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How to Create a Viral Article

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The best SEO happens when other people do the work for you. When a piece of distributed content goes viral, people start sending its link to their friends, who send it onto their own friends – and your URL starts to get massive attention as a result.

Obviously everyone wants to create viral articles. Very few do – because most people still create distributed content with one eye on promoting their brand or their product (or themselves personally). And no-one likes reading an article whose basic thrust is to sell them something.

Content is key for a successful article. It needs to be snappy, unique and highly relevant.
Plenty of articles floating around on the web fit one or two of these criteria. Only viral ones hit all three.

There’s a fourth criterion, a kind of magic property that all viral articles share: they elicit a reaction from their reader. Maybe they make the reader think about something in a new light; or maybe they court controversy. Or maybe they aim to alarm, or disgust, or make the four o clock Friday crowd fall off their office stools in fits of laughter. Doesn’t really matter. What matters is that viral content makes its reader stop, re-read, react and forward.

Now if you re-read my little list of potential “magic” attributes for a viral content piece, you’ll see it’s possible to elicit some reactions you probably don’t want associated with your brand. Disgust, for example, or horror. Both are emotions that will guarantee a viral effect for the piece of content in question – but they’ll also ensure that the aspect of that content that caused everyone to go “eeeuuwww” is inextricably linked with your brand.

Although the content itself should not refer to your brand in any way, it will be linked with it because the link in it is pointing back to your URL. So you want to make sure your content is eliciting strong emotive reactions that aren’t ultimately bad for your image. Be controversial if you like: but not without point and never to a degree that might be considered offensive.

Paying attention to current affairs is a must for any would-be viral article writer. By writing about something current for the industry your brand sits in, you automatically raise your chances of creating a viral content piece. And when you stick within the confines of an industry, and its latest trends, your article doesn’t even have to be particularly revolutionary before it starts to break out of the box.

For industry specific articles, I’d suggest that finding a hot topic and developing a new slant on it is the way to go. Again, you can court controversy if you like – that’ll ensure your article does the rounds – but do it constructively. Take an industry given and turn it on its head – but explain why you’ve done that, and what benefit so doing twill confer.

The best SEO is always done by content with the most original slant. Don’t be afraid to say what you


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