There are 4 ways to make your blog posts go viral.
Are you a blogger concerned about getting more traffic? Would you like to see your readership grow? On the other hand, with so many other blogs to choose from, are you concerned about falling stats?
The answer is clearly finding a way to get your blog post to go viral so that you can see your traffic, and hopefully your readership, increase.
Viral means writing a post that gets an unusually high response.
I was just beginning to blog when I started reading articles about the best way to do it. After all, you do something, you should do it right, I always say. The advice I read explained it was good to start a headline with a number. (Did you notice this post’s headline?) I had read my friend’s book about being a perfect parent. My daughter said I couldn’t be perfect; I explained in my post 3 Lies Your Children Tell that I disagreed with my friend–parents shouldn’t have to be perfect.
As a new blogger, I was surprised to see the page views on that post grew increasingly higher by the day. People still read it; it still gets traffic. Although the comments were minimal, people were, and still are, definitely reading my post.
Rationale: The beauty of the post was in the headline. Parents wanted to know what the three lies were, and if their children were telling it to them.
A friend of mine talked me through how to install Google Analytics. To my delight, I found myself on the first page of Google repeatedly. (I still do–I say with much pride. The screenshot below shows me on the front page of Google within the week.) I was so excited that I wrote How to Increase Your Blog Traffic Using Google Analytics. This, 4 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral, is my 100th post. (Do I get a plant?) Out of 100 posts, …Google Analytics has the second highest page views of anything I’ve written.
The post explaining how I got on the front page of Google Analytics went viral.
Rationale: Readers like to learn something new. They were unfamiliar with Google Analytics. According to the definition, the post went “viral” and many new subscribers followed.
Write an Expert Round Up Post
I spent many hours compiling the information for How to Be a Successful Blogger: 19 Experts Share Their Secrets. Was it worth the time? Absolutely. I just wrote it within the week, and it is already my top performing post!
My readers that blog write about different themes. Find well-respected bloggers in your niche. Write them on their social media. Ask them just one question; most people have time to answer one question. It should be a question your readers want to know. I asked, if you could only give one piece of advice to bloggers, what would it be and why?
To my delight, not only did the experts disagree with each other, but my readers and I have spent the week debating the answer as well.
Rationale: Find out what your readers want, and get them the answer from knowledgeable people in your niche.
I recently published The Great Blogger Hoax in which I explained how helpful bloggers have been to me. I was told to ask twice as many experts as I wanted in my interview since half would say no. However, not one person refused to answer my interview question.
I inserted links to their websites, so they would get notified that they were included in my interview. They shared it on all their social media and retweeted it. Jason Cushman, one of the experts I interviewed, reblogged it, and then turned off comments on his site and instructed his readers to comment on my site, so I would get the traffic.
The adrenaline rush I had every time I heard the WordPress bell ping you can have too.
If you think others would love to have their blog posts go viral, please share.
Readers, have you had unusual success with a post? Please share what your experiences were so that the rest of us can learn from you.
