How To Go Viral

A very smart man named Seth Godin once said that it takes three to five years to become an overnight success. There’s a lot of truth to that. In terms of your web based presence, getting even a single piece of your content to go viral is your ticket to success. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight. Much viral content is the result of sustained effor to find something which will just click with the denizens of the internet universe.

There’s a certain science to it but also there’s an enormous amount of work involved, and it won’t happen without at least a pinch of luck. Of course, in some respects, you can make your own luck, and that’s all part of the process. Below, we outline some specific things you need to do in order to get a piece of your content to go viral. This is not a push button solution, but if these principles are consistently applied, you will see success.

Great Content

It starts, as you might guess, with great content. You can’t expect that your fifty sixth blog post about why people should fall madly in love with your product is going to go viral. If that’s the only kind of content you’re creating, then you’ll never get there. Great content has to be compelling, and it must either solve a problem or be so entertaining that it can’t help but be shared. Anything less and you’re wasting your time. Remember, great content isn’t about you, it’s about your readers. It either entertains them, enlightens and informs them, or solves a problem for them.

Instantly And Easily Sharable

If you’ve developed a piece of great content, then it’s got to be immediately accessible, consumable, and sharable. If you don’t have social media hooks hung around the content to make sharing easy, it won’t get shared, and again, you’ve just wasted your time.

Your readers are under no obligation to share your content with their social networks, and the vast majority aren’t going to go out of their way to do that. Make it easy for them. Make it push button simple.

Arresting Imagery

Walls of text don’t generally get shared. Great content augmented by token stock photos don’t get shared. It’s a small but critical piece of the puzzle; you need to find or create original, interesting images that will start the conversation. Viral marketing is is proof positive that a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Strategic Partners

In order to get your content off to a great start on its quest for global visibility, you need to get it seen initially by as many people as possible. That’s probably somewhat less likely to happen if the content resides on your own blog than if it is published on say, the Huffington Post’s website, or CNN. You need to work carefully and diligently to build deep penetrating connections so that when a piece of your content “hits” it gets seen by a wide audience, and is then picked up and passed further and further along, like ripples in a pond.

This is exactly what we meant before about making your own luck. Sure, you can rely on fate and chance in the hopes that a major website will see your content on your blog and pick it up, but it is better by far to go actively seek out ways to get your content spreading far and wide.