How to Make Your Blogposts Go Viral

Okay, got some blog posts written and uploaded and now you want people to see them!  How do you make them go viral?

As mentioned in my last post on How to Prepare Content for Your Blogposts - you must first ensure that the information contained in your post is interesting and of value - so people will WANT to read it and be compelled to share it.  If it's boring, or just all about you, they're not going to be liking or it sharing it.

So assuming that your post IS very interesting and contains valuable info that others would want to read . . .here's 4 great tips to help your post go viral.

1. Share it with Your Customer List

If you haven't already set up a customer email system for contacting your prospects and clients - then I suggest you do so now.  You can't use gmail or outlook for this - these are designed for one-on-one emails - not broadcasting out to lots of people at once.  (Your ISP or hosting service will shut you down if you do this too often).  See our resources page for reviews on email database systems.

How to Make Your Blogposts Go Viral

My automated gardening newsletter

We have set up an automated newsletter template in either mailchimp or aweber for many of our clients and these are a brilliant way to build your relationship with your prospects and clients.  We schedule the newsletter to go out on a regular basis - ie: once a week, every two weeks or every month.  Frequency will depend on your industry and how often you add blogposts to your site.  If you have a big customer list, salesforce or sell products online, then we recommend Infusionsoft - which we use and so do some of our clients.

The template can be branded to match your website, and contains the important information about your company and a call to action.  The exciting part is it contains special codes which go to your website - check to see if you have new posts - then populate the newsletter with the headline, image and summary text of your latest post or posts - with a link through to the whole post.  So if you've added 2 posts to your site since the last time the email newsletter went out - then this edition will contain summaries and links to your latest two posts.

The people in your list(s) - prospects and customers - will receive the newsletter as scheduled, (provided of course you have added new posts since the last edition) and could email it on to their friends - particularly if you encourage them to do so.

The best part is it's all automatic!  You don't have to do anything except keep adding posts to your website regularly. Oh - and of course make sure you have a way of capturing your prospects and customers email addresses into your email database system so they receive this automatically.

Want us to set this up for you?  Check out our Automated Blog Post Newsletter Setup Service.

2. Encourage People to Share via Social Media

Ask your webmaster (or us) to add a social media sharing plugin to your site to make it dead easy for people to share your posts on their favourite social media channels.  There are a number of plugins around that do this well.  We're continuing to experiment with different ones to see which is the best in terms of functionality, load time and non-interference with other plugins.  No clear winner yet!

The plugin we really like that seems to work very well is the one on my site bestjuicytomatoes.com - this is called Socialize.

You'll see another one below this post - which we're still experimenting with - this is called LogIn Radius

Below that is the Social Author Bio WordPress Plugin which adds an author bio box with the author’s avatar with built-in and custom social icons on pages/posts. It is the most configurable author bio box available for WordPress and is great for building your online personal profile.  It integrates with Google+ authorship.   (Google+ authorship helps you to get your avatar to appear in Google search results).  Although this plugin does not facilitate sharing - it does help you gain more followers on your social media sites.

3. Share your Blog Post on Your Social Media Sites

You want as many people as possible to read your blogpost - so promote it where they are!  Once you've installed your social media sharing plugin, use it yourself to share your post onto your FB business page, your LinkedIn news feed, your Twitter account and your Google+ profile or business page - or your favourite bookmarking site like StumbleUpon.

If you've got some interesting images in your post - and you should always include an image or two - install the Pinterest plugin for your favourite browser. These links either take you to the plugin or to training on how to install.

Alternatively - visit one of your social media pages and create an update which links to your new blogpost.  This should automatically bring in the image, headline and some text from your new blogpost.  See example below - before and after. As soon as i pasted the URL to the blogpost - FB automatically brought in the image, headline and opening text. (Notice also I have the option of uploading a different image if I wish to). Once this image and info has appeared, I delete the URL from the update text and clicked Post.  This creates a clean shared post which goes out to all the people who've liked my page.  If they then "like" this update - it's shared with their friends!  And so it can go viral.

How to Make Your Blogposts Go Viral

Creating your Facebook post

How to Make Your Blogposts Go Viral

The published post

Another option for Facebook and Twitter- there are also plugins which automatically add your latest post to your Facebook Page and Twitter feed, every time you hit publish.  These do take a bit of technical setup though - which we can help with.

4. Share Your Post on Ezine Articles

How to Make Your Blogposts Go Viral

The Ezine Articles WordPress plugin

My final tip is to install the Ezine Articles plugin to automatically share your latest post on Ezinearticles.com - the world's largest articles site.

Of course you need to have registered a free account with them in order to do this.  You also need to set up your author's bio and follow their strict guidelines on links, etc.  As a text only service, it won't include your images, but it is worth it. Articles on this site are widely read and shared and also generate good traffic back to your website.

Key Viral Blogpost Take-Aways

  1. Always create valuable, interesting content with a call to action
  2. Promote your blogposts yourself by email, social media and ezine articles
  3. Make it easy for others to share your posts via email and social media

There's also plenty more ways to make your blogposts go viral.

Want Help?

The initial setup can be a little tricky, but once it's done you're laughing.  Sharing is the easy part.  Please shoot us an email or give us a call on 1300 554 495 if you'd like us to set your site up properly to enable sharing using any or all of the above methods.

 

Avatar for Annette Welsford

About Annette Welsford

Hi there. My passion is to inspire and help business owners to create the type of marketing and customer service that makes their business irresistible. I'm privileged to have a talented team at Commonsense Marketing who create and execute beautiful websites, engaging social media campaigns, and fantastic email campaigns that deliver results for our clients. And it's wonderful that many of them have said lots of nice things about the work we’ve done (see our case studies). We love to work with the owners and teams of small to medium sized business who are motivated to become the best in their niche and achieve more than they ever thought possible.

1 Comment

  1. Avatar for Francesca Francesca on March 30, 2017 at 4:40 pm

    Social media marketing can be a game changer when it comes to making your blogs go viral….