Viral Content or The All-In-One Move: When There Is No Time For Link Building
There are many ways of link building, such as linkbait and building Private Blog Networks. Nevertheless, they all take time and sometimes serious investments. Is there really no way to get around the difficulties and make one but a well-timed leap to acquire external link mass? It turns out you can by creating viral content. We will talk about what it is, how it works, and how to make a link go viral.
What Is Viral Content?
So what does viral content mean? In essence, this is content that rapidly spreads from one user to another. It is important that the content is shared by representatives of the target audience of the promoted web resource.
Usually, hot news, recipes, tutorials, or aesthetically attractive video material act as viral content. Analytics and statistics often fall under the category of viral content. In general, everything that has a verified origin and is confirmed by independent expert instances.
Why is viral content creation a worthy alternative to traditional link building?
Viral content can deliver the same results in days as PBN. This can be expensive. The creation of viral content is not an easy task, it will take a lot of effort to solve it. We will simplify your work a little by offering a small tutorial.
Steps on the Path to Creating Viral Content
How do you make something go viral? There is no universal recipe, but there are steps that will push you to the right train of thought.
Finding a trend
First of all, you need to determine the trend. Now, the top positions are occupied by the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic and everyone is actively using it. This includes everyone from online cosmetics stores to business card websites of IT companies. The American rap singer and viral blogger Cardi, continued the popular song and dance challenge against the pandemic in TikTok with her exclamation “Coronavirus!” distinguishing herself in this area.
Six months ago, the most popular viral content was dedicated to the end of the world. The Internet was full of shocking headlines related to the collision of the Earth with the mysterious planet Nibiru and with the end of the Mayan calendar a few years earlier. This was also unspoken evidence of the Apocalypse. From this, we can conclude that alarming news works without fail.
However, this does not mean that there is no other option to do something viral. At one time, the Internet was swept by a wave of everything related to the culture of the 90s and the name of Kurt Cobain began to appear in numerous keywords.
In recent years, Internet users are looking for something cute on viral sites such as cats, unicorns, pandas, etc.
Choose the genre that is most relevant to your audience and move on to the next step.
Choosing the right format for feeding
To make the content go viral, you will need to use at least one of the following formats:
- Infographics
- Videos. Here’s a great August selection of viral videos for ideas:
- Memes
- Statistics
- Quotes from opinion leaders
As for the article itself, users like life hacks, global forecasts for the future, tutorials, DIYs, shock content, and something either very funny or very cute tend to go viral.
Coming up with a shock title
The headline should contain not only a high-frequency key request but also challenge the reader.
For example, one and the same news, “two lion cubs were born in the London Zoo” can be presented in different ways. “London Zoo is happy to be replenished: two lion cubs were born”, and “London is shaken by the appearance of new predators: can we sleep peacefully?”
Make a few versions of the headlines, and keep the best one.
Making text and visual content as catchy as possible
Do not forget that the material should be attractive due to its content, novelty, and visual perception. Usually, special attention is paid to fonts (serif fonts are less readable), the arrangement of text blocks, pictures, and other nuances.
The main thing here is not to go to extremes when every paragraph is followed by an unfunny meme and the headings are rippling with animation.
We post the article on the site and wait
The first results should appear after one or two weeks. If you did manage to create a viral link, then i you will receive a solid increase in backlinks from relevant sources in a few days.
What Tools Can Be Used To Assess Virality?
In order to assess how correct the idea of viral content turned out to be, it is enough to upload a link to the page of your website where the relevant material was uploaded, to services like:
- Semrush
- SERPStat
- Moz
- Majestic
They all work according to the same scheme, in the corresponding analytics tab, when the link is loaded, they determine the number of backlinks. Some of the presented tools do this at a certain time interval. Therefore, focus on convenience and an optimal tariff plan.
Successful Example of Viral Content
We propose to consider an article on one of the burning topics – the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we know, only the lazy did not write about the rapid spread of the virus today. Therefore, in order to break into this niche and create truly unique content, its authors need to look at the subject of discussion from non-standard angles. The notorious virus was compared with the Spanish flu pandemic from 1918 to 1920 claimed the lives of more than 50 million people throughout Europe.
So what do we see in this article that made it go viral and brought in nearly 9.3K backlinks?
At the very first glance at the article, the expert approach of its author catches the eye. Indeed, the article turned out to be scientific. There are graphs, photos, links to authoritative sources, statistics, and references to historical events. It looks like the authors used really validated data.
The effect of expertise is enhanced by the famous name of the main reviewer of the article, Jessica Pickett, Ph.D., the chief consultant at Tomorrow Global, LLC.
However, the “trick” of the article which becomes viral is that the article was published on June 4, 2020, namely at a time when the hype about fear of infection subsided somewhat due to the beginning of the summer season in the Northern Hemisphere. Panic began among those whose financial condition was undermined by the pandemic. The Internet was overtaken by a new, “fresh” wave of concerned people trying to find out at least something about the long-term forecasts of the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
If virus infection of heads of state and their deputies, recipes of antiseptics with their own hands, and expert opinions of doctors about the usefulness of wearing masks, by the beginning of summer people were eager to receive predictions about the duration of the quarantine, due to the massive loss of jobs and the devastation of family budgets.
The deliberately negative flair of the “predictions” made up added fuel to the fire because alarming news spreads quickly. That’s the whole secret of success.
As you can see, viral content can bring a web resource to the top of search results in a matter of days. The main thing is to understand what can hook your target audience. Another thing is that it is not so easy to stand out as something against the background of tens of terabytes of information noise.
Do you have any experience in creating a viral site? Was there any secret on the way to idea generation? Share your story with our readers in the comments below!
