The Strategy to Make Your Content Go Viral: Checklist Guide
It is not a secret that social media help starting entrepreneurs put their business on track. The luckiest ones literally wake up rich because their ad (or ad-like) content has gone viral. Is it only about blind luck, though?
The best practices in the trade greatly increase your chances of winning the prize of skyrocketing traffic, and we are going to share some of them in a moment.
Why You Badly Need to Master the Art of Writing Viral Copies
A post or an article that manages to get the reader’s attention and leaves a deep impression gets plenty of likes and shares, right? This is exactly what you are looking to achieve because they like adding credibility to your post while the shares make more people see it.
Viral marketing is about letting people help spread your content. It is a way of making ads that would otherwise cost a whole load of money free.
There is no reason soever to postpone pushing your viral content through. Imagine how a single YouTube video can gather 11M+ views and enable you to build a memorable brand overnight!
The question is how to produce viral content? Well, there’s no silver bullet and no magic pill to help resolve this matter; nevertheless, there are some actionable techniques. Here they are:
Review Your Approach to Content Marketing
Adaptability is crucial in times of a global lockdown. To stay afloat and thrive when sales are going down everywhere, one has to keep track of the trends, expand their audience, and retain loyal customers at the same time.
To do this effectively, be in the know about what your affiliates and rivals are doing. One way of doing it is to subscribe to their channels. Apply the best practices in your niche.
Stay atop of your competition by taking the tastes and opinions of your audience into account: what do they talk about in comments, forums, and chats? You must know.
You’ll notice that you can predict what will appeal to them when you really understand the audience.
Find a Niche-Savvy Copywriter
Professional copywriters are all around. Content is king, which is why successful companies keep writers in high esteem provided that the writers, in their turn, feel privileged to represent a particular brand, an idea, or a product.
It is hard to deny that, for example, a writer in the gambling niche must be a little bit of a gambler themselves. Perhaps they know all the ins and outs of the trade, actually? They will know how to touch the right nerve in the readers for sure.
You should find a writer who loves your product and has experience working with your niche. That person talks the same language with your audience and surely will move your brand to the next level. By the way, https://write-essay-for-me.com/write-my-paper-for-me has hundreds of writers, so why not start your search right now?
Feel the World of Your Audience
This one sounds obvious. Neither a Chief Executive nor a Social Media Manager should be some kind of a detached creature who only reads about the tastes of their audience in the news.
It is not only about making a product better, whatever it may be. Let us suppose that you manufacture and sell laptops, and you already know that your customers want an aluminum-casing gadget with a powerful battery for the price of a rig from the ’90s. What else?
A little investigation may reveal that customers would love to see integration with Google services. Now that was not so obvious!
They call it “thinking outside of the box.” The information obtained through this kind of thinking must be used in your killer post.
Nail It on the Head with Your Headline
A headline that you want to click is almost as important as an article itself. There are hundreds of debates on the web about this, and you have likely seen some of them already.
- Three words are too short; eleven is the absolute maximum. Eight or nine words is best.
- The niche-specific keywords must be present closer to the beginning of the headline.
- The headline must be informative.
- Yet it should not reveal all the information upfront; it should leave a reader curious.
- “How To” articles give its reader a clear idea of what to expect.
Then there are tons of peculiar statistics. How about his one: “the headlines with the word ‘who’ generate a 22% higher click-through rate than without it.” Heads up, don’t overdo it! While these statistical insights have a certain value for sure, it is sometimes better to intuitively grasp the feel of a headline.
Appeal to Your Reader’s Feelings
People buy with their hearts. In other words, a product they like and relate to has a lot more chances to win their sympathies than just an incredibly useful one. This is a proven scientific fact, and this is why emotional ads work. And what does it mean for you?
Depending on a particular product or service you are selling, your post should invoke certain feelings. It may be the fear of loss, anger, love and care, compassion, confidence, safety, et c. Choose the one that fits your brand. Volvo car brand chose safety as a primary reason to make their buyers consider buying their cars, for example.
What about you?
Positive Emotions Are More Powerful
You generally don’t see brands threaten and frighten their customers, and for a good reason! Naturally, good vibes seem to work and have better virality potential.
The underlying psychological mechanism behind this is social media users’ desire to identify themselves with a certain image, e.g., empowerment, happiness, health. When they hit the share button, they anticipate how the other social media folk will see them consequently.
For example, if I wanted to be seen as a lovely sentimental person, I would repost a cat video.
As for the unusual content, it must be used with great caution. Posts and videos that induce sadness, disgust, or anything else belonging to the negative scale, go viral much less often.
Write in The First Person
There had been a trend in content writing some time ago: never to say “I” or “we” in writing. Why so? Sales content, they said, was not a place for self-opinions and self-expression. So, writing a script or an article, a writer should rather describe a brand.
However, a brand is an abstraction, and it is hard to relate to or feel any emotions towards it.
The tables have turned just recently, and now it is actually trendy to voice out opinions and personal experiences.
Don’t be afraid to show your personality in writing. Either in the form of storytelling or a little author’s side note, it makes readers feel that there is a fellow human on the other side.
Add Value to Your Posts
Whenever possible, share a piece of valuable information with your readers. It must refer to your niche, of course. Share some insider information, useful tips, predictions, and technical details: anything that can spark interest will do.
At least, your reader should be sure that they will not finish reading your post-empty-handed.
Make it interesting and entertaining so the audience will learn something new every time.
Don’t Push a Product Down the Reader’s Throat
A sales pitch is the killer of virality potential. Whenever you encounter it in an otherwise perfect piece of writing, it makes you feel nauseated, doesn’t it?
The blogs and vlogs of many successful companies look rather like life updates, not advertisements. Social media users are particularly sensitive to ad-like content; after all, their favorite social media is a place to chat and chill. They hate it when it starts to look like a supermarket.
That said, treat your audience as neighbors and friends. Make your account a place for dialogue, not self-indulgent promotion.
Everybody writes that their product is “awesome” or “amazing.” These words don’t impress potential customers anymore. Moreover, they turn them away.
Show and Tell
Pictures are easier to digest than text. According to some estimations, humans receive up to 95% of their surroundings through sight. So if your purpose is to convey a complex idea, an emotion, or just a load of facts, a wall of text just won’t do.
Instagram, for one example, is a social media that deals almost exclusively with visual content. This platform had become popular among entrepreneurs almost immediately after its appearance for a good reason: photos are more impressive than plain text blog articles and short stories and even more impressive than photos.
So, if it is possible to put your idea or emotion into a single picture, do it. If you need to layout a lot of technical information that fits into a 10,000-word long-read (and no less), make sure to give the reader a break: spice up the text with diagrams, infographics, or just any photos that relate to the content.
The real, freshly taken photos are best. If for any reason, you cannot publish the photos you took yourself, stock images will do.
Deception Will Do No Good
I bet you have encountered the kind of sugary writing that looks like this: “Our product is rated 9.99 stars of out 10…” which is just too good to be true. Why do writers still over exaggerate the positive features of the product they write about? Oftentimes, because marketers suggest it. And why do marketers suggest it? Because it works!
The wonders of placebo-effect were discovered about three hundred years ago. As you make a customer believe in your product’s wonderful qualities, their expectations will indeed endow the product with the said qualities; however, be careful!
An attentive customer who discovers the factual truth may just throw a lawsuit against you—losing trust matters as much as a huge financial penalty in the long run.
Don’t Skip Brainstorming and Drafting
When working on a project alone (be it a post, a video, a film, anything), one often thinks too high of their creation. There is no way to know whether or not the audience is going to like the creation, which is why it is so important to pour out a few different ideas into a draft and leave it be for a time.
Return to it in at least one hour and see how your perspective changes when you give it a fresh look. If you have plenty of time before publishing, it is better to leave your future content alone for a week.
This technique allows you to partially disillusion yourself from the impression that your creation is going to hit the top spot in whatever chart you are aiming for.
Besides, outright bad ideas will thus get filtered out quite easily while the bring ones will get their chance for enrichment and elaboration.
Use References and Give Credits
Referencing another great author so that your audience may read their content in full is not something that steals your own fame from you. On the other hand, it adds to your credibility. Think about it: one day, they may just link you back as a sign of goodwill and appreciation of your content. Asking to be mentioned in return is another common practice. It may be exactly what brings you tons of traffic the other day.
Here’s an extra negative motivation. When your readers notice you quoting another niche professional word-by-word without referencing them, you may lose a significant part of the audience forever.
If making properly formatted quotes is bothering you, plenty of software tools and services can help.
Proofread
You want to write professionally because professional writing evokes the right state in the reader, while amateur writing doesn’t. And professional writing involves proofreading.
If the readers have a reason to ridicule your content because of a silly typo, the content is unlikely to go viral. Even if it does, it will be hard to take it seriously unless the mistake is eliminated in time.
There is no doubt that your time is precious, and proofreading does not always fit into the schedule. Nonetheless, considering the importance of clean writing, Assignment Partner is there to proofread as many pages as you need.
Keep Working on a Post After the Publish
Letting people know that you have released a new terrific post increases its audience. I assume that you have used the synchronization feature to the full: some platforms provide it from the start. Otherwise, you would have to use third-party software.
Now that you know that people on multiple platforms (including email) will be notified about the release of your post make sure that it will look as it was meant to. Unfortunately, reposting means not always perfect: they ignore the text markup, don’t copy the images, or otherwise alter the original content. For this reason, you need to take a final look at the post after publishing or better test it locally before publishing.
It does not mean that you are free to forget about the post immediately after the above-mentioned procedures. Quite on the contrary, keep an eye on the comment section (either yourself or with the help of a trusty companion) and run automated plagiarism detection checks to see if someone has copied your content without referencing.
Focus on the Process Rather than on the Result
Although it sounds like a useless philosophical postulate, such an attitude will help you to stay optimistic if your content doesn’t hit the spot.
Working on great content is hard. The fact that your readers may give your post a cold welcome can be really devastating, but hey, there’s no magic pill to make all pieces of content work wonders! Fortunately, just paying for high-quality texts are so simple on https://sharpessay.com/pay-for-essay.
Here is how to deal with the situation if the result is far from the desired: consider the experience in the future, don’t give up on that post and keep linking and updating it when possible, and focus on the next great read!