Back in the '90s, Bill Gates declared that content is king.
Ever since, that mantra has been espoused by just about everyone, from wannabe writers all the way up to the most respected of digital marketers. Today, the Internet is flooded with content of all shapes and sizes — making it a lot harder for your mom-and-pop content to gain any type of traction at all.
Because of the endless pool of reads and recommendations, a lot of stellar content is destined to sink rather than swim. It’s no longer good enough to publish high-quality, high-volume content and call it a job well done.
The new goal? Going viral.
An admirable ambition, but the truth behind engineering a viral phenomenon, it turns out, is a lot less actionable than you’d think.
“Trying to go viral is a bit of a fool’s errand,” said Emerson Spartz, CEO of Spartz Media, which operates Dose.com and OMGfacts — websites that help net the company 50 million unique monthly users and make Spartz Media one of the largest media companies in the world, based by audience size.
But Spartz, a leading expert in virality, is anything but a fool. Though he said it’s virtually impossible to predict with a high degree of confidence what content will hit and what will miss, he’s managed to build a business around putting everything in place to make sure that when content does hit, it hits big.
In the process, he’s become somewhat of a content king himself. Here are some tips from Spartz on how to prep your content for going viral:
1. Write really, really good content.
“People consume a lot of content, but they share very little of it,” Spartz said. “For your content to actually be shared, it has to be that much better than your competition — which is the entire Internet.”
2. Learn to write for the web.
Forget your English teacher’s five-paragraph essay. Spartz said keeping your sentences and paragraphs short makes it easier to read and retain your content. (Bonus points if you keep commas to a minimum).
3. Put a ton of stock in headlines and thumbnails.
In Spartz’s eyes, your headline and thumbnail are your sales pitch. They’ve got to be alluring enough to get people in the store in the first place. You could have awesome content, but if readers have no incentive to check things out, they’re going to skip your brilliant blog post for something flashier.
4. Predictive technology helps.
At Spartz, they use everything at their disposal to make sure they take as probabilistic an approach to virality as possible. That means sourcing algorithms that scour the web for content with viral potential, content manage systems that help writers streamline content production, robust testing for headline and thumbnail optimization, and distribution engines that make sure the right content is delivered to the right people.
5. History repeats itself.
“The best predictor of future virality is past virality,” Spartz said, making an example out of men’s health magazines whose covers, month after month, promote the best ab workouts — because they know that’s the content that resonates.
“Content that goes viral tends to go viral over and over and over … Most people can’t recognize the same content when it’s dressed up wearing slightly different clothes,” he said.
6. Develop content that resonates with your target audience…
Spartz said you really need to understand what your readers look for in content and focus on that. The end goal should always be providing value to your readers — not writing something you hope every person on the Internet will eventually read. If you're lucky, your readers will bite.
7. … and make sure it gets under their noses.
Invest in marketing your content. Seriously. The more you distribute, the bigger lift you’ll get in terms of views and shares.
“Most content makers end up spending an inordinate amount of time essentially giving great speeches to empty rooms.” Spartz said. “You could have created the most viral, awesome piece of content, but if it doesn’t reach the right people, then it’s not going to go anywhere.”
8. Stay positive.
“The most important thing by far is that the content has to really move somebody,” he said. “It has to produce a ton of emotion or be really awesome to be viral.”
Certain emotions, Spartz added, work better than others. Nostalgia, amazement, fascination, and awe are all good bets. Humor, how-to content, and pictures of cats work well, too.
9. Make it as easy as possible for your readers to share.
“Have share buttons at the top of articles, bottom of articles, and have some that scroll with you,” Spartz said. “People will share in a specific moment of passion, and you need to make sure that those buttons are there on the screen when they have that moment.”
He added that you should probably make your social buttons four times as big as they are now. And it never hurts to ask people to share at the end of your content, either.
10. Above all else: there is no secret to going viral.
Unfortunately, there’s no formula to ensuring a viral hit. You could follow each of these steps perfectly and never see any of your content take off. Virality can be fickle and arbitrary and downright weird, which is why Spartz said it’s much more important to focus on creating as much value for your readers as possible.
