Marketers spend a lot of time thinking of content that has the potential to go viral. While there are plenty of steps that a marketer can take to maximize the odds of a specific piece of content bringing in a flood of traffic, it’s not uncommon for a blog’s biggest hit to come as a surprise. Even if you don’t actively try to push a specific post to go viral, it only takes the attention of one influential blogger to send you tens of thousands of readers.
Because a huge rush of visitors isn’t something that happens every day, you want to make the most of this opportunity. However, if you weren’t planning on a post becoming a hit, does that mean you’re going to miss out on benefitting from this event? The good news is if you’re using a flexible platform like WordPress, you can quickly make a handful of changes that will allow you to capitalize on your 15 minutes of blog fame. Here’s exactly what you’ll need to do:
Decide What You Want to Accomplish
When a blogger experiences going viral for the first time, it’s easy for them to get caught up in refreshing their analytics every few minutes to see how many visitors are landing on their site. While it’s normal to get excited about this event, it’s important to remember that it’s not going to last forever. It’s also important to realize that unlike a standard visitor who comes from a search engine and browses through several pages of a site, the majority of these visitors may only stick around for a single page.
Since you may only have one shot, you need to figure out exactly what you want to accomplish with your viral post. For many businesses, this goal will be getting visitors to sign up for their mailing list. For others, it may be increasing their Twitter following. And some businesses may simply want to maximize the spread of a post by getting as many people as possible to share it.
Remove Distractions
Once you decide what you want to accomplish, you need to strip away all other distractions from your post. With a WordPress theme like Twenty Eleven, you can do this in a matter of seconds by changing the post format so that the post itself is the only thing that’s displayed. You can then add a call to action directly to the post. If you want people to sign up for your mailing list, add a compelling call to action and the signup form directly in the post. The same goes for following you on Twitter or sharing the post with others.
Keep Your Site from Going Down
The last thing you want is to miss out on visitors because your site goes down. Luckily, by installing and activating WP Total Cache, you’ll be able to optimize the performance of WordPress and prevent your blog’s server from getting overloaded.
Have you experienced a post going viral?