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
-
Blog posts copied to Facebook or Linked? Any Duplicate Content Issues?
I wasnt able to find any good answers on this. I have two separate ecommerce websites, one with a top level blog. (www.xyz.com/blog) and different website with a subdomain blog (blog.xyz.com)***note on the subdomain blog, although it links to our website. You cannot directly shop from it. Until i can make some sort of scraper, its what I have to work with. For quite some time now I have been copying the blog posts and re-creating them on facebook as a Note. Using the same anchor text/links on facebook as my blog post. Part of the issue is that I want the facebook pages to have some content and not just links. Both get 2-3 updates per week, 1 of those being a blog re-post. Does anyone know if google or bing considers this duplicate content? Should I simply link directly to the blog everytime, as a best practice? Any insight on this would be great. Thanks!
Social Media | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
What do I do about old content on my blog?
I run a blog: www.b2bsocialmediaguide.com. It's been going for 2.5 years and some of the old content is, frankly, dated! What do you recommend I do about it? 1. Update old articles with new, more relevant content and change the date? 2. Write new articles with the relevant content and forward the URLs from old articles to the new ones? 3. Do nothing. 4. Just add links to new content from old posts? I don't want to lose link juice!
Social Media | | HeatherBakerTopLine0 -
Adult dating site. How can I get people to share content on facebook or google plus..
I am working on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com an adult dating review website. I want to build a presence on social networks so have set up twitter, google plus, and a facebook page. As I understand it retweets, like, shares etc... Play a significant part in seo. Therefore I want to get as many shares etc as possible. My initial idea was to create a fan page on facebook and pay to promote it on facebook gaining likes on the fan page. Will likes on the fan page impact the main site? I would imagine not? However I can see how someone visiting the main site and liking a post would have a positive effect on rankings. The problem I've come into is facebook won't run the ads as the page is adult so they won't accept paid ads. If I add a post to the facebook page how can I get it in front of people to share or like it? Equally how can I get google plus shares? I'm new to social and am unsure of how I should proceed? Especially as facebook considers the page adult. Finally how important is social. I've read it can get short term wins and optimised posts can appear at the top of search results but don't stay there long. Link building is still the long term strategy?
Social Media | | SamCUK0 -
Value in content from website being shared across social media?
If I write content (small career advice quotes) on my website and I distribute across Twitter and FB I assume my site will get the full credit (from an SEO perspective) since that is where the content was originally uploaded. However, will I still get SEO credit for being active on social media, or will Google view it as duplicate content and evaluate that I am not active on social media? thank you
Social Media | | knielsen0 -
Social media profiles with same description - Duplicate content or reinforcing business details?
Hi, I am currently doing a Social media review and find myself wondering whether having exactly the same copy - or part thereof, on a businesses' Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, Twitter, profile(s) is likely to be viewed by SE's as a good or bad thing? Is it duplicate content and to be avoided? Or would it be viewed as a case of the business trying to ensure a consistent profile and therefore reinforcing your business details?
Social Media | | Binarynature0 -
Google+. Good for all businesses?
Hi guys, My question/discussion is regarding Google+ and whether or not I should advocate creating an account for one of the websites I work in-house for. This particular website focuses on unlock codes for mobile phones and isn't a service that consumers would really want to connect with - which is what Google+ appears to be a vehicle for. It is a one off purchase website, and not something people will use regularly. On the face of it Google+ offers very little for a company that operates in this fashion and makes most sense for B2B businesses. I feel that by potentially creating a Google+ presence we are in fact attempting to manipulate the search rankings because it isn't a networking site that makes sense for our business and there is actually very little real reason for us to get involved with it. I don't think Google would penalise any business for getting involved in their product, but we would only be using it to benefit our ranking position. Surely that is against everything Google themselves stand for? Also, what real benefits have you guys got out of using Google+? If I am to create a presence there, this is the ammo I'll need to use to convince my manager with. Thanks a lot.
Social Media | | purpleindigo0 -
Scribit - A good deal?
Hi there! There's a new platform on the web which says that it can crawl on the web to get the best content around social media and blogs in order to allow the developer of website "x" to public this content on their websites (with all rights reserved - that make me believe that it generates automatically rel="cannonical" tags). http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/18/scribit-launch/ http://www.scribit.com/ I aways heard that all kind of automatic content applications suck, and my fist impression about this one was the same. But my business partner found it really interesting, mostly because we have a small team to generate constant great content. So I said to him that automatically generated content commonly suck in any case, and google sometime will find that our blog has 1kk rel="canonnical" tags for every post and they might find it suspect. Anyway he asked me to research more about this specific platform and I wanna know what you guys think about it. Forget speech errors. English is not my native language. Regards.
Social Media | | ivan.precisodisso0 -
Should I post these viral videos/photos on my website?
I started posting viral videos and stuff that I found on reddit and youtube on my facebook fan page. It's getting a lot of attention and creating more opportunities for bonding with my fans/customers. I'm just wondering what you guys think about reposting some of this stuff on my blog...do you think it would be worth the time and effort? I've experimented with a few and it really does draw traffic to my site...and gets me facebook shares. But the traffic is very poorly converting. So, now I'm trying to decide if the extra time it takes (i.e. 5-10 minutes to write a blog post and include the video imbed code vs. 20 seconds to just hit the "share" button) is worth it. What do you think?
Social Media | | MarieHaynes0