Content that spreads is hard to create.
How to come up with ideas that go viral?
How would one help to spread things to help them go viral?
What is influence marketing and how does it help amplify content assets?
To discuss viral content, Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, invited Rand Fishkin, Co-founder SparkToro, founder and former CEO of Moz and author of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.
Viral can mean very different things to marketers and businesses.
From the content marketing perspective, viral content means that helps your businesses rather than TikTok videos that generates millions of views.
In other words, viral content is content that many people saw and engaged with and they are now associating your business with that.
And hopefully, this content has a very long lifespan, it continues to drive brand awareness for months or even years.
Some of the viral projects Rand did for SparkToro continue to send clicks, citations and positive brand associations or many months. This is the goal.
Similarly, some of IMN clients who we created and amplified brand assets for, have seen that content go viral within a few months after the publication but the positive signals have kept coming for a long time since then, especially when it starts to rank.
In other words, when done right, viral content:
- Adds value to a business
- Is long-term: Keeps sending positive SEO signals for moths and years.
To come up with content ideas that goes viral…
In order to come with with viral content ideas, you need to really be in that niche: Read, share and engage. Pay attention to what your audience is reading, watching and listening to.
After some time of reading and creating content, you’ll have an instinct for what may resonate with your audience.
About one in ten content assets will go viral…
Even with a great niche knowledge, not all of your content will go “viral” which is fine because those 9 content assets will still add value to your site.
A great thing about aiming at creating content that spreads is that even when you fall short, that content tends to have a positive impact.
Contact ninjas for us to create a long-term viral content strategy for you, create those brand assets and amplify them.