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
-
Should rel=publisher tags (pointing out at Google+ Business page) only go on the homepage?
Hello, I've just read... “Publisher tags should only go on the most significant page of your site, usually the homepage.” Is this correct?
Social Media | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Content issue: Amazon book review & company blog
Can my site be penalized for including a book review verbatim in my blog that I also post on Amazon? What are the steps I need to take? I have written a book review that I want to post on Amazon. I am also planning to create a blog post and include the exact text of the review within the post which I will then also promote on my social channels. What do I need to watch out for in terms of duplicate content? Is there a sequence I should follow? We have the rel=canonical tag on our site which is WordPress.
Social Media | | gfiedel0 -
Content Marketing and Twitter
Hello, I'd like to improve how I use twitter for pushing a piece of content. Here's what I am planning to do currently: First, we created a useful piece of content for a niche where we'll be appealing to the humanitarian side of thing. Nothing like this piece of content is on the web. The subject is not mouthwateringly attractive to other websites, but it is good, very useful, authoritative and uses the information we have in our niche. For Twitter, we plan to pick a website carefully that could use our content and 1. of course follow that site on twitter 2. Retweet 2 or 3 relevant good tweets the site has put out. If the person I want to contact has a twitter account, retweet some of his too. 3. Tweet a general tweet about a good article or blog post the site has with a link to the site and the article. 4. Tweet at a specific person in the site's company (or to the general twitter account if there isn't anyone specific) asking if they need help with content if it is well written and useful, then later tweeting introducing our article. Email will also be used. I'm really new to using twitter for content marketing, any help is appreciated. Facebook liking/sharing as well as blog comment posting along with adding to g plus circles will also be used. Thanks.
Social Media | | BobGW1 -
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 -
Are Social Links on Home Page Good for SEO
Hi, I have removed the Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and G+ links from the top of our home page so as to try and stop users leaving the page. Is this bad for SEO? Thanks
Social Media | | Studio330 -
Is Pinterest's Embed a Pin good for SEO?
I was curious if by having Pinterest embed pins on my site will add SEO value... This would be used mainly on product pages for alternative images, closeup detail, any type of image to answer a customers question. I would accompany the pin with more text as another way of adding content to the page. Example on my site: Wicker Sofa product page with Pinterest Embed live. Also attached the screenshot of the code that is used by Pinterest pin embed widget. Hoping that extra unique content + social activity repins or follows, would help my store's SEO. Thank you for your answers in advance... 3uqUz57.png
Social Media | | wickerparadise0 -
Why is FailBlog allowed to make 2,000 dollars a day posting OTHER PEOPLE's videos?
So if FailBlog makes about 2 grand a day in YouTube revenue for posting other people's videos, then why can't someone just make their own FailBlog? In other words, someone could simply download all of FailBlog's videos, and remove their logo, and publish the videos on youtube as their own. Afterall, FailBlog doesn't own the videos anyway. Neither YouTube nor FailBlog seems keen on vetting videos - to see the rightful owner. Yet they are happy to both profit from videos of ambiguous ownership. Or, even, unambigous ownership. e.g. its obvious failblog doesnt own this media http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNQLmHKlmiE
Social Media | | anthony-3054420 -
How do you believe Google's +1 service is going to affect SEO? What can we do?
So Google just announced the +1 button, which is there answer to Facebook 'likes' button: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-facebook-like-button-70569 http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/google-plus-one/ They should begin showing up now on Google US. If you aren't seeing them, you can turn them on here: http://www.google.com/experimental/ I want to know? What affect do you predict these are going to have? Is there anything we can do from an SEO point to begin leveraging +1 right from the outset?
Social Media | | Tom-Anthony1