8 Simple Ways to Make Your Blog Post Go Viral

by Waqar Azeem
8 minutes
8 simple ways to make your content go viral

Blogging is a great way to get your message out to your audience. After publishing a blog post, every blogger wants to see it go viral but that doesn’t happen most of the time. Have you ever thought why some posts go viral and some don’t get attention at all? Well, think about it.

Sometimes you spend a lot of time writing and composing a piece of content and while writing it you may think that you are sharing one hell of information and it is bound to go viral but what happens later is that you get a bare minimum response from your audience. And sometimes you gather a very little piece of information without putting much effort, and that goes viral within no time. So you start to think why it performed better than the other post you shared earlier that was a lot better in your opinion.

So today, we are going to look into the most common aspects of viral posts to sum them up in 8 simple points. These will help you in creating better content that will have a much higher percentage to get massive engagement.

At ContentStudio, We’ve examined the social exposure of more than 100 thousand articles in the previous 8 weeks. So it’s reasonable to say we have a fairly good guess of what gets loved the most. Naturally, the necessity to get your articles discussed extensively will be to compose powerful and persuasive articles. There’s simply no alternative to that. But once you’ve composed a well-written and beneficial article, you will find several other things you can do to gain more reach to your content.

Here are 8 useful key points that will help make your content get more shares and likes.

1) Having images in your content

When you add images to your articles, people find it easy to read and get the most out of your articles in minimum time. Make sure that the images are of high quality and provide some value to the user. And it is always advised to use those images that you have taken or designed yourself because uniqueness is the key here. If an image has already been seen by the masses, most likely it will create a negative impact making your content fall in the sub-standard category.

As an alternative, you can always find good quality and highly relevant images from online photo-sharing websites such as Flickr for absolutely free of cost. Due to the huge database of photos and continuous updates in their database, it is highly unlikely that you won’t find an image that is rarely used.

According to Ryan Salomon from Kissmetrics, content with highly relevant images get 94% more exposure than content without those images.

And did you forget about the social media tags for Facebook? According to our analysis, posts that used Facebook preview image tag had received 3 times more likes and shares compared to those posts that didn’t have a relevant preview image. Similarly, it gives you more shares on Twitter if you use open graph image tags for Twitter.

Key Point: Add at least one image to every post you make and do not forget social media tags for Facebook and Twitter preview image.

 2) Add video to your article

People love to watch videos rather than the same context presented to them in textual format. And more importantly, videos are extremely useful to help people in identifying problems and then presenting them with solutions to those problems.

There is no doubt about it that videos help in improving conversion rate by a healthy percentage. Video marketing is very essential as there are 151 to 185 million monthly searches on youtube, so you should consider it as a part of your marketing strategy.  You can use any type of video such as explainer videos, customer testimonials, tutorials, or demonstration videos. A study reveals that adding video along with your content has proven to increase conversion by 86%.

Make sure that the video is of high quality as there is a strong possibility it will serve as the main component in your brand recognition and enhancement. And also it should go well with your brand, aesthetically speaking.

Key point: Try to add a relevant video along with your article

3) Infographics and lists get massive shares

There was an analysis done by Buzzsumo in which they compared 6 different types of content that included:

  • Lists
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • How-to posts
  • Why posts
  • What posts

You would be surprised to know that Infographics topped the results while lists were the runners-up. Here is the complete bar graph.

shares by content type

It is quite obvious that infographics are much more appealing and easy to digest as compared to other types of content. And users are able to get stats out of it with visual charts and images in a better and efficient way. Bloggers always love to see new infographics and there are much higher chances of these going viral on social media platforms.

But it is highly surprising to learn that lists perform far better than how-to posts or even videos. One reason could be that lists give an exact idea as to what sort of and how much content is being given provided in the article (For e.g: 10 easy ways to do this…) and more importantly lists are easy to read and digest for most of the people.

Key point: Present stats in the form of visually appealing infographics and add structured lists to your content.

4) Quizzes are so popular these days

You must have seen those quizzes in your news feed on Facebook where a friend of yours has recently found out through a quiz that he is going to die in 2049. Well, have you taken any such type of quiz yourself? If not, then go through the whole process once and try to learn different aspects of a quiz from a marketing point of view and you will get to know that they are one of the most easily shared content on Facebook.

viral quiz builder

“We find that when people take one quiz, they want to take more,”  said Melissa Rosenthal at BuzzFeed.

Did you know that Some of the most shared posts on Buzzfeed are actually quizzes? Well, there is nothing too hard to digest in it because quizzes are so popular these days because quizzes are fun and they give people a way to know more about themselves and their friends.

So quizzes can be used as a valuable tool to get more traffic to your piece of content and ultimately make it go viral. If you are looking to add a quiz into one of your posts, use ContentStudio’s Quiz creation module that will help you get your first quiz up on your blog in the next 5 minutes.

Key Point: Add quizzes to your blog using ContentStudio’s quiz creation module

5) Long-form content gets more attention than thin content

Everybody is talking about above-the-fold content and there is no denial that above the fold content is important but what about the rest of the content? Can you get an ideal conversion rate by throwing all of the information at the top section of your web page?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big practitioner of simplicity and to the point approach. But, surprisingly the results say the opposite. When we analyzed and compared long-form content with short and concise content, we saw that long-form content gets shared at a much higher percentage than short and concise content.

article length vs social shares

And recently we have seen that Google also tends to love long-form content and ranks those posts even better. And Google knows that long articles provide more value to the visitors of a website by going into deep details of the topic. In fact, multiple reports show that content over 2,000 words is the way to go for companies to create evergreen content because it ranks better in search engines and it will keep circulating in social networks for a longer period of time.

Key Point: Write as much detailed articles as you can preferably over 2000 words

6) Invoke sentiments to get quick attention

Targeting your audience’s emotions has shown a great impact on content marketing. By using this technique you can quickly grab their attention and keep them hooked with your engaging copy.

We don’t have a scientific reason as to why this type of content gets more engagement but according to different research studies carried out in the past, people share emotional content for different reasons. Some of them are:

  • Positivity – What makes people feel good has more probability to get shared.
  • Shock – Shocking facts and stories get shared widely
  • Anger – Human nature wants to let everyone know what they are angry about.

Below is a pie-chart from a Business insider about the type of emotions that trigger more amount of shares and likes.

Emotions-for-viral-content-marketing

Key Point: Add entertaining or shocking pieces of content in your articles

7) Never stop promoting your blog posts

This is the point where most of the bloggers get it wrong and they start to worry about ‘why is their post not going viral?’. My only question to those people is ‘Have you done enough to get your post in front of the right audience?’.

Sharing on Facebook is not the only way to promote your content, in fact, it is the starting point. You must share it on most of the social platforms including Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Quora, Google+, Newsletters, and any other way you can think of. Promotion should never stop, even if you have to find niche relevant blog posts to comment with a link pointing back to your article.

If you can get your articles shared by an influencer who has a large number of followers, there is a strong possibility that your content will get a massive amount of likes and re-shares. So if you can find multiple such influencers, it can create a domino effect making your post go viral within no time.

There was a strategy shared by Brian Jackson that really caught my attention. According to him, he has used this strategy multiple times and it has worked almost every time. Basically, he published an article “An Entrepreneurs Struggle with Ulcerative Colitis” in which he described the state of emotional suffering he has gone through. In the same article, he intentionally mentioned a non-profit organization named CCFA.

Later, he composed an email asking them to share his post providing them with a reason that this article might help a lot of people fighting that certain disease. Guess what happened next? Someone from CCFA decided to share his post on their social media and overnight his post views jumped from 18 to 2081 within 24 hours. He got hundreds of emails, Twitter mentions and even got an interview request from Digestive Wellness.

Here is the full story if you are interested to read it

Key Point: Promote your post in both traditional and non-traditional ways. Think outside the box!

8) Automate Your Process

If you share content on a regular basis, you should look towards automating different parts of the whole process. I am not asking to make it a machine-dependent system but at least you can automate some of the tasks that you have to do over and over again in a similar pattern.

Let’s say, you have to research and discover content on a specific topic, you can do this by making searches on Google with relevant terms and then pulling out only the quality material out of all the results provided by Google. Or you can cut down the time and effort it takes during the whole research process by using ContentStudio’s content discovery and content curation platform.

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Not only this you can easily curate content and then publish it to your WordPress blog from within the ContentStudio platform. If you connect your social accounts with ContentStudio, it will automatically share all of your blog posts to your social media accounts.

So, it takes all the hassle away from your content curation and content marketing efforts. You can spend the same time you saved through automation on some other promotional method that can help you get more visitors to your blog.

Key Point: Automate as many tasks as you can

Final Words:

So, keep these 8 key points noted somewhere so that you can use them when planning new blog posts. It could help you write better content that will definitely get more engagement from visitors.

If you liked the article then please like and share this with your friends.

Waqar Azeem

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