Make Your Blog Go Viral

People tend to think of blogs today the way that websites were thought of ten years ago: “All I have to do is get a site up and I’ll instantly get tons of traffic and my business will take off.” That was the case for a brief time with websites, but it’s no longer the case with blogs.

Here are 13 practical ways you can grow the readership of your blog to help it go viral:

1. First determine why you’re blogging. Who is your audience? What are your goals? What are your readers interested in? If you create compelling content for readers, readers will naturally come back to your blog to read more.

2. Do basic research. Go to Technorati and search for keywords related to your target audience and the topics you want to focus on. While there, try to answer these questions: Who are the influential bloggers in your space? Who is successful at getting in front of the readers you want to get in front of?

3. Avoid sub domains. Never set up a blog under a sub-domain. Install your blog on your own domain as a sub-page, or if you don’t have a domain, get one

4. Create a content schedule. Determine a steady schedule for how you’ll post, and plan ahead to create structure around your workload. If you plan to post on Tuesdays and Fridays, for example, put it on your calendar. While you’re at it, take the time to determine what topics you’ll cover on those days.

5. Be personal. Post a photo of yourself and/or your team, and write good bios to enhance your credibility and demonstrate that you’re a real person to your readers. This engages your audience.

6. Be first. Being the first one to post breaking news is a relatively easy way to go viral.

7. Stay on top of what other bloggers are saying. If an influential blogger posts about a topic and you disagree with their viewpoint, link to their post and state your position. Don’t worry about taking a different position or even being negative, as long as you’re not insulting. Disagreement creates interaction and interaction builds a community. If you say the same thing everyone else does, why should people read your blog?

8. Pay attention to social networking sites. Take the time to study the social sites to see what people like. An article that goes “popular” on Digg can generate tens of thousands of visitors to your site. The same is true for StumbleUpon or del.icio.us

9. Stay in control of your blog. Real time statistics from your blog are important, so keep up with your live stats so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

10. Make it easy for your readers: Put your RSS feed in a prominent place. RSS feeds let users display the content from multiple blogs through one program so they can easily see the latest posts from all their favorite blogs. Many visitors prefer to use RSS feeds to subscribe to your content so they don’t have to visit your blog through a browser.

11. Rinse and repeat. Watch your blog carefully to see what works. And know that some blogs do better on StumbleUpon, some blogs do really well on Digg, and others seem to perform better on del.icio.us.

12. Don’t try to please everyone. Have opinions and stand by them. Even if everyone doesn’t love what you do, that’s okay. Some of my favorite blogs are ones I frequently disagree with. Even though I have a different opinion their posts make me think … which makes me come back for more.

13. Finally, don’t get discouraged. Many bloggers write a couple of posts, don’t see much traffic, and give up. Building a readership and going viral takes time and experience. It takes effort to find ways to get your particular audience to visit, comment on your posts, and recommend you to others – but it’s worth it.

Do this and you're bound to see your blog go viral gathering more and more traffic to your sites and your offers.

To make your blogs, sites, e-books and other media to go viral bringing you lots more traffic then check these resources out:

http://ViralMarketingCrashCourse.com/g.o/Jooje and also this resource

http://www.jorgearguello.com/freetraffic

Thanks for reading