What exactly is viral blogging?

“Viral blogging” is not at all different than that of regular blogging. The word “viral” just means that something has gained popularity rapidly and unexpectedly. Viral content is often spontaneous, shocking, funny, weird, or moving.

There is no way to guarantee that what you are going to write and share will ever be popular.

When you think that the best ideas have already been thought of, you’re wrong. Because each year or sometimes in just a couple of months something new comes along that makes you think, “how did they do that?” or “why didn’t I think of that?”.

From the most famous social media platform, “Facebook” and to the once upon a time, the most downloadable game app “Flappy Bird”, it’s amazing how people find new ways to create something new and fresh that people will surely love and follow. What I’m going to share with you today is simply about giving crack to Facebook users and becoming rich by doing it.

Not actual crack or nonsense, of course, but crack in the form of content that people can share with their friends and families on the world’s most popular social network which is Facebook. What’s more amazing is that your website doesn’t have to look 101% good and appealing and you don’t have to get any of your own images or write any original content. What’s cool with this is that your website can be up and running with huge traffic in less than 24 hours. You heard it right, in less than 24 hours! If you don’t believe me, then let’s go and I’ll show you how it’s done with more than one example for you to look at.

Examples of websites who are successfully using viral blogging tactics

If you try to analyze a few top trending websites these days, you will get to know that most of them are using viral content to attract maximum audience who in turn quickly shares their content.

One good example is Upworthy which shares viral stories and videos with catchy headlines to drive massive traffic from social networks. Checkout their traffic stats below.

Another good example is ViralNova. According to business insider, ViralNova was sold for over $100 million in a cash and stock deal. It uses the same ‘click-baity’ headlines to make the content go viral on social media. The original owner Scott Delong made another website of similar nature and it soon became the top 1500 site on Alexa. Later on it was sold on an even bigger deal to Salem Communications. Here are the recent traffic stats of Viralnova.

 

Ok, enough of the examples and background talk, now let’s get to the bottom line that how can you make money with viral blogging.

Things You’ll Need

• A Domain Name and a hosting where your website will be hosted. We have tested quite a few hosting companies, fully managed WordPress hosting by Cloudways and Inmotion hosting seems to be the best for such websites.
• A Facebook page and Facebook ads account
• Twitter Account
• Pinterest Account
• An AdSense account or alternative ad network account.
• Lastly, ContentStudio Account (Click here to signup)

How Will It Work?

The concept is really simple but obviously, it requires some dedication from your side. You are going to create a WordPress blog with content that is highly engaging and trending right now. This will be done for you by ContentStudio on complete autopilot. Once set up, you will send traffic to your website as much as you can from any channel you want. But I am going to reveal a few traffic sources in the step by step section of this post.

When the audience will visit your blog, some of them will click on the ads provided to you by Adsense or any other network you have used on your website. I recommend Adsense because it gives highly relevant ads according to your content so the possibility to get clicks on your ad is much higher as compared to other ad networks. So you will be paid for every click you get on ads embedded on your website. Sounds profitable, right?

Well, I have tested this method and yes it works really well. You just need to find the right balance between paying for your traffic and getting paid from the ad network for ad clicks.

Step By Step Process To Get You Started

If you think it’s not for you, then before we start, you can stop reading right now at this point. But if you think you can put some effort and build a powerful blog for constant income stream then continue reading through the next 4 steps to get everything up in a streamlined way.

Step 1: Setup a WordPress blog

If you don’t have a domain name yet and you haven’t thought about a brand name then simply go to namemesh.com or panabee.com to get ideas and select a short and simple brand name for your blog.

Once you have decided the brand name, go over to namecheap.com or godaddy.com just to check availability of the domain (do not buy the domain at this point because you will get it for free while buying the hosting account). Preferably it should be a .com, .net domain or a country level domain such as .co.uk, .co.in etc

After you have decided on a domain name that is available, you will have to get an account with a CreativeON web hosting company that will host your blog and make it available over the internet for your audience.

There are many hosting companies around the world but it’s really important that you go with a reputed one and it should be using SSD storage drive, great support that is available 24/7.

So the only hosting company I would recommend to you is InMotion Hosting because I have personally used it on several blogs without any problems and their support team is simply awesome and above all saves you from the slow hosting big time. If you search about InMotion Hosting on the internet, you will find thousands of good reviews about this company.  Go with any business hosting package as we can upgrade any time at a later stage once the need arises.

While making the order, make sure to check the option to get WordPress pre-installed on your hosting account. In case you forgot, there is nothing to worry about. Simply follow the guidelines given in this link: Getting started: How to Install WordPress

Once you are done with above steps, you can go with a free WordPress theme like Socially Viral or SuperMag. Follow these instructions to install your theme from WordPress dashboard. Adjust the theme according to your layout requirements by going through the documentation of the theme you have installed.

Step 2: Setup Social Pages

It’s really important to create social media pages for your website so that the content gets shared with your audience. Once you have a good amount of  followers, you will keep getting healthy traffic on regular basis.

So, setup a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a Pinterest account with your brand name. I am not going into the details of how to do it because it’s quite simple to set this up and there is a lot of help available on the internet about it.

Step 3: Populate your blog with viral content

Once your wordpress blog and social media pages are ready, it’s time to get some juicy content up on your blog. Now there are two ways to do it.

• You can manually find relevant and good topics over the internet, write articles over 500 words each with pictures or related videos. And then publish them on your WordPress blog on a regular basis at least 5 articles per day initially. You will also need to share links of your blog posts to your social media accounts.
• There is an AUTOMATED way to do this step and you will never have to worry about new content on your website. Use ContentStudio.io content curation platform that will do everything for you. You simply have to set up campaigns only once and then contentstudio will automatically publish fresh content to your blog. And more importantly, it will automatically share those blog posts to your associated social pages at regular intervals.

 Step 4: Get Some Paid Traffic

As I mentioned previously, I tried this strategy and based on what I experienced I say it’s better to promote the page itself than it is your individual posts. I paid for ads towards a page (in the form of Page Likes) which is fairly typical but also used the “boost” option wherein Facebook will allow you to promote posts to people who like your page and also to their friends.

I started with my Facebook page that didn’t have too many likes when I did this, it really didn’t work out too well, but the interesting part for me is that I stopped the campaign almost two weeks ago and I’m still getting 5-10 likes every single day.

You’ll see that it’s not a huge number, but when you factor in that, I only promoted three articles and spent less than $20, then it’s actually quite surprising, if not impressive.

Looking at that personal experience, if you’re going to be fairly serious about running Facebook Ads, then I expect your budget to be somehow large. It’s better to put on more money so you can get your brand starting strong.

You can also try some native ad networks to get more traffic to your blog. So try to get as much traffic as possible from any channel you can. Uploading videos on YouTube related to your articles is another free method to get extra traffic.

Step 5: Rinse, Repeat, Track

You will have everything up and running in 1 or 2 days then it’s just the matter of scaling things in a good manner. It is really important for any online marketing venture to be properly tracked so that you can see what’s working and what’s not working, this will help you make decisions in a better way. You will quickly see that some articles will get more shares than others so keep an eye on those and spend more budget on those articles to get more traffic on your blog.

Always explore and test new traffic sources, and keep an eye and focus on what is clearly working for you. Since most of the work will be automated using ContentStudio, all of your energy and time should be spent towards getting more traffic to your blog.

Never consider that you have achieved a good level at a specific time, just keep moving ahead and grow it to a full online business which you can, later on, sell or keep it provide you with regular income.

Final Thoughts:

If you follow the 5 step plan laid above, you will definitely be able to make some good amount of money by viral blogging. We see more and more such websites popping up every other day and when you check their traffic stats you only get amazed at how quickly they are growing.

So this method will never get old because we as humans are always hungry for fresh crisp stories.  It will require some effort to get massive traffic but if you stay consistent you can build yourself a business with recurring income.