Want to use Viral Marketing to make your Blog viral? Today’s article provides insight into this. The fact is that people discuss brands all the time. According to Smart Insights, typical American mentions a brand’s name 9 out of 10 times a day in online and offline conversations.
This roughly equals to around 3.3 billion brand mentions every day. Word-of-mouth is the most common way to share information about preferred brands and brand-related experiences.
So, what is needed to make people talk about a brand?
That’s a question for viral marketing. Essentially, viral marketing uses social media platforms for promotional purposes. What makes viral marketing different from other marketing strategies is the way a message is spread on a given social media platform.
Viral marketing is employed when a brand wants a message to be spread as fast as possible, which is often compared to the way how fast a virus spreads from one person to another.
Do you remember Ellen DeGeneres’s tweet from Oscars back in 2014? The tweet broke the record within a few hours, with people making 254,644 tweets about it per minute. As a result, that tweet has over 3 million retweets and over 2 million likes. This tweet is a perfect example of how viral marketing works.
But what about promoting a blog?
A great thing about viral marketing is that it can help you spread any type of message. So it can potentially be a very good strategy for promoting your blog, as long as the message that you want to spread is created according to the rules of viral marketing.
So What Makes a Blog Post Viral?
1. Positive Vibes
It’s a fact that people tend to be more interested in negative news more, although we never confirm this fact. Apart from that, news sources know about this psychological phenomenon, that’s why negative news always dominate the headlines.
Here’s an interesting fact. Not so long ago The Guardian published an article featuring KalevLeetaru, a data scientist, who used the sentiment mining method to analyze every article posted by The New York Times from 1945 to 2005. During this considerable period of time, Kalev was able to find that the news, posted by this source, were predominantly negative, with a very low tendency towards positivity.
So, with so much negativity around, it’s only natural that people would want to run away from it, paying more attention to positive headlines. And, you can use it for your benefit to make your blog post go viral.
Take a look at this. An article posted by AtlantaBlackStar blog about 50 Cent writing a 3$ million check to boost education in low-income communities went viral in just a few hours on Facebook, with over 30K actively sharing it:
Here’s what makes this title so eye-catching:
1. It shares positive news. It’s more common to see negative headlines describing famous people, so this one is a great contrast from what people are used to seeing.
2. It uses a number. Another psychological trick is including a number in a headline. People love seeing numbers in a title because they add credibility to the headline. So, using “3$ million check” instead of “an impressive check” will have a more positive effect.
In terms of viral marketing, positive eye-catching headlines do great, as positive content converts great on social media. Thus, your blog post with a positive headline and social media are a perfect match.
2. Thought-Provoking
Have you ever thought that the seemingly innocent song “Rudolph the Red Nose Raindeer” describes bullying? Think about it for a minute. Interesting, right? This exactly what the article by TheBlaze does – it makes you think about things that you would never think about. That’s why this article went viral:
With almost 300K shares on Facebook, this article is a perfect example of how thought-provoking blog content can go viral.
There’s a bit of a trick about such posts. “What you need to keep in mind before creating a viral message to turn attention to your thought-provoking blog post is that it cannot be a clickbait,” says Martin Parker, a social media manager at Flatfy, sharing his company’s experience with viral marketing. Your main goal is to attract positive attention to your blog, encouraging people to check out your other blog posts as well.
3. Personal Story
People take an interest in the lives of others, it’s our natural behavior. This psychological factor explains a lot about the popularity of social media and the rise of influencer marketing as well. Also, the interest in the lives of others is one of the reasons why vlogging has become so popular over the last few years. Personal stories attract a lot of attention, thus, making this a perfect strategy for viral marketing.
For blog promotion, personal stories do best among other blog posts in terms of attracting viral attention. Just take a look at a blog post by Food and Wine blog:
Although the headline seems silly, this is still a story about a personal experience that, interestingly enough, got a lot of viral attention.
Blog posts describing personal experience attract attention because such headlines already add a lot of credibility to this type of content. Thus, it is guaranteed that your message will spread quickly on social media, helping your blog go viral.
The Bottom Line
Helping your blog go viral isn’t an easy thing to do. With so much content available online, this is your task to create something that will immediately catch the attention of social media users. Hopefully, the examples we provided in this article will help you understand better, how viral marketing for blog promotion works, and inspire you to follow these techniques to help your own blog go viral. So, before you spend a fortune on YouTube ads or Facebook ads, consider these steps.
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