When a blog post goes viral, it can drive hundreds or even thousands of unique visitors to your blog in a short period of time. The first few visitors who access the post will share it on their social media profiles, increasing its visibility while attracting additional visitors in the process — and those visitors will now share it with their friends and family members; thus, the cycle repeats. But how exactly do you create a viral blog post?
Publish Trending Topics
A helpful tip to make your blog posts go viral is to discuss trending topics. If a large number of people are talking about the upcoming 2016 presidential elections, for instance, jump into the discussion by publishing a post with your own unique perspective on the elections. Whether it’s right or wrong, publishing trending topics is a highly effective way to make your posts go viral.
If you need help choosing trending blog topics, check out WhatTheTrend.com. Owned and operated by the folks behind HootSuite, this simple tool will reveal what’s trending on Twitter and why. You can even narrow your trends down to a specific region/location, which is incredibly useful for identifying geo-specific trends.
Enhance Your Posts
If you aren’t adding images to your blog posts, you are missing out on one of the easiest ways to encourage user engagement, and ultimately make them go viral. A study conducted by Skyword found that web content with “compelling images” receives approximately 94% more traffic than web content that contains either no images or irrelevant images. Images help to convey the meaning of web content while making it more visually appealing in the process, so be sure to include them in your blog posts. Besides, it only takes a couple of minutes to grab a relevant, royalty-free image and upload it to your blog.
Promote Posts on Social Media
Creating and publishing a killer blog post is only half the battle. Unless people actually see it, it’s not going to go viral. This is why it’s important for bloggers to promote new blog posts on social media. Whenever you publish a new blog post, try to get into the habit of logging into your social media accounts and linking to them. You don’t have to write an entire essay about the post, but instead simply copy the post title and include the URL. Assuming you have a decent number of followers, this should get the ball rolling by driving an initial burst of traffic to your post. Depending on your blogging platform, some such as WordPress, have plugins to make it easy to automate social media postings.
Encourage Visitors to Share
Of course, you’ll also want to encourage visitors to share your blog posts on their social media profiles. A simple way to do this is by placing “Share This” buttons on your blog. While visitors can always share content by logging into their social media accounts, clicking a button is far easier and less time-consuming.
What’s the most amount of traffic you’ve received from a single blog post? Let us know in the comments section below!
I average around 120 hits per day. My highest hit post is around 30,000.
The most amount of traffic I’ve received on a single post is about 20,000. My blog is relatively new and so far, I’m happy with its progress.
Your tips are much appreciated. I’m just starting out. I haven’t gotten more than 7,000 on a single post. I’m hoping to increase that drastically as I go along.