How to get most out of viral blog traffic?

[Jiri.Novotny]

Our website has a WordPress blog, hosted at website.com/blog.

I've discovered that with some hard work and a bit of luck, I can create a blog posts that will go viral - they will get about 50k readers in 1-3 days (which is a LOT for our website), and 300-1000 tweets, 100-250 Facebook shares, and anywhere from 10 to 130~ G+1s. (Unfortunately, these are for the posts, not for our website.)

The posts will also get some comments. And most importantly, a few links - sometimes from very reputable domains.

However, I feel that I could be doing much more here.

The links go directly to the blog post, and I'm not sure how much is that helping our website overall in regards to SEO.

1. What actions can I encourage the readers to do, and how should I prioritize them? Some of the actions are: Sharing/liking, writing a comment, checking out our products, subscribing to our Facebook/Twitter/G+ profile, subscribing to our RSS. One another possible action/opportunity that I see and which could potentially pay off is to offer some kind of PDF report to be emailed, which would initiate an autoresponder sequence.

2. Do you think that having a clear call to action in a blog post could reduce the sharing of it ?

3. Is it possible to encourage whoever is writing about our blog posts to use a direct link to our website, instead of linking directly to the post? If yes, how? E.g. if I included a direct link to our website in the post itself, e.g. in the most important part of the post that gets quoted, it could work - unfortunately that's usually virtually impossible.

4. Am I sitting on a gold mine here, and should do this as much as possible?

5. Should I consider putting this content not just onto the blog, but on our website.com/something ? I'm actually not sure how that would help though, it would simply have a shorter URL. I've discovered that it doesn't matter where I post this content, if the presentation looks decent. So it doesn't have to be posted on website.com/blog. I can even post it on other domains - should I?

And the most important question:

6. How do I get the most out of this opportunity in SEO regards?

Thanks for any ideas or insights!

[MarieHaynes]

Good for you to be able to create such shareable content!

I have one post I wrote that occasionally gets a boost of virality and I'll tell you what I did (but I am by no means an expert on how to make the best use of viral traffic.)

-I put links in that article to other interesting/related articles on my site.

-I encourage people to share or link to this article if they have found it helpful.  (If you're not already doing it, you may consider adding a block of code to show people how to link to the article, for those who are not html savvy.)

Another thing you can do is use this article to look for linkbuilding opportunities.  If that many people are willing to share and read your stuff then you should have people who want to link to it.  Depending on the content you can look for other websites that are linking to this kind of stuff and then suggest your site as a resource to link to.  Similarly, you can do broken link building.  Find sites that link to your kind of content, then search for broken links (I use the chrome check-my-links extension).  Then, you can send them an email saying, "Hey, I found some broken links on your site.  I was wondering who I could report them to...and by the way, you may find this article of mine worth linking to.)

Care to share your tips on how you make an article attract so much attention?