When a blogger’s post goes viral, the blog is placed in a class apart from others. There are other spectacular benefits as well, such as traffic, enhanced visibility and the recognition that comes from fame. How do you make your post go viral? Try one of our following proven strategies.
(*) Get The Most Out Of Every Post
1. Identify Your Target Audience
This is the very first thing you do as a blogger. Know who your audience is and where to find them. Tailor your content for your target audience and you’re a winner.
2. Simplify Your Subscription Options
Put your RSS subscription button prominently on every page on your blog, in your email signature, in your newsletters and so on. Keep the subscription form simple as well.
3. Monitor Your Subscriptions
Use tools such as FeedBurner, Google Analytics and Mint to keep an eye on your RSS readership; focus on increasing subscriptions every week.
4. Keep Up With Live Blog Stats
All new posts have a ‘hot’ shelf life of 24 hours. Live stats help you know what’s working and what’s not. Plus, in 25 hours you can do a lot to increase your post’s popularity.
(*) Stay On Top Of SEO
5. Do Keyword Research
Use Technorati to search for your audience-specific keywords. This will help you get the content topics that’ll appeal to your target audience.
6. Use Your Own Domain
Don’t set up your blog under a sub-domain. Either put up your blog as a sub-page under your company’s domain, or get your own domain.
(*) Practice Viral Content Strategies
7. Be The First To Break The News
Create news alerts using Google News, RSS feeds and Yahoo News! Take the latest news feeds, include your personal opinion to it and be the first to share. Over time readers will rely on your blog to know what’s cooking.
8. Create Valuable Resources
Create resource pages where readers can find helpful tips, tutorials, white papers, lists of great resourceful URLs and so on. Save time for your readers and be a one-stop-shop for all their information needs.
9. Make It Personal
Your readers must know you as a warm, giving person who really cares. Use personal and family pics, write a great About Me page and relate to your audience as a real person.
10. Write Creatively And Innovatively
You can take any topic and write about it but make sure your posts are funny, creative, interesting and different from others.
11. Interact
Sponsor contests, conduct polls and surveys and initiate discussions to get reader interaction going. Focus on building relationships through your blog and social media.
11. Link Your Posts
Make sure readers can easily find old, related posts via cleverly placed links on your blog. Work on your blog’s navigation to enable this. Tweet older posts on Twitter so that your articles are disseminated widely.
13. Create SME Branding
Make sure you can answer any question on your space and ensure your Twitter profile shows you as an SME.
14. Know When To Post
Fine comb your blog account stats; find out what time of the day and week your audience reads your posts. Post during those times only.
(*) Practice savvy networking strategies
15. Stay In The Loop
Review other bloggers’ posts, and link to them. Include your opinion and dare to be different, honest and be in disagreement; readers will soon want to check out what you have to say.
16. Know The Players In Your Space
Use Technorati to check high ranking posts, their comments and so on. You can link to posts you write to posts you like and earn backlinks.
(*) Be Social Media Savvy
17. Know Which Sites People Like
Use niche-specific keywords to search through social networking sites to find out what people like. Identify content types that are popular.
18. Know Which Social Media Site Works Best For You
What works better for you? StumbleUpon, Digg, or del.icio.us? Find out where most of your traffic comes from. Don’t rehash winning articles but create similar ones. Experiment and find out what works best on which platform.
(*) Put Viral Twitter Strategies In Place
19. Be An Active Twitterer
Spend some time every day reading top players’ twitter and blog posts. Tweet and re-tweet as required and enjoy the returns.
20. Don’t Forget To Provide A Twitter Button
Put a Twitter button at the bottom of every post you upload. Your chances of going viral on Twitter are much higher.
21. Don’t Forget To Request Tweets
You can ask your readers to tweet the posts they liked in their Twitter networks. Doing this will increase both your Twitter network and your readership.
22. Create Follower Groups
Use the Twellow database to group your Twitter followers based on their interests. This will help you target strategies for individual groups based on their likes and dislikes.
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