There are 2 blog posts you need to read about viral marketing:

1. Why Does Great Content Fail?
2. Think You Can’t Go Viral? Bull****

Also read

• 9 Hard-Hitting Content Strategies for Small Business Blogging
• Don’t Know What to Write About? Here’s the Real Reason Why…

People often ask me: How can I get my newest video to go viral?  And how can I get my sales page to go viral?

My really short answer

You can’t “make” your video or sales page go viral. There’s no magic button, secret trick, or fairy dust that you can sprinkle on your stuff to make it go viral.

If you blog post is published or your video is complete then it’s too late to think about making it go viral.

The solution

Study Viral stuff
Study viral content and you’ll discover some patterns.  Some of the patterns I have found:

• Viral videos are usually short and pack an emotional punch and can be fun/happy, inspiring, or funny.
• Viral blog posts offer tremendous value to readers and usually solve a tough a tricky problem or offer unique insight.  Or they use humor, like the oatmeal.

Understand a person’s motivation for spreading content
People want to share things with friends/family/followers that make them appear to be on the cutting edge or have inside knowledge about something.  This is why breaking news gets ReTweeted so much on Twitter; no one shares last week’s news.  Imagine how many ReTweets I would get if today I tweeted about the 2011 Hotdog eating champion or the death of Michael Jackson.

Don’t re-invent the wheel
Find blogs in your niche and look for the posts with the most comments.  Study the content, format, and structure of these posts to figure out why they are so popular.

Design Matters
I am no web designer but I have to be honest with you:  There are a ton of poorly designed and awful looking sites.

If you use a purple font on an avocado green background and have the latest Taylor Swift hit automatically play while my eyes are assaulted by an angry barrage of blinking banner ads then you don’t deserve to have a website, let alone get traffic or have it go viral.

Likewise, if your font is so small that I break out my magnifying lens (I have a big one that I use for melting pennies and lighting things on fire – but that’s another story!) or if you have long paragraphs that make it hard to skim, visitors will leave your site regardless of the quality of your content.

Spend an hour looking at the design of your 3 favorite websites and you’ll see some patterns.

Most blogging engines (i.e. WordPress, Blogger, etc) have lots of decent themes for free.  Crafting a totally-wicked-awesome-design-that-will-win-awards is probably out of reach but there’s no excuse for a crappy design that makes my eyes bleed.

Tasty Titles
Have you ever walked by a bakery and seen the delicious assortment of cakes & cookies in the display window and thought Wow those look delectable but I shouldn’t go in there because I’m starving from doing the latest fad diet and I will eat EVERYTHING! and yet your feet march you into the bakery anyway?  It’s as if the bakery has power over your mind and you succumb to its every whim.

You want your titles to do something similar.  When people read your title they ideally will think Holy cow!  I have to read this right now!  

Much has been written about how to write effective titles so I won’t bore you with all the details in this post.  Just know, if your title sucks then no one will click the link to your post from their Twitter/RSS reader and their eyes will never behold what beautiful content you have published.

Don’t smell like an advertisement
Notice that I didn’t say Don’t be an ad but rather I said Don’t smell like an ad.  The distinction here is subtle but important.

Blendtec’s series of Will it Blend? videos were actually advertisements for their top-notch blenders.  But they went viral because they were awesome short videos that didn’t appear to be smell like an ad at first glance.

So it’s okay if your blog post or video is an ad as long as it has some other redeeming qualities.

Photo  by Martin Pettitt

This InfoGraphic was created by Voltier Digital and you can view the full version at ProBlogger.

Welcome to Day 27 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Producing an informative video and submitting it to YouTube along with your website’s URL can send a hurricane of traffic in your direction.

Case Study:

Blendtec makes high-end blenders costing hundreds of dollars. They got a lot of attention with their “Will it Blend?” videos on youtube.com. They have videos of the blenders blending everything from golf balls to credit cards to glow sticks to even an iPhone. The video of the blender blending an iPod ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8H29jU8Wrs ) has been watched nearly 5 million times.

Don’t forget about the other video sites such as veoh.com, MySpace Video, and a South Korean-based video sharing site called CyWorld.com that actually gets more traffic than YouTube.

For a full list of video sharing sites:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/list-of-video-sharing-sites/

Also consider carefully titling your headlines with highly searched keywords and adding a whole lot of search engine optimized content in your description.

Search engines love video sites and so do web surfers.

Your videos don’t always have to informative. Many of the most watched videos are just silly and took very little to produce.

Welcome to Day 11 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

You may have heard about viral marketing and viral this or that.

One of the easiest ways to get traffic is to create a viral email that people will forward to others.

Case study

My Mother loves to bake and in November of 2007 she forwarded an email to me with a list of 100 recipes for every imaginable cookie.

Now the email didn’t actually have every recipe but rather contained 100 links to the recipes on northpole.com

Someone at northpole.com had the bright idea of sending out an email with links to all their recipes.

They knew that people like my Mother would forward this email to everyone she knew that liked to bake.

This one email sent a flood of traffic to the northpole.com

The great thing about this is that it is so easy. No autoresponder is needed.

Simply craft an email with a list of pages on your site about a particular topic and send the email to a bunch of people who would like this information. If the information is good enough they will forward it to others.

Below is a screen shot of the actual email with 100 cookie recipes my Mother sent me