Insider Secrets: Writing a Blog That Goes Viral

It’s every entrepreneur and business owner’s dream: Writing a blog that really takes off. Goes viral. Reaches an out-of-this-world number of prospects. Easier said than done, right?

Not so fast.

Writing a viral blog is actually easier than you’d think. We’re going to outline the specific steps you need to take from planning the blog to promoting it to ensure it gets the maximum reach and exposure.

Here’s what you need to do.  

Planning

While planning the blog post is the first step, you should actually work backwards. Here’s why: Promotion is the key to a viral blog post. You want people to share the article, so it has to be an article worthy of sharing. Do you know what your readers want to see? Do you know their deepest, darkest problems? Take some time to address these questions, and work your way backwards into a blog topic that has the possibility of going viral.

Let’s put that another way. Perhaps you’re passionate about your product’s quality and you can give a mean elevator pitch to anyone who’s within earshot. However, your passion for the topic doesn’t necessarily equate to a viral blog topic.

If your customers are dealing with a significant problem – losing sleep, for example, they might not care about the quality of your C-PAP machine. They just want to sleep again.

That, my business friend, is where you want to put your blog efforts.

Writing

With your best topic in hand, now’s the time to get down to the actual writing.

But hold on. There’s planning involved in this phase, too.

The type of blog post that gets shared most often is the list post. But not just any list post. It should be a long list post.

They take a great deal of work to generate, but they’re oh-so-worth it.

Instead of putting in 20 hours researching a long list post, take the shortcut approach and curate a list.

What’s curation? If you haven’t yet heard about curation, you should get to know this creative way to write a blog post. Here’s what you do:

Google “best ways to get more sleep” or similar phrases. Jot down the ideas and take not of the source from which they came. You might want to get advice from WebMD, Dr. Phil, Psychology Today, and other experts who weigh in on the topic. With this curated list of ideas and research in hand, write the blog. Promoting

Now, we’ve arrived at the final step of the viral blog: promotion. And this is where the “secret sauce” comes in. People love to get their name out there, and your list post will help them. Use your list of curated sources and make a new list of their Twitter handles, Facebook profile names and Instagram usernames.

Go to your favorite social media management tool (like Hootsuite) and start promoting the blog:

Write a tweet promoting the blog with a link back to your website. Tag 3-4 experts from the curated list. Continue writing tweets that promote the blog and include the experts’ handles until you’ve mentioned them all. Sit back, and wait for the favorites, retweets, shares and likes roll in.

This recipe for making your blog post go viral is a proven one. With the right experts on your side, your blog post will get picked up with influencers who will then share the blog with their own followers. The more it gets shared, the more reach it will have. With the virality of your blog, your website will gain exposure and some new followers. Eventually, you’ll be able to track new leads back to the original blog post.