How to make good content go viral?
-
Hi, have a question on the distribution of content which is designed to go viral.
Let say you have written awesome content, with great visuals, etc which is designed to go viral. Your site is relatively new - not many social media followers, DA authority, or natural traffic.
What would be a good process of distributing that content - getting the content out there so it has the best chance and ability to go viral and generate links.
So far i have:
-
Use press releases to distribute that content, using a distribution service like: prnewswire.com. Hope its picked up by a news site or something.
-
Contact Facebook Pages or Twitter Pages who have a large audience of the type of people who would be interested in the content. Ask them if they can share the content.
-
Content sites related to the content, and ask them to share it with their users (Give them a incentive e.g. money, a gift, etc)
I think number 1 would yield the best possible results in getting actual sites linking to you.
2 and 3 are more designed for people (who very few would have blogs) to read the content.
Any other suggestions, i'm missing out on?
Any good articles you guys recommend, i should checkout?
Thanks,
Matt
-
-
Just ideas that seem to work for me....
-
Design a site that allows you to advertise your most valuable content on all or most pages of your site - like in a sidebar or in "related boxes".... go to a good site like CNN and watch how they do this. Look at right side of this page with all of the promoted content. This promotes your content to your current visitors who should be your most important fans.
-
Make it easy for people to share your content with FB buttons or addthis.com widgets
If you do the two items above and you do have viral content then just exposing it to a few people will be like throwing gasoline on a fire. If you have pedestrian content then not much will happen.
* Get an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe. I use feedburner and have lots of people who get my feed by RSS and email messages. Whenever I publish something new it goes out to thousands of subscribers and many of them visit my site within just 48 hours. Enough of these people post to FB, Twitter, etc. that I don't have to do it myself.
Keep in mind that it is really really really hard to produce viral content - even if you have done it many times and intentionally try to do it. When I intentionally try to make viral content it does not work.... then I write a simple article on a topic that I know a lot about and it pulls in more traffic than something viral - but pulls in that traffic over time because it gets good rankings in the organic SERPs and a steady stream of social shares.
Most of the content that I produced gets less than viral attention. A few percent can pull in major traffic - often 100,000 visitors within 48 hours, but that type of content only happens for me a couple times per year.
However, once you have a large library of high quality content and people are visiting your site regularly the number of visitors from social sites and blogs will grow steadily. This is not viral it is simply the steady social sharing of good content which for me brings in lots of traffic - far more over time that if everything that I produce would go viral for a short time.
So, you don't have to focus on viral to get lots of traffic. Who would you rather have on your baseball team - a guy who hits a homerun every few games but strikes out a lot or a guy who hits a single almost every time at bat?
SEOs overvalue viral and undervalue steady. It is like the tortoise and the hare.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Social Media Causing Duplicate Content
Recently, I spent some time in the SEO MOZ Crawl Diagnostics, and found that I have 40 pages that are being listed as “duplicate content.” These are original blog posts, but I made the mistake of sharing on social media immediately after publishing each post. I recently found out that if you post on a blog and on social on the same day, Google indexes the social first, and then up to 2 weeks later indexes the actual blog post. When it does, it stamps the blog post as duplicate and the social media posting as the original. Any ideas on how I can rectify this? Any code I can put in each blog post to let Google know they’re the original? I’ve begun publicizing my blogs on social 14 days after I actually publish them to alleviate the issue going forward, but I’d like my 40 other blog posts to get the authority they deserve.
Social Media | | Jake20150 -
How can i get good Backlinks for my domain?
Hi there I have a year old domain and still have 1PA and 1DA how can i get moztrust on my domain and how to get backlinks. please advice. http://www.bassilimousine.com/ thanks.
Social Media | | GarySahota0 -
Should I be worried about a duplicate content issues between LinkedIn and my blog posts?
I sometimes take my original LinkedIn post and repost it to my blog. Since Google indexes LinkedIn posts, is there any need to worry about duplicate content issues? Or will Google recognize the common author/ownership?
Social Media | | CQMarketing1 -
Duplicating content on more than one social network
I am just getting in to social media for my company and i can find an answer to my questions. Different people give a different answer. Question: i have written a post and uploaded it to our Google+ page. If i upload the same post / content to our Facebook page, will this fall foul of the 'duplicate content' rule with Penguin? Or does that rule only relate to websites? Any Guru's out there with an answer? Much appreciated. Si
Social Media | | DaddySmurf1 -
Content marketing for fake snow website
Hi there I have taken control of a webshop that sells fake snow and winter effects products. www.snowsupermarket.co.uk I am going to start a blog & in addition to paid and organic search practices, what other content marketing ideas does anyone think could increase traffic. Cheers, Ben
Social Media | | SnowFX0 -
Is social media going to be the king of SEO?
Hi, Bit of a discussion really, every article out at the moment talking about SEO mentions how Social Media will take over in 2013. Is this really the case, should every SEO be focusing a large amount of time of Social Media? Far as im concerned I do a few things, try and build the social lists on different networks such as Facebook & Twitter also trying to get the list to engage with my posts and secondly social sharing from onsite content. Thats it at the moment.
Social Media | | activitysuper0 -
Is using a platform to automatically cross post on the social media networks good for SEO?
Is cross posting automatically on the multiple social media networks good for SEO or bad?
Social Media | | Melia0 -
How Do I get Content & Pictures into Thoora Results?
Wondering if any one is having success with getting their content and pictures into Thoora.
Social Media | | bozzie3110