How to make good content go viral?

[Mattcarter08]

Hi, have a question on the distribution of content which is designed to go viral.

Let say you have written awesome content, with great visuals, etc which is designed to go viral. Your site is relatively new - not many social media followers, DA authority, or natural traffic.

What would be a good process of distributing that content - getting the content out there so it has the best chance and ability to go viral and generate links.

So far i have:

1. Use press releases to distribute that content, using a distribution service like: prnewswire.com. Hope its picked up by a news site or something.

2. Contact Facebook Pages or Twitter Pages who have a large audience of the type of people who would be interested in the content. Ask them if they can share the content.

3. Content sites related to the content, and ask them to share it with their users (Give them a incentive e.g. money, a gift, etc)

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I think number 1 would yield the best possible results in getting actual sites linking to you.

2 and 3 are more designed for people (who very few would have blogs) to read the content.

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Any other suggestions, i'm missing out on?

Any good articles you guys recommend, i should checkout?

Thanks,

Matt

[EGOL]

Just ideas that seem to work for me....

• Design a site that allows you to advertise your most valuable content on all or most pages of your site - like in a sidebar or in "related boxes".... go to a good site like CNN and watch how they do this. Look at  right side of this page with all of the promoted content.  This promotes your content to your current visitors who should be your most important fans.

• Make it easy for people to share your content with FB buttons or addthis.com widgets

If you do the two items above and you do have viral content then just exposing it to a few people will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.  If you have pedestrian content then not much will happen.

*  Get an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe.  I use feedburner and have lots of people who get my feed by RSS and email messages.   Whenever I publish something new it goes out to thousands of subscribers and many of them visit my site within just 48 hours.  Enough of these people post to FB, Twitter, etc. that I don't have to do it myself.

Keep in mind that it is really really really hard to produce viral content - even if you have done it many times and intentionally try to do it.   When I intentionally try to make viral content it does not work.... then I write a simple article on a topic that I know a lot about and it pulls in more traffic than something viral - but pulls in that traffic over time because it gets good rankings in the organic SERPs and a steady stream of social shares.

Most of the content that I produced gets less than viral attention.  A few percent can pull in major traffic - often 100,000 visitors within 48 hours, but that type of content  only happens for me a couple times per year.

However, once you have a large library of high quality content  and people are visiting your site regularly the number of visitors from social sites and blogs will grow steadily. This is not viral it is simply the steady  social sharing of good content which for me brings in lots of traffic - far more over time that if everything that I produce would go viral for a short time.

So, you don't have to focus on viral to get lots of traffic.  Who would you rather have on your baseball team - a guy who hits a homerun every few games but strikes out a lot or a guy who hits a single almost every time at bat?

SEOs overvalue viral and undervalue steady.  It is like the tortoise and the hare.