Once you understand best practices, writing a blog post is really easy.
But making your content go viral is HARD.
Really hard!
Have you ever wondered why even after posting so many articles on your blog, you are still struggling to get more traffic or links?
It might be mainly because your content is NOT good enough.
Your content has to be epic to make it go viral online.
How To Write Blog Posts That Will Likely Go Viral
If you are looking for proven ways to make your blog’s content go viral, I’ve a 5-step plan for you which can help you quickly create outstanding content that creates a lot of buzz online.
Are you curious to know more about it?
Here are 5 simple steps to create epic content.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Coming up with blog post ideas
Every popular post that goes viral online really starts with an idea at first.
Coming up with unique, interesting and valuable blog post ideas is no joke.
It takes a lot of time to brainstorm viral blog post ideas.
If you are struggling what to write next on your blog, let me help you.
Try implementing the following methods and you will find it extremely easy to come up with unlimited number of blog post ideas.
Spy on your competitors
One of the easiest ways to coming up with viral blog post ideas is to spying on your competitors best performing keywords.
Do some keyword research to find out what are the keywords that are generating huge search traffic to your competitor sites and you can add your own unique flavour to them to create content for your blog.
If you are wondering how to find out your competitors best performing keywords or blog posts, try the following ways.
- Popular posts: Almost every blog features their blog posts either at the sidebar, about page or at footer.
This helps you quickly find out the best performing posts on each blog.
Try to analyze 10 to 15 top blogs along with their popular posts and you will come up with dozens of blog post ideas to write about. - SEMrush: SEMrush is widely used SEO tool which allows you to find the best performing keywords of any website.
Just enter your competitor’s URL to find out their top posts.
It can quickly help you come up with lots of highly profitable keywords.
Come up with your own ideas
When you are free, brainstorm post ideas for your own blog.
Take a notepad file and start writing all the questions your audience might have.
That will give you an easy way to come up with lots of informative blog post ideas really quickly.
Try writing about your own mistakes you made along the way, the plugins or tools you use or anything that’s personal which helps you connect with your target audience emotionally.
It’s a great strategy to know your audience pulse and win their hearts.
Use tools
When none of the above methods work, use tools!
Below tools can help you find hundreds of blog post ideas within minutes.
Have a look at them and give a try to them once.
- Portent: Portent is a free tool which gives you unlimited number of blog post ideas.
You just need to enter a keyword and it will give you lots of interesting blog post headlines to write about. - Alltop: Alltop is one of the biggest blog directories that pulls information from all major blogs by showing headlines of their recent 5 blog entries.
Topics ranging from marketing to fitness to education can easily give you lots of blog post ideas to write about!
Step 2: Research
This is where you need to spend most of your time.
Pat Flynn once said, he usually spends around 9 to 10 hours for finishing a post and majority of his time is spent on researching.
If you spend more time on doing research about the content you write about, you can be easily able to write blog posts that go viral quickly.
Few people think they can write blog posts in an hour or two but I just don’t recommended that if you want to grab more traffic and exposure to your content.
By taking more time to research, you can help your audience with killer content along with the detailed information they need to solve their problems.
You can also be easily able to write in-depth content.
If you are blogging for a while, you might already know the fact that detailed content with 2000+ words usually ranks well in Google search results.
So that’s an added advantage of spending quality time on doing research to write great blog posts.
So what are you waiting for?
Next time, do remember to spend more time on research and see the results by yourself!
Related: How many words should a blog post be?
Step 3: Productivity tips for writing quickly
One of the biggest hurdles most bloggers encounter while creating content is they take too much to write.
It’s not bad to spend more time for doing research but you can write blog posts faster if you know few productivity tips.
Here are few incredible writing tips to write really faster.
1. Outline
Once you come up with the blog post ideas to write about, start outlining the post.
Use lots of subheadlines and divide your blog post topic idea into small chunks.
Outlining your content makes it really easy to write blog posts quickly.
2. Get rid of distractions
Turn off all your social media and email notifications.
Declutter your workspace and put your smartphone in silent mode away from your laptop or Mac.
Getting rid of all the distractions is really the key to write quickly.
3. Put a timer
It’s easier to get lost in doing unwanted stuff while writing.
By putting a timer, you are allowing yourself to focus on finishing just one thing i.e writing.
Using a timer like Pomodoro tool can help you work for 25 minutes straight.
Then, you can take a 5 minutes break and again start working on your content.
That’s how most efficient writers and bloggers write faster.
4. Find out your own optimal time for writing
Few people write better at nights and the others love writing at morning.
Some might prefer evenings or even afternoons.
Knowing your own time when you are most creative is the real KEY to writing success.
5. Write first, edit later
Most bloggers have a bad habit of editing while writing.
If you are one among them, stop that practice right now.
It can only kill your precious time.
Don’t think about editing anything while writing.
Just focus on writing.
Once it’s done, you can edit it a thousand times.
Step 4: Strategically name drop others
Make it a habit of linking out to other bloggers frequently.
Not only external linking can improve your SEO (if done right), it also helps you quickly get noticed by other bloggers.
Name-dropping the influential bloggers in your field is an art.
We all know how crucial influential marketing is.
Even one authority blogger is enough to help you boost your blog traffic, subscribers and overall sales.
But… building relationships with the influential bloggers is hard.
Because everyone else in your field is trying to grab their attention.
More importantly, most top bloggers are really busy.
They are busy in creating content, managing their products, reaching out to others and they have so little time to engage and connect with the new bloggers.
One of the best ways to gain their attention is to link out to the frequently.
If you have a new blog, you can surely link to their blog posts often.
But it won’t grab their attention.
What happens when you link out to an influential blogger from a top blog (with your guest posts)?
They will surely be glad to respond to your emails when you say about it or even promote your guest posts to their audience.
That’s how you build connections with the authority bloggers with your guest posts.
It works like a charm and make sure to name-drop others from your guest posts not only to grab their attention but to build a connection with them.
Step 5: The secret sauce to make your content go viral is to promote!
Derek Halpern says about his secret formula for building his million dollar blog Social Triggers that he spends 80% of the time in promoting his content and the remaining 20% in creating it.
Most bloggers do this completely opposite.
They spend 80% of their time in creating content and 20% in promoting it.
So if you want to make your blog posts go viral, promote the hell out of them.
Here are few effective ways to promote your blog’s content to reach wider audience.
1. Repurpose your content
Repurposing your blog’s content is the quickest, smartest and better way to make it go viral online.
Repurposing your content can help you get more exposure to your blog without posting any new content.
Here are few ways to repurpose your existing content.
Create slideshares
Slideshare is one of the biggest marketing platform and can send you thousands of unique visitors if you create compelling slides.
You can turn your most popular blog posts into slides.
You can simply use powerpoint presentations and upload them on to Slideshare.
Here’s a great guide by Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe on how to use Slideshare to drive massive traffic to your blog posts.
Turn them into PDF’s or Infographics
Whenever you publish a new post on your blog, spend a few minutes to turn it into a PDF file and upload it to the free hosting sites where people can download them for free.
Just make sure to use internal links to your blog posts to drive traffic.
This is a great strategy and won’t take much time.
Make videos of your most popular posts
Whenever you write an in-depth post for your audience, try making a video about it and upload it to YouTube.
Not only you will get more exposure from YouTube but you can gain some good links from YouTube by placing your blog post links in the video description.
2. Write relevant guest posts and link to your own content
Guest posting is undoubtedly one of the most effective strategies to increase your blog’s exposure.
Not only you get quality links but you can reach out to wider audience by landing on top blogs with your guest posts.
The key to making the most out of guest posting is to write relevant guest posts and link to your own articles.
That way you can quickly build some relevant and quality links to increase your search results.
3. Reach out to other bloggers
Blogger outreach is probably the smartest way to get more attention and links from other sites.
Whenever you write a new post, make sure to link out to other sites and follow them via email or social media to connect.
- Use email: Write emails to other bloggers. Let them know you like their content and you frequently link out to their blog’s content.
Sooner or later they will start linking or sharing your stuff if they find your content really interesting. - Use social media: Twitter and Facebook both are great to connecting with other bloggers.
Whenever you see an influential blogger posting a great source on their social media accounts, make sure to leave thoughtful comments.
Share their stuff and connect with them always!
Wrapping Up
Creating viral content is not a rocket science.
You need to put efforts and spend quality time to do research about the topics you want to write about.
Influential name-dropping from your guest posts is one of the smartest ways to quickly build connections with the top bloggers in your field.
All the steps mentioned in this guide are insanely useful and practically possible to make your content go popular.
So what are you waiting for?
Start creating epic content using the 5-step process mentioned above.
Let me know if you have any more content writing tips.
