10 Solid Viral Methods to Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral!

10 Solid Viral Methods to Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral!

Are you struggling to make your awesome blog posts and articles to go viral? Want to get more shares and engagement on the thing you post? Well those clever people over on the BuzzSumo blog analyzed over 100 million articles to find out what made the ones that went viral, go viral.

Here's what they found!

1. Longer Articles Get Twice as Many Shares

Articles of 3-10k words got almost double the amount shares than articles that were under 1000 words. This has been known for a while now. Longer articles far far outrank shorter articles. Although short tailed content is easier for the reader to absorb, for ranking a new site, all articles should be at least 1k minimum IMHO!

The takeaway: Articles that had more words than those under 1000 words got more shares so write longer articles!

2. Post And Share Your Articles Early

You might be surprised at this but Tuesday is the best day to share your articles on social media. What was found is that Monday is the best day to post to Pinterest and LinkedIn. Tuesday is the best day to post to Facebook and Twitter, Google+ and other social media sites overall.

The takeaway: Articles Posted on Monday and Tuesday (early in the week) got more shares than those posted later on in the week with Tuesday being the best day to post on.

3. List Articles Naturally Get More Shares.

List post make it easier to soak in and absorb the content within them. But not all list posts are created equal! In at 1st place are posts that list 10 items. 2nd place goes to lists that post 20+ items. 3rd place to those with 16 items and 4th place to those with 24 items.

The takeaway: While it can be tempting to make top 25+ posts. It's only really those top 10 posts that do better than any other amount.

4. Articles With Images Get Twice As Many Shares As Those That Don't

And on average, twice as many people share articles that have vibrant images in them. Since images add more value to an article and act as a window into it that can visually represent something talked about in that article it makes sense to always include at least one image. If not just as the featured image.

The takeaway: Make sure every article you post on your has at least 1 nice image in it. Never post an article without an image! That's just rude.

5. Happy Articles Get Shared More

Not all content you post will be of a happy nature, but happy content that makes people go awww, and ahh, and LOL is naturally shared much more than sad content that doesn't.

The takeaway: Try to make your readers laugh and smile through your content as you'll get more shares from it. Keep things upbeat!

6. Quizzes Are Hot Right Now!

Quizzes are doing great right now! So much so in fact that of the 10 most shared articles in 2016, 8 of them were or had quizzes in them. Quizzes feed peoples egos and people love to feel like they're important by getting things right.

The takeaway: Try to use quizzes in your content and you'll feed people's narcissistic side. You can find many free quiz makers out there to take advantage of. So do it!

7. Infographics Are Still Cool and Stil Naturally Viral

You can make your articles more visually pleasing by turning them into an infographic. Long articles and text is informative but is time consuming to read. Like how list posts work well in improving CTR and engagement. And what with peoples attention span decreasing more and more as you can see from these Top 5 Design Elements to Put Above the Fold on Your Website post.

The takeaway: Just like top 10 lists, making infographics of your posts or for them will help people to absorb the information quicker and result in quicker shares and engagement.

8. You Can Reshare Your Articles You Know?

A lot of webmasters and bloggers spend a long time writing a post on their blog, then publish it, tweet it and share it to their Facebook page etc then forget about it! You can always double or even triple post your blogs posts and articles after a few days or so. Tweet it with a different question, repost and reshare from a different angle.

The takeaway: Social media sites can quickly bury old posts and shares under new ones. So keep posting and sharing your old articles to increase shares and reshares and effectiveness even more.

9. Influence Influencers to Share Your Articles

If your content is shared by someone influential and powerful in your industry, let's say Neil Patel or Rand Fishkin or Matt Cutts or a website like Moz.com or SearchEngineLand.com was to retweet this very article. Well that shared content would get around 32% more shares. And the more influential people that share it, that doubles and is quadrupled when up to 5 share it but that would take some doing.

The takeaway: It's not easy to get influential shares, you'll need to create amazing content and reshare their stuff a lot fot them to take notice. You can sometimes lead a horse to water but...

10. Articles With Bylines and Showcases Get More Shares

It's been proven that Google+ articles that have a byline/bio get up to 42% more shares than those that don't. This also works for articles on blogs that have the about author below them letting the reader know who wrote the article itself, about them and how to contact them etc.

The takeaway: Articles that have an author byline in them get more shares. So why are you doing that?

So that's 10 dead simple no-brainer methods to apply for making your blog posts go viral. You should try to put each and all of them in all your blog posts.

Not just present and future posts you write. But maybe even go back into old post you wrote ages ago and adopting these methods into them to improve engagement and viralness.

Hope it helps!

Do you use all these viral methods yourself?

What other viral tricks do you know of and like to use?

Cheers!

Mike.