Your Detailed Instructions On How To Create Viral Content

Posted: August 8th, 2009 | Filed under: How-To, Marketing Mediums Comment

With social networks, marketing your product or service has never been as cheap and effective. At the same time, as more and more people start to get on-board to the idea of social network marketing, turning your marketing campaign viral is becoming harder and harder by the second.

Before, we move on to various ways to go viral, lets first define what “going viral” means.

To most people, viral means being seen by millions of people around the net, while that is obviously viral, you do not need that many to successful run a viral marketing campaign. Rather, you want a major influx of targeted visitors that are actually interested in whatever you are promoting.

Now that we got that out of the way, lets look at a couple quality marketing methods to launch a viral campaign…

What Makes Good Viral Ready Content

When it comes to something going viral, it has to usually be unique, different, and funny.

Video – No doubt the source of almost anything that happens to goes viral is video. In fact, video is getting so popular that major companies like Vitamin Water and Nike create high profile videos solely to release online. In most cases, these videos usually require you to have some famous person doing something unusual, doing a spoof, or just something strange and funny.

Lists - Everybody loves awards, praises, or some type of recognition. That being said, the “Best of” lists are some of the best textual pieces to go viral. Create a list of the best people to follow on Twitter for a specific topic or the best blogs to follow.

Resources - People love cheap stuff, especially if cheap means free. Have a killer product or at least on that  gives off the impressions that it would drastically benefit people? Give it away for free or at much lower than the current price. Regardless if your product is good or not, if it seems enticing people will follow.

How To Promote Content To Go Viral

Probably 70% of a successful viral campaign is through some form of luck: either you managed to be in the right place at right time and/or you get somebody more popular or with more reach than you pick up and promote your product. I can say with 100% certainty that 99.95% of content that is simply posted online and left to run, will NEVER go viral.

Creating viral content requires perfect coordination between multiple marketing mediums. The following is a step-by-step example on how to create viral content:

1. Create a video on topic - You will see that most of the Nike viral videos are usually promoting their latest basketball shoes; however, most of the videos either have some sort of joke or exaggerate to what the shoe does. Remember Kobe Bryant jumping over a car? The idea behind the video is to get the viewers to say “What?!?!” and then get them to share the content with others.

2. Post the video - Post it anywhere and everywhere. Upload the video to every media site you know (i.e. YouTube, blip, Vimeo, Viddler). Share your video on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Obviously you want to learn how to increase your Twitter followers before hand. Submit the video to every social bookmarking site you know (i.e. Digg, Delicious, Reddit). Finally, email it. Whether it is though your mailing list, to personal friends and family, or both start the circulation. People love forwarded things in email, so why not get the movement started yourself?

With 6 degrees of separation, you never know who will see your content.

Obviously not everybody wants to or can create videos, so what about the textual content you want to go viral?

1. Mention high authority names – When it comes to sharing textual content, you already limit your marketing choices because you cannot post the content to video sites, so instead we need to try and increase the impact of our social networks. An easy way to do this is to mention high authority names in your article.

If you are creating a list of the top people to follow on twitter for stock trading tips, then name some of the top stock traders on Twitter. People love seeing their names posted on a “best of” list and will almost always retweet or some how link back to your article. Now once their followers see this article promoted by the high authority name, it will instantly give your article more credibility and his or her’s followers are more like to relink your article again.

As you can clearly see, creating viral content requires complete harmony between your individual marketing campaign and the luck of picking up other promoters on the way. What may make one piece of content viral may not work again; however, once your content goes viral make sure you have the overall funnel filter already in place to profit off that traffic. After all, there is no reason to go viral if you cannot end upf selling what you wanted…

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