Viral Meaning

There are a lot of misconceptions regarding viral marketing. A lot of people have the idea that if they publish “great content”, whatever that means, that they automatically will get amazing traffic.

I know it is kind of weird, but people do still believe that idea. It seems so dated. It seems like something that people would believe in the 1990s, but you’d be surprised as to how many people still assume that marketing really boils down to great content.

I've got some bad news for you. Even if you have put in a tremendous amount of time polishing your content, it's still not good enough. Seriously. Even if a lot of people you know tell you that the content that you produce is top-notch, you're not there yet.

How can I say this?

Well, it all boils down to promotion. If you come up with amazing content, but there’s nobody around to read it, you might as well have not written that material. It really is that basic. You're going to get the same results. You're going to get a whole lot of nothing.

It all boils down to promotions. It’s not really the content itself, but where you plug that content into. This is the core of viral marketing. It's all about building an influence network or plugging into an existing one.

If you don't know how this works or if you're completely clueless as to how great content interacts with distribution networks, you need professional help. You really do.

It doesn't really matter how big your budget is. It doesn't really matter how talented your team is. If you do not have a clear realistic idea of how to identify and tap into influence networks with the right type of content, you're going to be wasting a lot of time.

Again, this has nothing do with how awesome your content is. Believe it or not rather mediocre content can still go viral or at least produce impressive results if they are marketed properly using the right influence networks.

Oftentimes, a lower quality version of an existing meme ends up getting more eyeballs than the meme it is based on because the ‘right people’ retweeted it. This is especially true of ‘floating’ political memes which seem to have been around for what feels like forever.

All of a sudden, they either get a new lease on life or truly gain traction when a big political personality retweets or shares them. Focus on getting your stuff in front of the right eyeballs. In other words, target the right influence networks.

Thanks to the rise of social media, identifying and engaging with people in influence networks has become so much easier.

Finding Viral Content More Efficiently

One of the biggest misconceptions about viral content is that you have to create it yourself. If you are launching a viral content marketing campaign, the idea is for you to come up with the next best piece of content in your niche.

In fact, according to this thinking, your content is so awesome that people can't help themselves. Seriously.

When they see the content, they read it, they engage with it. They can't help but click on the link and join your mailing list, buy whatever it is you’re selling or otherwise make you money.

This is a fantasy. This is in no way, shape or form connected to reality. Not even close. You have to understand that viral content is actually very, very complicated.

At the end of the day, nobody really knows why a piece of content went viral when something that is almost identical fails to get traction.

If you don't believe me, just scour through the video collections of YouTube. There's a tremendous amount of funny, sad, enraging or otherwise engaging videos that have very few views.

I’m talking about less than one hundred views. You can tell on face value that these materials are top-notch in terms of quality.

What's going on?

Well, nobody can really quite put their finger on it. Nobody can really say that this piece of content will go viral and this won’t. However, a lot of it has to do with influence networks.

A lot of it has to do with who you share the content and where you share as well as when you share. But even that explanation doesn't do justice to what really is going on. At the end of the day, nobody really knows.

This is why it's really important to stop wasting your time coming up with the next best piece of content in your niche. There's a high likelihood that you probably are going to fall flat on your face.

That's right. I know it's depressing. I know this is the kind of thing you probably don't want to hear, but this is also the truth.

Instead of just trying to reinvent the wheel or come up with something truly awesome or revolutionary or earth-shattering, focus instead on what already works. I am, of course, talking about content curation.

Content curation is just a fancy way of saying that you're going to republish other people’s content. You may be thinking to yourself, “What's in it for them?”

Well, you're driving traffic to them. You’re driving eyeballs. You’re driving attention because you are always going to post a link to where you got the content from.

That's not the issue. The issue with this content is picking the right piece of content. If you look at all the content in your niche on a certain social media platform, you can see which content gets shared a lot.

That should be your number one focus. Don’t focus on the likes. Don't pay attention to how many times people have commented.

Who cares?

The number one thing you should focus on, in fact the only thing you should focus on, is how many times this piece of content got shared. If you notice that it is very popular, go ahead and curate that content and piggyback on its success.

That's how you play the game. You really cannot afford to come up with original content.

Use General Interest Viral Content to Drive Niche Traffic

Believe it or not the question posed by the title of this article is being asked by a lot of experienced marketers. It turns out that every single day, hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of content go viral in the United States alone.

There are so many markets and, unfortunately, the majority of these pieces of content don't really have a niche target. They are what you could say “general interest” content. They defy easy categorization. It’s really hard to pin them down.

The question then becomes “Given the tremendous amount of this type of content, can they be used to drive niche traffic?”

For example, if you are promoting a personal injury law office in Southwestern Arizona, does it make sense for you to piggyback your website URL on content that features cars getting into accidents, trains going off rails, planes crashing to the ground and other viral content that people can’t get enough of?

Besides the professional ethics issues involved, it might not be a good idea. You have to remember that general interest viral content is not niche-targeted. People just respond a certain way to this type of content.

Maybe they're shocked. Perhaps they think it's controversial. Possibly, it appeals to fear or pride or whatever. People who view that content develop some sort of strong emotional response.

Unfortunately, this may not be good enough as far as your marketing objectives go. You have to understand that it's very tempting to try to use very popular general interest content for niche marketing purposes.

It’s easy to see the attraction because you don't have to try as hard. You already know that this funny cat video is taking the Internet by storm.

You already know that if you only share that video of the singing nun winning a singing contest that you stand to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views.

Unfortunately, you have to resist that temptation because general interest viral content is not automatically going to pull the same traffic that you need. At least you need people who would actually want to stick around by joining your mailing list.

Let me tell you the vast majority of people interacting with general interest viral content probably are not going to be in your target niche. So, do yourself a big favor.

Focus instead on finding viral content that is already in your niche. If you can’t curate this type of materials, curate stuff that is ‘close enough’ but let your call to action link do the filtering.

For example, your niche is sexual harassment plaintiff’s legal services. You can viralize content involving ‘jerk bosses’ and use a call to action link to filter the people sharing jerk boss content who might be interested in learning more about office harassment issues.

Your definition of viral in terms of traffic volume should be adjusted in light of the content’s niche specificity.

Generally speaking, when people talk about viral content, they talk about content that gets viewed by millions of people but, believe it or not, content can be “viral enough” even if it has only one thousand views as long as the people viewing that material are very interested in a particular niche.

Turbocharge The Emotional Appeal Of Viral Content

You would think that when a piece of content goes viral, that it pretty much speaks for itself.

Do you remember those viral emotional videos from Thailand advertising some sort of life insurance company?

Those videos really took Facebook by storm. They really tugged at your heartstrings.

It's very easy to turn on the waterworks inadvertently when you watch these videos. They are packed with emotions. It's very easy to sympathize with the characters.

A lot of the scenarios that they set up really speak to the human condition regardless of where you come from or regardless of your personal experiences. That’s how powerful they were.

It’s easy to assume that all viral videos are like that. It’s easy to assume that their emotional impact is plane and obvious.

Unfortunately, if you think that way, you are assuming too much because, at the end of the day, there are just so many reasons why a piece of content goes viral and another almost identical piece of content doesn't.

It's anybody's guess. A large part of it, of course, involves influence networks.

Regardless of the main reason a piece of content is viral and why another piece of content falls flat is the impact on emotions. Online content is never neutral.

Even if somebody showed you a very boring article, you can rewrite to spice up whatever controversies or outrages it contains. Believe me there's always a way to spin otherwise lifeless, dead, dull and boring content into something that would make you want to jump out, scream and pull your hair out.

It really all boils down to presentation and positioning. You have to keep coming back to this because if you’re willing to take viral content at its face value, then you're basically not selling it right.

It may have gone viral before you got your hands on it, but you're not really doing it any favors by re-sharing it.

If you are not going to turbocharge or otherwise enhance its emotional appeal, you probably would have been better off not messing around with the content in the first place.

So, how exactly do you turbocharge the emotional appeal of viral content?

First of all, you have to reimagine its headline.

You can’t just copy and paste that the existing headline of a piece of content. There might be a lot left to the imagination.

The original writer might be lazy. Instead, you should just spend some time in coming up with a title that would get people to click.

Get people to get so excited about the content that you're sharing that they would want to stay.

Of course, this is the kind of skill set that doesn’t happen overnight. I don’t expect you to become some sort of Madison Avenue professional copywriter in the span of a few hours.

The good news is the more you practice, the better you get. Regardless, you I have to turbocharge the emotional appeal of your viral materials to maximize their marketing benefits to you.

Content Format and How “Viral” It can Get on Platforms

There’s just something about video automatically playing when people scroll through their mobile devices like tablets or smartphones. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.

Believe me not everybody is excited reading through block after block of text. It may be talking about the most exciting things in the world.

You really can’t blame them because the way Facebook has influenced and, dare I say it, “trained people” mentally, people have really developed a severe case of temporary attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.

Have you ever noticed that tend to be very forgetful and suffer from brain fog?

This is why it’s really important to present the right content form to your audience because if you are able to hook them the first time, they look at your content, you make it all the more likely that they would click the Share button. That’s how you play the game. You have to play for keeps.

But how exactly do you pull this off?

How are they tagging their content?

How do they describe the content they share?

Do they use the same hashtags over and over again?

Going Viral

You must be logged in to access this course