Value Blogging Series: Viral Blogging

Viral Marketing rarely happens by accident. As Malcolm Gladwell would say, it has to reach a tipping point first before it gets picked up eventually spreads like wildfire. The same concept applies for Viral Blogging – or the publishing content that gets passed on by different people across various mediums. Note that there is no sure formula for hitting a home run with Viral Blogging however the tips here that I’ll share will definitely help you increase traffic. In this post I’ll identify what are the important components for Viral Blogging and then share with you case studies based on my personal experience in some of my other blogs. After explaining Viral Blogging, I’ll also share with you some books that you can read which will give you a better understanding of the subject being discussed. These are books that I’ve read and I strongly recommend to everyone.

Components of Viral Blogging
I’ve identified that there are four fundamental components to Viral Blogging. They are:

1. Content Strategy
2. Identifying Influencers or Network Hubs
3. Reaching the Tipping Point
4. Following through

First let’s talk about CONTENT STRATEGY.

Ultimately, the topic of your post has to be RELEVANT. You can’t expect old or passe topics to be interesting because it won’t really catch the wave. Viral Bloggers should have an eye and an ear for trends. One good way is to be up-to-date with the current news and events in your industry or niche. But that will limit your readership and relevance just to your existing market. For you to be really viral, you need to talk about things that matter to everyone. You don’t need to become a current events or political/lifestyle blogger to do this. Find a way to tie in the latest controversy to your niche and write about it.

My best example for this would by Pastor Dennis Sy who blogs at Clueless Church Planter. You’d think that a Pastor would blog only about boring stuff right? But that’s not the case with Pastor Dennis. The reason why his blogs get a good following is because he’s able to relate current events to the bible. For example, he recently wrote about Michael Jordan’s induction to the hall of fame. He even wrote about the infamous Hayden Kho – Katrina Halili controversy.

Your post has to matter for it to spread around. Your observations about the sun can’t spread… well unless you write that balls of fire rained from the sky and destroyed your town.

Which brings me to my other point – Copy Writing. This is a skill that is highly paid for in the advertising agency. It takes a lot of creativity, insight, and research to come up with a product slogan or tag line. Let’s take San Miguel for example. They’ve launched a lot of campaign ads in the past decade but ultimately the line that sticks the most is still “Iba ang may pinag samahan”. The title of your post needs to emotionally connect with your readers. Right now the entire social media world is abuzz with US President Obama calling Kanye West a jackass for what he did to Taylor Swift during the MTV Awards. If Obama called him “improper”, do you think it will generate the same amount of interest?

Here’s a good example. A month ago Happy Feraren wrote on Facebook about how Jamby Madrigal gave away bracelets with her face on it during the memorial service of former President Cory Aquino. I found it really insulting so I decided to write about it. I wrote about it, posted it on my social networks, and sent e-mails and texts to some contacts. Here’s what happened after a week or two:

Another important but often overlooked factor is TIMING of your post. I had a very good conversation with my favorite Mom Blogger, Noemi Dado about this. She shared that if you publish an article before it’s released on tri-media or shortly after, you’ll get a lot of traffic from the search engines. Main reason here is that Filipinos tend to search Google for more details since Television and Radio can say only so much in the little time that they have.

If you’re writing a post and you want it to spread, ask yourself if the topic is interesting, relevant, and if your title is compelling.

Now that we have content strategy out of the way, let’s talk about IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS OR NETWORK HUBS.

Imagine the world as a series of modems and network hubs. There are a lot of cables that connect with one another but there are routers that connect to a lot of other computers. Routers or Network Hubs are people who have the power to reach out to a wider audience. Network Hubs can be bloggers, political leaders, media people, celebrities, party people, trend setters, etc. The pitfall of a lot of bloggers and marketers is that they don’t identify and build relationships with these kinds of people. By not doing so you are just limiting yourself to your own circle or network and this stops your readership from growing at a faster rate.

Whenever I have a really good post, I always make it a point to send out Facebook messages, e-mails, and SMS to my contacts that I consider as Network Hubs. Sometimes they share it to their network, sometimes they don’t. However I don’t really lose anything if I send them a message right? But I have everything to gain if they do.

As a warning, don’t just spam the hell out of Network Hubs. The moment they see you as spam, they’ll ignore you. Make it a point to always offer value with your articles and don’t send every single article you have to them. It will also help if you build relationships with these people first. Coming out of nowhere will land you… nowhere.

Now that you have your message and you’ve identified your hubs, let’s talk about pushing your content so that you CAN REACH THE TIPPING POINT.

Let me go back to what I said in the first paragraph – Viral Marketing rarely happens by accident. You have to seed and promote your content properly so that it spreads. If the content is good and you promote it properly, that’s the time where it will take a life of it’s own and explode from online to traditional media. You might even get a call from TV stations asking for interviews.

So the question is – how do you reach the tipping point?

There are a lot of tools at your disposal. Most of them are even for free. Let me tackle some of them in detail.

Social Network Marketing
E-mail Marketing
SMS Marketing
Forum & Community Marketing

Let’s start with Social Network Marketing. First things first though. If you’re not regularly updating and adding contacts to your social network accounts then this isn’t for you. If you have like less than 150 friends, then you should focus first on building your network before you leverage it for traffic. Imagine social networks as waves in the beach that you surf on. The bigger your network, the bigger the wave, the bigger the reach!

For Social Networking, it’s pretty simple. You can set-up your account to aggregate content from your blogs. A more effective approach though would be to actually post it as a note and tag NETWORK HUBS or send them as messages so that you can get their attention. You might also want to consider adding a call-to-action at the end asking them to pass it to others if they find it interesting. You can use this for all major social media in the Philippines – Facebook, Friendster, Plurk, Multiply, and Twitter.

If you have a really good post, you might also want to consider direct marketing it at a small cost like sending out SMS messages to your contacts. This works well if your content matches the industry or interests of your contacts.

Don’t believe in the power of social media? Then let me share with you a screenshot of my Google Analytics for one of my blogs.

In a couple of weeks, Facebook delivered more than 20,000+ views to my blog, Plurk gave around 1,000+, and Twitter delivered 604+. What’s great about this kind of traffic is that the people are genuinely interested in reading what I have to say.

Last, we have FOLLOWING THROUGH.

Viral Blogging is not about one-hit wonders. It’s a style of blogging so that you can generate the maximum buzz and interest for your site. It’s not just all about search engines anymore with the advent of Social Media. You’ll have a lot of hits and misses in blogging and this is no exception. However like what I said above, you’ll still get new traffic and you get to build your readership by using this style.

This kind of blogging is just like dropping bombs. Some posts are grenades wherein you can blow up a room. Some viral posts are like dynamite, which can decimate mine shafts. Every now and then you’ll have one that can turn into an atom bomb and level a city.

The reach varies, but the underlying effect is the same: you grow your readership.

To summarize, always ask yourself these questions when you plan on making a Viral Blog Post:

1. Is the topic relevant?
2. Is the title compelling?
3. Who will I inform about this post?
4. Did I properly promote it on my social networks?
5. What’s the next post that I can write about?

And that’s a wrap for the first post. Bombs away people.

RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin
3. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
4. The Purple Cow by Seth Godin

For the next post in the series, I’ll be writing about a very controversial, interesting, and powerful topic: How to Really Make Money from Blogging.