very tech-centric.  Tie your viral content into current events that are of interest to the social media community.  In these particular cases, look at what is popular on the front page of Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us today (and over the past few days) and work your content into a specific news story that was well received by the crowds (which you can determine easily by viewing the number of votes, thumbs, and saves that these content pieces have received).

Strategies for Helping Content Become Viral

When you write something and it sits there, it won’t get the recognition you want it to receive.  Promotion is absolutely necessary.  If you offer a newsletter, highlight the piece of viral content.  If your blog is attached to a larger site, showcase that blog post under a “Featured Blog Entry” headline to direct traffic and attention to the brand new blog post.

Since most of you may already have “social media involvement” through media such as Twitter, forums, email, or IM, start promoting the content internally.  Tell your readers that you have something you want them to see. Solicit feedback and seek additional advice if necessary.  If someone really likes what you’re offering them, he or she will probably help promote it as well without you asking them, especially if he or she is a regular user of social media sites.  If it’s truly “viral,” word of mouth travels and the opportunities for marketing this content are vast.  The possibilities are endless. (For more tips on social media optimization, see our Social Media Optimization Strategies guide.)

Launch and Promotion Tactics

Once you have your blog post written, published, and ready to go, it’s time to focus on promotion.  Since the greatest kinds of viral content may bring thousands of visitors to your site within a short period of time (often 5,000-10,000+ visits within the first 2 hours), you need to be adequately prepared for this surge in traffic.  In section 2, part 2, we discussed the possible danger from a surge in traffic on a WordPress platform.  Because WordPress is a database-intensive application, if you are querying the database hundreds of times a second, you can easily crash your server.  Make sure you have thoroughly tested your hosting environment before you promote your blog post.  It would be a nightmare to work forever on a piece of content and lose the potential readers and visitors due to insufficient hosting preparation.

As mentioned earlier in this article, there are caching options for WordPress.  Before you activate a caching plugin and consider yourself safe, you will still want to test this out thoroughly before you go ahead and promote the content.  Your hosting environment may feel safe under a medium load, but it may not be able to handle the heavy traffic, even if your hosting provider reassures you that your website won’t suffer an outage.  Perform stress tests as much as you can.

Static hosting features are still available, though if you have too many page accesses within a short period of time (and your content is media-heavy with hundreds of kilobytes of photographs hosted on your server), you may also run into traffic spikes, server outages, and worse, bandwidth allocation issues with your hosting provider.  When in doubt, contact your host and be sure that they are prepared for a spike and you won’t incur penalties.  (This is one of those times when it’s better to have a free solution on Google’s Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress.com, as maintaining your own hosting environment can be entirely unpredictable.)

Section VII: Measuring Success: Blog Statistic Software Applications

How much traffic is my blog generating?  Am I getting visits primarily from social media sites, search engine traffic, or is the majority of my traffic coming from direct hits?   What keywords are bringing me the biggest boost in traffic, and how can I improve my content to drive additional visitors?  Where are my visitors clicking once they reach my site?  These are all valid questions.  Your blog should be launched with statistics code already integrated into the scripts so that you can accurately measure how well you are doing from inception and onward.

Fortunately, there are many different analytics platforms available for blogs that will provide you with detailed usage statistics about your visitors.  Most require a small code snippet to be added to the header or footer of your site.  For the most part, these are all easy to set up.  In this section, we’ll discuss the options available.

Free Analytics: Some of the most powerful analytics tools are free and don’t require much tweaking or IT overhead.  Once the code is integrated into your site, you need to log into the various analytics consoles to see popular content.  Here are some tools that work very well:

• MyBlogLog (http://www.mybloglog.com): MyBlogLog is a community in itself with its embeddable widget, but it also boasts a powerful set of analytics.  Users can choose to either use the widget (which is customizable) or embed a small line of code onto pages that they wish to track.  MyBlogLog will tell you where your readers came from, what they viewed, what they clicked once they visited your site, and what other sites they visited.  Additionally, since MyBlogLog itself is a social site, you can network with users and join other “communities” that represent blogs. Here’s an example of some statistics that have been generated by MyBlogLog.  In this particular illustration, the time of the last referral is listed in addition to the referring link and the number of clicks from that link (which are blurred out).

• Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics): Possibly the most powerful free analytics suite is Google Analytics, which is consistently being updated with new features.  Users can easily set up a Google Analytics account in no time and embed a small Javascript snippet on their site.  Google Analytics offers goal tracking, e-commerce options, and it can be embedded with your Google AdWords account if available, among many other options.  Here is an example Dashboard, which features a graph of user visits, an at-a-glance view of usage statistics, the number of unique visitors, a map overlay representing the geographic regions that primarily target your site, your traffic sources (whether direct, search engine traffic, or referring sites), and a content overview featuring your most popular content.  Google Analytics account holders can drill down for specific information about their visitors, including the type of network connection they are using (broadband, dial up, etc.), the typical screen resolution (for optimization and usability purposes), the most popular keywords they are using to find your site within search engines, and  hundreds of other unique statistics.

• Clicky (http://getclicky.com): Free and paid options are available for Clicky, a web 2.0 real-time analytics tracker with a handful of nifty features.  Clicky’s Dashboard includes a basic statistics table in addition to detailed information about daily visitors, daily actions, traffic sources (broken down into direct hits, search engine traffic, social media traffic, and traffic through links), top content, highest linked-pages, and popular searches.  The free version of Clicky (featured) tracks 1000 page views daily, but paid options are available specifically for bloggers ($3.99/month or $23.99/year and up), integrating additional options including RSS tracking, “Spy” (which gives you live results about page views in real time), and more.

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