This is your ultimate aim. You want all of your content to go viral and to work for you long after you’ve written it. There are some golden rules to ensure that you achieve this:
Only ever produce high quality, useful content.You need to really commit to only ever producing high quality, useful content. Your content is going to go viral because it’s so good and so useful that people want to share it. If it’s not good enough for that, then give up now because with all the will in the world it isn’t going anywhere! You need to really take time to consider your content, to always make sure it’s giving real value and that it is going to leave your reader wanting more. There are hundreds of blogs out there that you can use for research so have a good look around and decide for yourself which seem to be the most relevant, popular and useful topics. You can then begin to pull together a plan of your content based upon what people really want to read and learn about.
I highly recommend that you do take some time to plan out your posts. There’s nothing wrong with adding posts that reflect things that might have just come in to your mind there and then but don’t leave your content down to this alone. Your structured plan with a full list of topics and when you intend to post them will really keep you on the right track.
When you are pulling your posts together take the time to ensure that they grab the reader’s attention but are then very easy to read. People do not tend to take the time to sit and read a blog post fully and in its entirety. Instead they tend to scan the post, looking for the most relevant information and anything particularly interesting or valuable that will suck them in further. Therefore take some time to consider the title that you are using for your post. Make sure that your posts make sense individually as often a single post will be seen by people on other sites outside of the context of your blog. Your ultimate aim with each post should be to encourage the reader to want to come to your blog and spend time learning more about you.
In terms of the length of your posts, you need to get the balance right here. Too long and people are not going to read them. People want quick results and want to get to the juicy information quickly, avoiding the waffle! Too short however and your posts are not going to rank. Try to aim for between 250 and 400 words and you won’t go too far wrong.
When you have written your post, before you publish it, go back and review it asking yourself the question of whether your post is giving the reader something of value. If not then go back and re-write it. You need to make sure that you are offering your reader something of value with each and every post you write.
Make sure the content is seen in as many places as possible.Once you are comfortable with the content of your post, you need to take the initial ownership in getting your content seen in as many places as possible. You can start by submitting your content to your social networking sites. A good example of this is automatically importing your blog in to facebook. You can use the application under ‘notes’ and ‘import a blog’ to automatically pull your feed in from your blog, however this is going to pull in the full post. Rather than doing this I recommend that you either sign up with ‘networkedblogs’ and they will import your blog for you or that you share each post manually as you publish via the share buttons on your blog (if you don’t have share buttons you should add them as a priority – if you are not sure how to do this there is a simple tutorial on my website that you can follow.)
By doing it this way you will only add the title and a few lines of your post to your facebook page with a link back to your blog rather than adding the full post. This will generate more traffic to your blog than if people could read the whole post on facebook. You do however need to make sure you are using titles that draw people in and that the first few lines of your post are going to encourage people to want to read more. As long as you do this not only are you putting your content in front of every one of your contacts on Facebook, you are also drawing traffic back to your blog.
You can also add your blog posts on Twitter, MySpace and all of your other Social Network and bookmarking sites. Remember, the more places you have it, the more people are going to see. Just remember to always encourage people to come back to your blog within the posts that you will be sharing on other sites. Your superb content will do the rest for you.
And of course don’t forget to share your blog and blog posts with all of the blog sites and aggregators out there. Submitting your blog feed to aggregators is a great way to get your content shared. There are hundreds to choose from and you can even upload plug-ins to your wordpress blog to automate the whole process (although these don’t tend to be free). If you are happy to do this manually then just make a list of all of the aggregators you are going to use and build it in as part of your routine every time you post to your blog.
Do some research to compile your full list but to begin with you can start uploading your blog feed to the following aggregators:blogbunch.com
blogged.com
feedage.com
feedlisting.com
millionrss.com
rssbuffet.com
rssmicro.com
rssmountain.com
rssnetworkfeedsdirectory.com
feednuts.com
syndic8.com
In order to do any of this you need to have your RSS feed set up for your blog. Most blog templates build this in for you automatically. If not you will be able to add it yourself via your widgets.
You can choose to use services such as feedburner.com to manage your RSS feed. This can be more user friendly for your subscribers as well as giving you the option to personalise your own page a little by adding your image and detail.
You can also convert individual posts in to RSS feeds and submit them to aggregators separately. Just bear in mind that some aggregators will not accept your feed if it contains too little content. If you want to set up individual feeds for your content you can do that by using sites such as feedity.com. All you do is submit the URL of your post and they will generate an RSS feed that you can then submit to feed aggregators.
Remember to encourage people to share your content!Having share buttons on your blog posts is not enough – you need to encourage people to share your content! It’s amazing how many more people will do something just because you ask them to. And remember, because you are producing high quality, useful content you are not going to be asking much from them. I am sure that with a gentle reminder from you, they will be happy to share your content!
You can also encourage people to help you to build your ranking on blogsharing sites. There are many of them out there; a simple search in Google will bring up a full list for you. However, a good example of one of these sites is Zimbio.com. Not only will Zimbio.com import your blog posts as articles, you can also set up your own profile page. In order to improve the ranking of your blog this site works on something called Kudos. The more Kudos you are given from other people, the better your blog will rank on their site. You can download a Kudos button on your site and encourage your readers to give you kudos on Zimbo.com if they like what they read. All they do is click the button – it couldn’t be easier!
Other blog sharing sites ask you to submit a button to your site that tracks the number of visitors you get. The more popular your blog, the more your blog will move up the rankings on their sites. So not only will be you be getting more visitors by having your blog on their site, you’ll be moving up their rankings due to the visitors you are getting from them! Two examples of these sites are TopBlogArea.com and TopBlogging.com, but there are loads more out there so go and check them out for yourself.