Have you been blogging a lot but don’t get much attention? If yes, you aren’t creating viral content.
You know people BLOG every day to get more traffic? And since October 2006, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of blogs and posts on a single day.
In October 2016, around 65.3 million posts were produced all over the globe. But, sadly, not enough comments could garner these blogs 🙁
When blogging was rare, people didn’t like to comment very often. Then there’s a violent increase. And July 2013 and April 2015 were the top-comment-producing months. But, this trend is again declining, with some better months occasionally. In October 2016, comments reached around 45.33 million. This figure seems exciting. But, compare this with 65.3 million posts in a month (see above).
You’d be asking – why such sudden decline when posts are rising?
The shrinking of comments could be many. However, one of the most dominant reason is – a non-viral content.
A viral content isn’t a unique content. You can’t always come up with a new idea. You can’t be Christopher Columbus all the time. But, you can find something new, something exciting to share. And creating viral content would attract more interactions with your audience.
In this blog, we’ll be learning to create viral content for your readers. Here are 5 of the tips which you’d use yourself to make a viral content:
Before explaining tips to generate content ideas let me ask you one question:
Why do YOU blog?
Share your answer(s) in the comment section. I’ll also reply mine, over there.
Generating content ideas is not easy even when you’re used to blogging. There’ll come a time when you’ll feel as if you’re all out of ideas. You may think that you’ve written all that you know. And you’d be right. But, don’t forget that you’re a writer, and writers are creative beings. Even if you’ve written everything you knew, you still can restructure the old pieces and create a new one. Consider this as the basis of generating content ideas.
Blogging isn’t for Googlebots. Your target audience is – humans, the real readers. So, you must write for them, and to write for them, you need to know them. So, let’s first know your audience.
If you already have been blogging, you’d have a good idea of your audience. You can trace them through their reactions in the comments section or you could follow them on your social media pages.
But, if you don’t have these or still have no idea who’s going to read your blog, try Quora.
Quora is research place to know what people are looking for. Type your primary keyword in the search field and press enter. For this example, I’ve used blogging tips as my primary keyword. By using Quora, you can get two ideas (a) know who’s going to read your blog (i.e. understand your audience) and (b) what choice of topic(s) you’d have?
To get an idea which topic is more shareable, you can use Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo is a search place to find the best-performing topics.
Type the word or phrase in the search box, hit enter, and you’ll get the results. The results will show some stats relating to your search query. I, again, use the same keyphrase blogging tips. The highest shared content on Twitter gave a result of 4.9k tweets.
As you can see from the search box that I’ve used inverted commas to analyze the specific keyphrase (blogging tips). This works exactly like Google’s search query. You can also filter your search from the panel on the left.
Using Buzzsumo, you’ll get new ideas for your next content. And you can also learn what people like to share on different social media networks. With a tool like this, you’d plan your content wisely.
When you’re writing for your online audience, you’ll have to be smarter. You need to do a lot of research when planning your next content.
Ubersuggest is one more tool giving you the opportunity to learn more about your target audience and about generating new content ideas.
Unlike Buzzsumo, Ubersuggest gives you 3 sources of information – Google search results, Google Trends, and keyword suggestions.
Again, blogging tips is my keyword of selection. There’s a continuous up and down in the trend, as shown by Google Trends Data. But people are still looking for blogging tips.
From the drop down menu, you’d get more suggestions based on your selected keyword. And again from the drop down menu you’d get Google Trends and more suggestions.
This gives you a precise way to learn what people are searching and what you’d write about.
Other than Ubersuggest and Buzzsumo, you can also visit different discussion forums, the comments section on your own blog, or follow others and see what they’re writing about and how do readers respond. Try a thorough research before creating viral content!
Imagine, you’re out for shopping. You’re there to buy some pants. But you aren’t sure where to buy and what type of pants would you buy. You peep through a shop-window, look at the pants on the standing mannequin, make a face and move ahead. You do this with few stores and finally, one shop-window make you step in the store and you come out with a pair of those pants.
What made you go in the store is obvious. So, can you do this with your blog?
Yes, you can. For a blog, your headline can act as a shop-window. They can either make readers come to your blog or make them move forward.
According to a research, 8 out of 10 readers will move ahead without reading your blog. You don’t want this. But, you can reverse this order by creating a headline which makes the reader click on your blog, helping your content go viral.
See the below two headlines and share which one you’d go first?
According to another research, a how-to content is not as valuable as a content with digits or something to offer.
Would you go back to the headline of this blog? Did you find any adjective?
It sounds better with the word promising, doesn’t it? You can do the same with your headlines and make them more nourishing.
Remember, there are more than these 3 ways to creating a great headline. We’ll discuss them some other time, in detail.
Now that you’ve done two major parts of blogging (knowing your audience and creating great headlines), it’s time to research. Whatever you’re about to write, you must have a good knowledge of it before educating others. Read as many blogs as you can and make points. Interview celebrities if you must. Go to an event and write your own story and be the pioneer in publishing it. But, there is one more thing you need to decide before writing – your tone. Your tone matters a lot. It can garner your content or could make the readers go away.
How to choose your tone?
Say, for example, you blog for a newspaper. Obviously, your tone and style would be close to news writing. But what if you plan to write for a technology-based magazine? You can’t use the news writer’s style and tone. You need to adapt the style and tone of a technology-based writer.
This part is not a necessity but a fruitful method to make your content more engaging. If you’d impress one reader, perhaps he’ll forward your content to his friends or share it publicly. This could help your content go viral.
One more tip to add here – build a story around your idea. Like, if you’ve done a research yourself, you’d share the story with the steps you’d taken. The more exciting your content is, the more people will read it.
People are full of emotions. The love to cry, to laugh, to amuse and so on. According to the chart above, Awe is the most scoring emotion with a share of 25%. Laughter is on second number (17%) and amusement, on third (15%).
There could be different reasons on which this chart is being drawn. But of them, the very common includes:
According to one research, 8 out 10 content being shared socially is a quiz. So, here you have one more magical tip to creating viral content.
Time to deduce, time to close (not for me).
Farewell or call-to-action statements can become a great part of your strategy of creating viral content. A bogus call-to-action statement can reduce the reach of your content. But I never understood how to use call-to-action statement! Some bloggers use this and some don’t. Seems like a dragging part.
Recently I was reading a research on how to avoid spam comments and it gave me a new idea of closing my content. According to this research, comment spamming can be dealt with. The research recommends adding a question or questions in the comments section, once you’ve written your content. Your questions could invoke the readers to interact. You’ve given them a way to involve in your content. And you already know that the higher the comments, the more popularity it could get in search results.
Summarizing the facts of today’s discussion, we have learned:
Not so bad, right? But these are just 5 of the tips to creating viral content. And there are more to learn.
Have you got some tips for me?
Digital marketing enthusiast and industry professional in Digital technologies, Technology News, Mobile phones, software, gadgets with vast experience in the tech industry, I have a keen interest in technology, News breaking.
