Create content that goes viral?
I am sure, you clicked through to this post because of the term “Viral” in that sentence. This is the age of all things “Viral”. About a decade ago, anything that had the term “viral” in it was associated with a disease.
But times have changed and now “viral” is anything that is “the most happening”.
Content too has to be viral to be effective.
Who amongst us has not clicked on one of those articles in our Facebook Newsfeeds that has millions of shares and likes? Today there are businesses like Buzzfeed that are thriving only on viral content and only because you or, somebody like you clicked on one of their titles.
[social_quote duplicate=”yes” align=”default”]Virality has become the coefficient of effectiveness in content marketing[/social_quote]. And hence it becomes essential that we learn the art of creating content that has the potential to go viral.
In this week’s link roundup on content marketing, we are looking at a few informative posts, all of which have tips on how to create content that goes viral.
How to Create Content that Goes Viral
Virality of an article starts with its headline, which entices a visitor to click on it. It builds on this and engages the visitor to such an extent that he is compelled to share it with his social media circles.
That becomes the second attribute of virality of an article – engaging and share-worthy content.
Let us look at some of these posts that deal with both these attributes.
6 Times Less Was More in Content Marketing
Research shows that long form content is the most engaging and what gets the most eyeballs. Neil Patel had even written an article on why long form content gets more traffic.
There were a few posts that I wrote, all of which were more than 1,500 words long. And all of these got a lot of traffic and readers.
But do you always have to churn out articles that are 3,000 words long?
Not necessarily, as this post suggests. There are times when less can be more in content marketing!
Dubbed “10x” by Moz, interactive long-form content is the medium of the moment. But whether it’s GIFs, infographics, white papers, or anything else, great content is always born from a great idea, not a medium.
In fact, sometimes less is actually more in content marketing. In this era of micro-moments, reducing a lengthy idea to an easily digestible visual piece of content may be better than blowing it out.
Before investing a year’s content budget in an expensive piece of scrolling content with all the bells and widgets, get inspired to bring moments to your brand from these six interesting examples of viral short-form content.
Image Courtesy : contentmarketinginstitute.com
Read more at contentmarketinginstitute.com
5 Ways Strategic Bullet Points Make You a Stronger Content Marketer
List posts were such a craze that an entire site called Listly was built around it.
Who does not list reading a post about 10 things, 20 things or, even 100 things? List points have the potential to keep a reader engaged primarily because of it satisfying one of the primary needs of a website visitor – scanning a webpage.
List posts lay down the content in a nice readable format and as a reader, I am not bogged down by paragraphs and paragraphs of text. Instead I can just read that first line and decide if that point is for me or, not.
But, not all list posts can be traffic pullers. Check through some of the lists on Listly and you will realize it. You need to apply strategy to it and only then will you be able to create a content that has the capacity to go viral, as is discussed in this post.
Bullet points make you a stronger content marketer?
Absolutely, if you’re good at writing them. In fact, being a master at writing exceptional bullet points is one of the most important copywriting skills around, second only to headline writing.
The goal of strategic bullet points is primarily to keep people reading. You’re highlighting easily digestible bits of important information, which keeps your reader’s attention focused and breaks up dense pools of text.
3 Remarkable Ways to Scale Your Content Marketing
What is the end objective of your content marketing strategy? How are you planning to scale your content marketing efforts?
These are questions that a lot of us might not have answers to. In fact a lot of us might not even understand what this means. And this is not surprising, because we are so focused on creating content that rest everything is outside the margins of our thoughts.
It is not even our mistake, because we have only been taught to generate content. We were told, “create and they will come”. While the second part of it never happened, we still continued on with the first part because that is what we were told to do.
How do you really scale up your content marketing and what is the strategy behind doing it? Jeff Bullas discussed that in detail in this post which is sure to change your perspective towards content creation.
Each day about 2 million blog posts, and billions of content pieces on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms are published without fail. Marketers are faced with capturing their own new Pokémon monsters to stand out and lead.
Despite these glaring statistics, 76% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers plan to create more content this year. Scaling content marketing is not just expensive but often confusing as most efforts tend to be me-too initiatives. Remarkably, 66% marketers are creating content without a documented strategy.
Many marketers do not have a specific approach towards defining success. To differentiate yourself the 3Ts – or the trilogy of right tools, teams and an element of tolerance – is critical.
Image Courtesy: jeffbullas.com
How strategic is your content strategy? Test yourself with five key principles
Do you really have a content marketing strategy and when did you last review it?
Your strategy cannot be to write 50 articles in 30 days. It cannot also be to create content that goes viral. It has to be more than that. It has to have a broader perspective with your business goals nicely blending into it.
One of the biggest reasons why a lot of people fail at content marketing is the lack of a proper strategy.
If you have a strategy but are not sure if it is really an effective one, then this post will teach you how to test it out to see its effectiveness.
19 ways to tell… Top 5 signs that… What Bridget Jones can teach us about…
It will come as no surprise that these cliché, clickbait headlines are the focus of a lot of digital marketers’ frustrations.
While people aspire for the next piece of viral content, expecting to become internet sensations overnight, it needs to be understood that things like this don’t happen by accident.
Of course, there is some degree of luck involved in just how popular a piece of content is, but the process of creating the idea and building out the strategy behind it is the core to success.
Image Courtesy : searchenginewatch.com
Read more at searchenginewatch.com
Content Promotion Strategies: 50 Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Next Article
Its all about traffic. The very objective with which you want to create content that goes viral, is also traffic. You need lots and lots of traffic to your site in order to fulfill your business goals.
But how do you drive traffic?
I am sure you would have read hundreds of articles that will show you how to drive traffic to your websites. And pretty much all of them will have the same steps and sources.
Why?
Because, that is all that is there to generating traffic. There is no Rocket science behind generating traffic.
If you can create a content that goes viral, then traffic to at least that piece of content will be taken care off. But you will still need to work on generating traffic from a long term perspective. And the very base of creating viral content is promotion which is an essential part of traffic generation.
This post might be a repetition of all of what you would already have read, but there are some nice tips as well, which you might not have been aware off. And best of all it is 50 tips in one place.
Where there’s traffic there’s hope. A visitor is an opportunity for conversion, which could mean a lead, a customer or a subscriber. But no traffic means no conversions.
This is why content marketers work so hard at content promotion.
And we do it by being active in three areas: search engine optimization, social media marketing and email marketing. Certain content has advantages in certain channels, but every piece of content can be promoted in all three.
Let’s look at how this all works with content. Then we’ll explore 50 specific content promotion activities in this checklist for driving traffic.
Over to You Now
Virality has more to do with the very anatomy of the piece of content than anything else. If you learn the strategy behind structuring content the right way, you will be able to perfect the art – the art to create content that goes viral.
While I will have to agree that a lot of people who created all of those content that went viral, wouldn’t have had a clue that their content will indeed go viral, there are yet others like Buzzfeed who has perfected that art of consistently creating viral content.
And that gives us the confidence that it is not difficult to master.
How do you plan to create content that goes viral?
Did one of the above posts inspire you to create viral content?
Do let us know your thoughts by commenting below.
And if you liked this post, then do take a few minutes out to share this post with your social media circles using one of the sharing buttons below.