MAKE Viral Content
At some point, you’ve probably heard about how important it is to use viral content to promote your blog. You’ve probably heard about how one report or video went viral and ended up eating thousands even hundreds of thousands of people.

In practice, making something go “viral” isn’t impossible, but it’s much harder than you might imagine after talking to the average Internet marketer.

In the rest of part 4, I will explain in detail the 5 essential steps you must take if you truly want your viral campaigns to be successful.

Step #1: Do Your Homework

The most important part of any viral marketing campaign is to do your homework. This usually consists of doing two things:

1.    Find out what made other viral campaigns in your niche successful. You’ll probably find that successful viral campaigns in your niche have some or all of these qualities:

->    The viral content in question is completely free to access.
->    The content is funny or controversial.
->    The content doesn’t seem like an overt attempt to sell a product.
->    The content is related to a current event or some important trend.

Additionally, there may be other important characteristics of viral content in your particular niche. For this reason, it is important (as the section title suggests) to do your homework.

Find out what it is that people in your niche will go wild for and will repost in other places.

2.    Find out what it is that might go viral in your niche now. For instance, people in your niche might be willing to tell their friends about some or all of the following things:

->    A step-by-step guide for something that everyone could benefit from doing, but can’t quite figure out how to do it correctly.
->    A funny video that contains inside jokes about your niche.
->    A free, 10-page guide that details a single money-making or marketing strategy that almost no one knows about.

Combining these two things, you can begin to think about good viral content topics.

Step #2: Pick Your Platform

Now that you have some viral content ideas in mind, it is important to start thinking about the platform you will use to launch your campaign. For instance, will you:

->    Create a viral video and post it on YouTube?
->    Create a viral report and give it away through your blog?
->    Create a rebrandable ebook and give it away to others for free?
->    Use your affiliate page to distribute your viral reports?

These are all important questions to ask and to answer.

Before you can go any further with the product-planning phase, you must know what types of products you must create; and what platforms you believe will be best for implementing them.

Step #3: Come Up with a Traffic Generation Plan

If you haven’t yet figured it out yet, it is critical that you determine how your proposed viral product will translate into traffic for your blog.

If you cannot do this now, it is unlikely that your product will do this by chance.

Here are some things you may want to do to ensure that your efforts generate traffic:

->    Include permanent links in your rebrandable ebook that cannot be changed. These should either point directly at your blog or at your product pages.

->    On your YouTube bio page, include a link to your blog. Also, at the bottom at each video and at the end of each video, include the URL of your blog, so that viewers know where to go.

->    If you give away free reports, include multiple links to your blog to capture traffic from all those who read it.

Step #4: Implement Your Plan

At this point, you know what type of product you’re going to create, what platform you will use, and how you will use it to generate traffic.

All you have to do now is create that viral content and then market it.

Of course, the content-creation part can be tricky. If you’re not a good video producer or writer, you might feel very limited in your options.

If this is the case, you should consider using a writer or producer from http://www.elance.com, http://www.guru.com or http://www.rentacoder.com. At one of these sites, you should be able to find a professional who can create your content at a reasonable price.

Step #5: Launch Your Viral Content

The point of a viral marketing campaign is that it promotes itself; however, if you don’t prime the pump and get at least a few people to look at your content then this process simply cannot get started.

For this reason, you should spend some time promoting your viral content through your blog and any websites you own. You should also consider sending a small stream of PPC traffic to it and commenting about it on forums and on blogs.

Once a sufficiently large group of people get access to your content, it should begin to promote itself if it is truly viral. Otherwise, you may need to discard that campaign and try a new viral piece of content.

Conclusion

Viral marketing campaigns are often hit or miss.

Either you get things right and the content promotes itself (and, your blog, in turn) or you get no traffic out of the deal; and simply need to move on.

However, there is a set of best practice guidelines you can follow to ensure that you maximize your chances of achieving success.

So follow what I have outlined above, remain patient, be flexible, and you should see your results improve over time.

Related Blog Articles

• How To Find Ideas That Create A Viral Facebook Following (web-workathome.com)
• Tips On Promoting Your Website (lazerpromotions.com)
• How To Turn Your Website’s Video Player Into A Cash Making Machine (ronmedlin.com)
• Using Viral Marketing to Build Links (mikemoran.com)