From time to time, a piece of content results in extremely high traffic to your site. However, over time, the traffic levels off to a new normal. Let us delve into how viral content boosts long-term traffic, and how to make it part of your content
marketing strategy:
Before the creation of a piece of content that goes viral, the traffic on your site is usually normal. When you create a viral piece, the traffic shoots for a while and then it drops to a normal. Interestingly, this normal is new. For instance, if your normal views are usually 1000, the new normal might be 2000 views.
How the new normal happens
- Social media
The viral content on social media increases the number of followers or subscribers. These subscribers also share your content as they have realized that it also helps to build their own audiences on social media. This way, you end up having a larger audience.
- RSS and email subscribers
People who read your content become interested in getting similar high value content from you. They therefore subscribe via email resulting in more branded traffic. These people want more content, especially if you expose them to more on your site.
- Bookmark and type in traffic
This type of traffic is based on users who have signed up for accounts on your site. After they have logged in and they go ahead and do a search on various search engines, they will make your site rank higher in their results. Ultimately, your site will rank higher from the increased engagement, shares and links, as the search engine ranks the site as preferred and personalized.
As a marketer, you need to cover all these areas in your content
marketing strategy. Your viral content should not only result in many shares and links, but it should also result in engagement and some conversion. More people should sign up to your site, search for your brand and even that particular piece of content. If your content doesn’t result in these things, then you might experience a faster fall in traffic to a normal.
How to create viral content
How do we get our content to have an impact? Some of the basics include: creating high quality content, and better still a particular type of content, as well as getting to have a deep understanding of our audience.
- Content that will attract influencers
A technique that is crucial in making your content to go viral is creation of content that influencers are likely to be happy to promote and share. Understanding why they promote that particular type of content is also useful.
You need to follow sharers and influencers in your field. This way, you will get to see the type of content that they like to share. You will also get to understand the reasons why they like to share that particular type. Some of the common reasons include:
- It helps them stand out as an authority in their field
- It provides value to their audiences
- It results in many shares, high traffic and engagement on social media
Having a deep understanding behind the reason why influencers share a particular type of content will help you create it, and it will go viral.
- Empathy
When it comes to content creation, you need to have empathy for the consumers of your content. For example, you need to provide a great mobile experience for them, as there are more users on mobile. This means moving beyond responsive design, to packaging content in a way that users can easily interact with it on their mobile phones. You also need to know what puts them off. For instance, promotional messages and pop-ups. Such methods will make content fail to go viral.
- Uniqueness
Uniqueness makes your content to stand out from the rest, making it go viral. It results in more shares when compared to 'normal' or 'usual' content. It must be highly valuable and uniquely packaged.
- A logical balance between promotion and content
For your content to go viral, there needs to be a logical balance between the content itself and its promotion. For instance, if you promote content that is not related to your niche, the users will want to question the logic behind it. While the intention may be purely promotional, the users will begin to get confused and lose faith in your brand. The particular piece of content will not only fail to go viral, but you may lose significant traffic.
- Failure
This may not be a very direct technique, but it is a pivotal part of every content marketing strategy. This is because failure allows you to do an in-depth analysis of what works and what doesn’t. Once you establish what works, you will be ready to create viral content.
- Follow Up
Follow up is a very important part of every content marketing strategy. It helps you to evaluate the kind of content that you are producing, and what works. You must keep on producing more content to ensure that your site always has fresh content. Depending on the size of your business, you can do follow up weekly, monthly or even once or twice a year.
- Community
Having an engaged community around your site, brand, niche or topic area will help give your content the much needed initial momentum for it to go viral. The community need not be very big. Even a community of 100 will go a long way in making your content to go viral.
- Tools
These tools will help you determine whether your ideas of content are worth promoting. BuzzSumo investigates the social popularity of a topic. This helps you to focus on content that can go popular, thus viral. SEMrush investigates the linkability of content. You can search for the content which contains your keywords and ranks well is search engine results.
Conclusion
The discussion above will not only help you to understand how
viral content can boost long-term traffic, but also how you can it make it part of your content marketing strategy. Do you want to have the '
viral effect' on the long-term?
If you have any questions, please let us know in the comment area below. Thank you!
