Let’s face it, both good and bad publicity can help bring a lot of attention and traffic to your website. However, as a business, good publicity is what you need. Publicity that will make your target market flock to your website and lead to extra sales. Creating Viral content achieves this.
From the word itself, viral content is like a virus. It spreads from person to person. In the online world, this means your content or marketing message being shared and talked about by people. Examples of great viral marketing are the Old Spice Video (link to YouTube Video) and the Coca Cola Share promotion (have a photo of some coke cans with names). Even on a smaller scale, any business can benefit from creating viral content. Here are some tips to help make your content viral:
- Be unique and original! – This may be a simple statement but being unique can do wonders. For example, if you have a page about your business which is similar to what other companies offer. Think of how you can make that certain page different. Perhaps make it funny, controversial or simply add valuable info, something that people will want to show their friends or family.
- Have a catchy title – You might only have 1 second to grab their attention. Make your titles catchy but still relevant to the message you want to send out.
- Seek opinions and test it – Try to seek opinions from other people especially people or groups involved in that market or industry. Find out if they found it valuable and worth sharing or better still, see if they actually do share it. Who knows, they might have some great feedback that helps you improve the message.
- Know the latest trends – If a certain issue is hot, it would certainly be worth writing about. Timing can be very important with these viral messages because no-one wants to share last years news.
- Borrow Ideas – Obviously, as with the first tip, you should never copy others, this often does more harm than good. But if something works well in other markets, look at how you might apply similar ideas to your industry. Looking at what hot topics or viral messages are being shared on online news websites and social media sites like Digg and Reddit can give you great ideas for how to present your message.
- Don’t give up – Just try and try! If one method doesn’t work, try another. There is no science to it, you will never know what works until you try. Viral content is a combination of interesting quality content and a bit of luck. Keep on creating quality content and it will increase the chances of your content going viral.
