How to make your post viral is the question every blogger asks himself almost regularly. But only few of them actually make it happen. In this post I will explain how Novak’s blog became viral and what to do if this happens to your blog. These posts made Novak’s blog viral: Moments frozen in time and Stumble on Sunday.
What does viral mean?
Being viral means that one or more posts from your blog become very popular in very short time. They spread like virus, hence the name viral. Your posts can become viral with help from social networks like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Propeller and lately increasingly popular Stumble upon.
How viral effect works?
When someone (you or your visitor) submits your post to one social network site like one of above, you receive some media attention. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some clicks from this submission. It doesn’t depends only on luck but also on your title making skills. If you write inviting titles, you’ll receive more traffic for sure. You have to incite people’s curiosity with your titles so they really want to know what’s your post about. If your post is good and useful the visitors will reward that with Thumb’s Up or Digg,… The more votes your post receives, the more traffic you’ll get. With more traffic comes more votes and so on.
How Novak’s blog became viral
My blog became viral after only two months of existence and the traffic’s still coming. It all began when I published Moments Frozen in time post. In this post I published interesting pictures, which shows people, animals and things in interesting situation. The visitors liked this post and with a lot of help from Stumble upon, it became viral.
What to do if one of your posts become viral?
When you notice you’ve got a traffic boost, you have to act fast because the traffic won’t going to last long. The best thing you can do is to link to other similar posts on your blog to spread the traffic.You can do this with these steps:
- try to include links to other posts at the beginning of your populat post
- use related posts plugin
- insert social network submission buttons at the end of the post
- make sure your blog’s content is in best shape, because it will be viewed by a lot of visitors
When I noticed sudden Moments frozen in time popularity, I made instant decision I would make this post a series. I’ve included links to all other posts from these series in every post about those pictures. The result was seen immediately in traffic going through the roof. When a post lost its popularity, the next one gain it and pull all other posts with it. The traffic is still coming after 3 months and comes to 2000 views a day.
This is how I dealt with viral effect. How did you manage to turn viral effect into your benefit? What would you do if a post from your blog became viral?
If you like this post, you could subscribe to full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email.
Marko Novak
There is wordpress plugin called Share-this that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
Just copy it to the plugins folder and activate it in your plugins tab.