The internet is an enormous place of websites with huge amounts of content. The question is: how do you get your content noticed? More importantly, how do you get it to go viral?
There is no such thing as magic bullet. Even the most seasoned copywriters are constantly tweaking and re-tweaking their content to ensure it has the “Wow!” viral factor. However, there are some essential ingredients that should be incorporated into every piece of your content to ensure that is has a very real possibility of going viral. Here are some important factors that your content should have to give it the best chance of spreading virally:
1. The Length of Content and Its Ability to Go Viral
Length is one of the most important elements to go viral. Essentially, long articles tend to be shared more. In fact, sheer word count was more closely correlated with sharing than any other variable examined. The point here is to make sure that the quality is not forsaken for length. For content to go viral both quality and length must be incorporated.
2. Make Your Content Easy to Skim
Only 20% of the content that we view on a daily basis online is actually read. The takeaway from this is to make sure that your most important content is in that top 20%. If only some content will be noticed by your readers, then why waste your time? Your content should be easy to read. The main points need to be clear and concise and interesting. People like little bits of information.
3. Catchy Language is Essential
If the content is full of boring words, your readers will ignore it. Don’t underestimate the power of words when you are writing or creating a compelling piece of content. They are your main arsenal when you deal with compelling and interesting content.
4. Including Sharing Buttons to Increase Your Traffic
This seems so obvious. According to a recent study performed by BrightEdge Technologies, the homepages of nearly half (46.4%) of the top 10,000 websites studied had no social links or plugins installed.The study also found that more websites are adding sharing buttons, and they can see up to seven times the mentions as a result.
It is also important to make the sharing of your content as easy as possible for your viewers. If you don’t, the chance of your content being shared and going viral will decrease. If you operate on a WordPress platform there are several plugins, you can use that offer sharing capability. Pick one that works for you and install it to increase the ability of your post to go viral. It’s also important to offer the sharing capability on the side of or on top of each post, as well as at the bottom.
5. Use Persuasion in Your Titles
No one wants to miss out on anything. If human beings feel like they may be missing out on something, then they are more than likely to take a minute and skim through your content. Therefore, it goes without saying that your titles must be persuasive and appealing.
The scarcity and fear of missing out will get people to click on a piece of content. In fact, using a negative in your title – “stop,” “avoid,” “don’t” and similar words – always performs better. Therefore, when writing your titles, consider incorporating persuasive phrases.
6. Inspirational
Highly emotional feelings like awe, anger, and anxiety are more likely to be shared than sadness. So it would be beneficial, for the sake of the viral factor, to inspire these feelings for your readers. Depending on your brand and your ability to deal with controversial pieces that inspire an emotion like anger, you may want to stick to the “awe” factor. This can be done in a variety of ways but the easiest thing to do when exploring a topic is to ask yourself if it has the “awe” factor. Research this by asking questions on Social Media mediums like Facebook and Twitter. Then take your feedback and play with it.
7. Show Your “Care”
Write a content that implying your attention and interest toward the readers. It is the innate nature of people to want to feel like you care about who they are, what they think, and how they feel. If your content screams, “I care about you!” then you have a winner.
In order for this to work, you have to be passionate about the topic, and you have to genuinely care about the impact that it will make on your readers. In order to develop this skill in writing or speaking, practice makes perfect. Study content that has both gone viral and makes you feel like the author cares about you, and use what you learn.