viral content Archives | Jim's Marketing Blog

If you own a website or blog and you want to dramatically increase the number and quality of visitors you get, you need to encourage people who visit your site, to share what they find with their friends.

Thankfully, we know that when people find material on a website, which they believe will be of interest to their friends and contacts, they are more than happy to forward it to them. This is why websites like FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter and Digg have become so popular. They allow people to easily share things with their friends.

In order for you to benefit from the viral power of the Internet, there are two things you should consider.

1. Content

Firstly, you need to have content on your site, which is worth sharing. This means your content has to be better and more valuable than the typical material, which people find on your kind of site or blog. Many blog owners feel compelled to write ‘something’ every day; indeed many so-called “social marketing gurus” even write posts telling people to do this. The challenge this presents, is that very few businesspeople have the time required to write new, valuable content every day.

Post only when you have something worth sharing and focus on quality, not quantity.

2. Make it easy to share

Secondly, you need to make it super-easy for people to share your material with their friends. I use a free plugin for this blog called Sexy Bookmarks, (see below), which allows people to share what they find here, on most popular networksg – quickly and easily. Just a few mouse clicks and that’s it!

As a result of focusing on what I believe to be valuable content AND making it as easy as possible for people to share it, I get thousands of new visitors from sharing / bookmarking websites every week.

A quick tip!

Take a moment to look at the last few websites, articles, videos, blog posts or whatever; which YOU have passed on to your friends. Now ask yourself this question: “What was it that motivated you to share that material and how can YOU use that same kind of motivation, to get others to share YOUR content?”

Your answer to that question is a good starting point!

I received a newsletter earlier today. However, I have no idea who the sender was or why he decided to send it to me. I have no recollection of ever subscribing to it, so I decided to un-subscribe.

That’s when I noticed that there was no un-subscribe option!

Newsletter marketing

Yes, it’s possible someone subscribed to this newsletter using my email address and that the newsletter’s sender doesn’t send confirmation emails.

However, to send anyone a newsletter or any piece of email marketing, with no option to un-subscribe, is a mistake. People hate to feel trapped and to use this kind of approach with one’s marketing is a massive mistake and totally counter productive.

I can’t see anyone recommending a newsletter – even a great one – if they know you can’t get off the subscriber’s list, once you are on it. Equally, I can’t see anyone wanting to do business with a company, which attempts to trap people with its marketing.

If you want to develop a successful newsletter, make the content worth sharing and make it super-easy for people to share it, subscribe to it and un-subscribe from it.

People love to share great content with their friends and they will remain loyal readers and advocates of your newsletter, for as long as they believe it offers them outstanding value.