Why do some things go viral while other don’t? This is one default question asked by many marketers out there.

Understanding the psychology of your target market is a must. As soon as you get your first 100 so-called customers, you need to create a persona.

A persona?

Yes. This is what it looks like:

After identifying the proper persona, it’s easy to target your audience since you know their needs, motivation and goals. Finding a place where they dwell is the next step.

These places can be Facebook, Forums, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Tumblr, News Magazines, etc.

You have now reached a stage where you know who your audience is and where they spend most of their time. Now, start analyzing the type of content that goes viral. How?

Here, BuzzSumo can help you.

BuzzSumo can tell you the most shared, trending article for your keyword.

Go to the top pages that have already gone viral and find out at least three reasons why that happened. It can be anything – maybe because of their already existing amazing website and popularity. Yes, here’s the challenge, you need to surpass all of it. You will find competitors for the content you are about to produce, but you can be smart.

Making your landing page look clean and intuitive is just one side – producing amazing quality content is the other, so it’s not easy.

Follow these steps:

First, make your landing page look clean and good, this is the place you want your visitors to come to and read your content

Make the page/blog shareable

Add a comments section to boost the conversation

Get rid of improper and annoying pop ups

Use the proper title and heading, H1 & H2

Use your top level keywords within the first paragraph of your article

Use external links wherever possible

Also, try to interlink to your own pages within your article

Use proper images and give ALT attributes

Adding an interesting and right video within your article is also good – this makes your visitor duration time go up

Once you have produced your quality content, it’s time to distribute it on the proper channels that you have already found as useful and where your target market is already spending most of its time.

Let me tell you one thing, it’s not mandatory that you have to be on all the websites to distribute your content. For example, you may not give more attention to social media channels like Facebook and Pinterest, if you are into software because those are not your traffic sources. Probably, you will share your content on LinkedIn and Twitter because you find it useful and see people visiting your website from those sites.

Knowing what works for your industry and organization is very important. For example, Google AdWords might not work so great for you since you are in a software company and do more B2B business, but AdWords works seamlessly if you are into e-commerce.

Another simple and easy trick is creating videos. Showing up on the first page of the Google search results will be difficult with your content, but videos show up well on Google search results. So, why not create targeted videos, tutorials, guides, product demos, etc. and upload them to YouTube. You can place the same video in your articles whenever possible.

Some popular tactics to make your content go viral:

Take interviews of famous people and publish them. Check this Sam Hurley interview by me

Connect with experts in your industry and ask them a simple question, collect all the answers and publish it as a blog. The best example is here

Create interesting videos and upload them on different video submitting websites.

Guest post on other popular websites. Many platforms and websites allow guest posting. You just need to hunt proper opportunities.

Submit your blog to Reddit on a proper subreddit, HackerNews and on Medium

Get involved in useful discussions on Quora. Answer the questions in a much better way than others. See this example here and here

Contribute to the comments section of other posts that you think are useful

Tag handles involved whenever you tweet any of your articles written on other platforms. See this example here

Create amazing infographics use the piktochart tool. You can see this amazing infographic here

Give something for free, like an e-book with rich content or a pdf report on some facts. Create e-books with this Papyrus tool

Check out what related to your industry is trending on Twitter and tweet with more attention and creativity. See this example here

People nowadays are pretty hyped up about podcasts – you can try it out. Embed podcasts within your article.

If you desperately want to make people visit or do some action on your website, then go for contests, which I think is not a good idea since it’s not your target audience. They are there only because they want the prize attached to that contest.

Hope these simple tactics are enough to make your content go viral.

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