Viral Website Marketing is Easy!
While the name of the phenomenon makes it seem easy (who can’t catch a cold?!), viral website marketing can actually be a little tricky, once you start getting into it. It doesn’t help that most people don’t have a well-articulated view of what viral marketing actually entails, and exactly what it is about a viral piece that attracts people. They know it when they see it … but nobody can explain it! If you’ve been frustrated by explanations of viral website marketing in the past, and are wondering what all the fuss about social bookmarking is, today we give you a plain-English explanation of what works.
Viral content can fall into several categories.
1. Content that piggybacks a trend or social phenomenon
If you can reference a piece of pop culture, no matter how ephemeral, in your viral website marketing pieces, you will get sooooo many more hits! Sometimes this strategy is turned completely on its head - either extreme works, but it seems that things ‘in the middle’ are less effective at viral website marketing.
2. Content that is timeless, or relates to a long period of time
If our earlier point had been a rule, we would have just broken it! Fortunately both of these points are just to show you the different forms that viral pieces can take. If you create a piece that can legitimately be called ‘The Greatest Ever…’, especially if that thing is a guide or a list, you’ve got viral gold.
3. Comprehensive content
Not everything on viral website marketing channels like social bookmarking sites has to be the biggest, best, greatest or funniest. But little snippets just don’t tend to make the front page of Digg! Be comprehensive; don’t focus only on a niche.
4. Be remarkable, or write about remarkable people and companies
Be remarkably ambitious, remarkably goodwilled, remarkably original, or remarkably generous. Or, create a resource list of people that are!
5. Content that argues a popular point of view
Some excellent examples of this style of viral website marketing content are two Scientific American articles, ‘15 Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense’, and ‘15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense’, both of which spent some time on the most-read list of the website this year. Find out what other people are saying - if you agree with it, do some research to back it up and create content based on it.
