Web Marketing Lesson 6: Secret Sauce (Part 2 of 2)

Web Marketing Lesson 6: Secret Sauce (Part 2 of 2)

Create high quality content for powerful SEO, Email Newsletter updates and Social Media mentions about your site.

secret sauce for online marketing, illustration

(cont’d)

Be Insightful

Your target demographic (aka: your audience) is endlessly searching for new information and the best methods to optimize the performance of routine tasks. If you publish video content that is both interesting and informative, then by definition, it is also highly sharable video. Practically every single person I can think of, and definitely anyone sharing anything they recently discovered, wants to learn something they didn’t already know from that discovery.  And people love watching videos more than anything else they currently do online.  That’s why videos can be a powerful tool for curating top performing content.

At my fun-based website The Daily Dose, we curate the best related content, including videos for viewers, whether they’re looking for editorial cartoons, jokes, pranks, cat videos, current trends, or world news. Therefore, be sure to use a similar tactic with your videos, and curate the best, most informative and sharable content which surprises and enlightens your viewers. And it should, of course, be relevant to the audience.

Be Inspirational

As you may already know since a long time, the story of Upworthy’s success is amazing. The website grew to more than six million unique page views per month in its very first year, partly due to its catchy and memorable headlines. One other key reason they grew so rapidly, was that the site searches for inspirational stories and content to share with their sizable audience.

In order to earn the viral advantage you so desire, go and find stories that are inspirational to your readers. Maybe it’s an article about overcoming adversity, or finding ways to cooperate and collaborate. Perhaps it’s about how to succeed in some way. People love stories that relate to their own aspirations, and the more inspiration it gives them, the more your viewers will share it with others.

Of course, making viral videos is not a cake walk. If it were easy, then every business and individual with a smartphone would have their 15 minutes of fame, if not more.

Using this guide and the six key tips properly will help you achieve more shares, likes, comments, re-tweets, follows, etc. and more importantly, it will help you raise your own standards in terms of quality. That in itself, will significantly increase your probability at successfully creating viral content.

Do you have any great tips for creating viral videos and other top trending content? Share in the comments below!

*****

All right. Now let’s go over how to optimize your content. The following instructions are applicable to most, if not all, content pages.

Section 1: SEO

SEO: Optimize Your Content For Search Engines

The procedure is standard on any WordPress site with the SEO Yoast plugin installed and configured as described in Web Marketing Lesson 5: Adding and setting up important Plugins.

Here’s what to do in your WordPress Admin area:

Step 1: In the Admin area, go to the Posts or Pages menu (depending on the type of content you wish to publish) from the Admin toolbar. That’s the vertical menu bar seen on the Left on WP installations in English and other Latin languages.

Here’s the quick list of options and fields to configure:

SEO – What to do to rank well in Search Engines

Bad Behavior Plugin

Acunetix WP Security Plugin

WP Login Security Plugin

WordPress Firewall 2 Plugin

WordPress 2 DropBox Backup Plugin

Akismet anti-spam Plugin

Done all of that? If yes, then Awesome. Your content is now optimized for search engines. You can put a big green check next to SEO on your page’s list of critical to-dos.

Section 2: Email

As any serious marketer will tell you, email lists are the key to your business’ success. Email lists drive new prospects to Sign Up, Register, Subscribe, Buy and Buy Again. Inside what is commonly called the Acquisitions Funnel, or the Growth Funnel, Email is the key to Retention. And in any serious business, Retention (your repeat customers) quickly becomes the bulk of your revenues.

Email – Your List Is Your Business

Setting Your Permalinks

Customizing Your Website Title, Subtitle, and other key WP Settings

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

Contact Form 7 Plugin

GD Star Rating Plugin

W3 Total Cache Plugin

Google XML Sitemaps v3 for qTranslate Plugin

Section 3: Social Media

Your social media efforts complete the cycle of creating optimized content, distributing it through your best spokespeople (your email list subscribers) and succeeding at content marketing.

Social Media – Earn proof, authority, interaction and popularity

Jetpack multi-purpose Plugin

Digg Digg Social Sharing Plugin

Pretty Link Lite Plugin

WordPress Short Codes Plugin

 

Step 2: Keep in mind that most plugins are not installed by default. However, some may be, especially if you installed it via a version customized by your web hosting provider. If any plugin on this list is pre-installed, then you just need to check the Read the Instructions, make sure you setup the Settings with your specific details for each one (when required), and make sure any pre-installed plugin is activated by clicking the word Activate in the Plugin’s summary on the Plugins page.

Step 3: For all other plugins, which are not pre-installed for you, click on the “Add New” button which is at the top of the Plugins Page.

 

Congratulations! Once you have followed the steps outlined above on your target content, your page is rolling and picking up steam. As your content’s distribution grows, you will start to see opportunities to monetize as it reaches a growing number of people.

Step 22: Now be sure to keep your content up-to-date. Do this by editing the page from time to time.

Step 23: On the Plugins or WordPress Updates page, you may update your plugins one at a time, or more than simultaneously, or even all of them at once.

 

If you prefer watching a video tutorial about installing your site and various key plugins included on this page, checkout this highly useful clip by a fellow online content marketer, Matthew Woodward, who created and maintains his own great website about creating real value and earnings through web publishing.

In the next lesson, we will cover how to analyze the data relevant to your website and its content. The article covers the use of Google Analytics (GA), Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), and other leading data analysis tools. It is the easiest guide to follow the best practices of business intelligence or business insight, both commonly known as BI.

As usual, if you like this article and care to help us in our efforts to put Google’s quality content claims to the test, then I ask you to please share this page with your peers and colleagues on your social networks or any place where web publishers may find it beneficial.

Follow us: @yashaharari on Twitter

A little bit of self-promotion:  If you need a great marketing agency on a budget you can afford, try our agency, which you can visit at YashaHarari.com. We know you’ll love the level of service and of course, the results.

Previous Lesson:Web Marketing Lesson 6: Secret Sauce (pt. 1 of 2) Adding the power of High quality content, SEO, Email Newsletter updates and Social Media to your site

Next Lesson: Web Marketing Lesson 7: Launch It Lean. When and what your pre-seed startup should spend on with your Marketing & Sales budgets.

Web Marketing Lesson 6: Secret Sauce (Part 1 of 2)

Web Marketing Lesson 6: Secret Sauce (Part 1 of 2)

Create high quality content for powerful SEO, Email Newsletter updates and Social Media mentions about your site.

secret sauce for online marketing, illustration

WARNING: 99.99% of you WILL FAIL to get your content to go viral. So if you’re looking for a 1 minute fix, a trick or a magic bullet to make your crappy content loved by everyone who sees it, then please, skip this page and get on with your life.  Only the Top 1% of the Top 1% of you that bother to read and apply this information will have a shot at that ephemeral sort of Internet publishing success known as “gone viral”.

This article is an easy to use, step-by-step guide to give any article, post or Page on your WordPress website the juice it needs to go viral in the easiest, best and fastest way possible.

Got your WordPress website powered up and ready to grow, but just don’t know what to do to make your work earn massive reach?

No worries. This article shows you specifically the ingredients necessary to make your content be popular.

Those ingredients include four major components, and they are usually best done in this order:

0. Content

1. SEO

2. Email

3. Social Media

Aside from being the most efficient method for adding the secret sauce to your content, you can repeat this process for just about any page on any type of site. It just happens to be very easy to do on your WordPress site.

Okay, so let’s quickly review what you should have already done.

Step 1: Register your domain.

Step 2: Setup Your Web Hosting Account

Step 3: Install WordPress

Step 4: Setup plugins to secure your WordPress site and give it the extra powers you need.

In case you skipped straight to this page, and still don’t have a domain or website host, here are some quick shortcuts for you to catch up.

Recommended Registrars:

GoDaddy
JustHost

OK, so we’re all together now. Super.

Now before you can actually optimize, distribute and get social media to popularize your great article, post, page, or other object, like a video, an infographic or an ebook, you first have to create that great piece of content that will appeal to masses of people.

And here’s how you do that.

Section 0: Content

6 Common Traits To Make Your Videos And Other Content Go Viral

As you undoubtedly know, viral content is the most sought after type of content. Of course, if you’re new to publishing, or if you’re stuck in old rules and regulations about how to create content, getting your videos to go viral is more of a Herculean feat than it is a walk in the park. Extremely sharable content is so powerful that it may boost your business, big time. This surge in growth can lead new people to your site, even multiple times, and increase your conversion rate (that’s the percentage of visitors to your website, who take the action you want them to take). Creating a viral video or other type of content is far from easy, unless you know these six simple secrets.

Most people, and especially “experts” and “gurus” will tell you that getting any content to go viral is akin to winning the Internet’s equivalent of the lottery. You’ve no doubt heard about how hard it is to earn viral status for any piece of content, and usually it’s even harder to repeat, let alone to do better and better with each successive attempt. For every viral video success, there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of total epic fails. Even sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, two massive leaders of viral content creation, only have about 0.3 percent of of their posts going viral.

Fortunately for you, I have spent decades researching, experimenting and working through trial and error in the content and marketing business, taking copious notes and distilling them into teachable moments, so that you don’t have to. You can simply read the following and try it out for yourself. You’re welcome.

The good news, despite what others will tell you, is that there are a great deal of things you can do to greatly increase your chances of success at making your content go viral.

So if you want (or need) to help your business claim its stake on the rewards of viral content, follow these six tactics:

Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)

Remember, the content you create is for the Twitter generation. And that means, you have to be able to crystalize your social media message in 140 characters or less. Brainwidth given to any topic is shrinking. And despite the ever-increasing population on Earth, the available slice of earned brainshare in the total minds’ pie is getting narrower for any publisher. This is happening as a result of a shift in the ratio of publishers from few publishers for the population, to many more publishers and channels for consumption than ever before. Human attention span keeps getting shorter. That means you need to tighten up your content be it in written, graphic, audio or video form. Edit your words. Less is more.  Unlike this article, which is lengthy and abundantly verbose for a reason (which will be revealed soon), your viral content should live by the old saying that “Brevity is wit”.

A survey published in The New York Times found more than 19% of people had left a video after only 10 seconds. By 60 seconds in, the video had a whopping 44% attrition rate of viewers. And that means, if you’ve even read this sentence after having read the article from the start (at an average adult reading speed), then you’re already in the top 1% of consumers; a sole survivor in the war for mental attention, fought by publishers eager to win your time. So congratulate yourself. You’re now fully in the labyrinth while all others have already admitted defeat and departed the field.

You see, by keeping the article lengthy, I have used mere words to separate the wheat from the chaff; the genuinely interested people who want to succeed at publishing viral content, from the general “gimme” people who just want to copy & paste their way through the production of content. That leaves you in pole position to take the flag, as soon as you get through the rest of this article, and apply its secrets to your own content.

And now that you know that about half of your audience is gone by the end of the first minute, and about 99% is gone by the end of minute two, be sure to put your most astonishing, interesting, mind-blowing, captivating, funny, or shocking information first and foremost in your content.

Creating viral content generally means do not save the best for last. Throw your first punch fast and hard, and get as many more hits in before that first minute is up.

Of course this does not mean you have to constrain your item to a bite-sized chunk. Viral content can in fact range anywhere in size from a single asset, like a .JPG file, all the way up to rich, multi-page experiences. But just like the Universe we live in, it has to start with a big bang.

After all, if you can’t sum up what you’re doing in a short phrase or two, how are you ever going to get it to go viral on twitter, facebook, linkedin, pinterest, imgur, reddit, etc?

Be Positive

In Contagious: Why Things Catch On, the book’s author, Jonah Berger, wrote that he learned that the most highly sharable or viral content tends to stir strong emotional response in the viewer, reader, listener or other sort of consumer. And of those emotions, the most sharable content has a tendency to be that which has an upbeat tone or a positive note. With the application of the empirical research method, Mr. Berger and University of Pennsylvania Professor Katherine Milkman discovered that happy emotions tend to perform better than sad emotions in terms of actual sharing results.

To be shareworthy, content must hit chords of emotion in viewers. These same people (or deep learning Artificial Intelligence machines) are more probable to share content of a positive nature, so if you want your videos to go viral, it’s important to strive for an upbeat or uplifting spin.

Be Timely

To make your content go viral, it can help to be updated on current events. Although much viral content seems “timeless” in terms of topic, a good deal of it is influenced by the goings-on of the real world. Making reference to an existing popular topic or theme, like  an Internet meme, you improve the likelihood that your content will be seen and shared by the people who have already shown an interest in the topic.

You can use any current event in the world, including politics, pop culture, arts, science, culture, travel, or any subject dominating the news. For instance, see how many parodies of popular entertainment like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones exist on video channels, content curation sites and image sharing sites. If you speak the lingua franca of your target audience and you express interest in their topics of interest, they are more want to share your content.

Be Engaged

A critical component of going viral is engagement. Engaging with a High Value Audience (HVA) leads to better rates of interest, involvement and loyalty. Do not underestimate your audience’s voice and opinion. This understanding is utilized by major brands including Coca-Cola, Old Spice and Amazon in everything from advertising campaigns to comments and other feedback channels on their websites and social media pages.

In addition to having a natural and organic fan base on social media channels, the British magician Dynamo engages larger audiences by doing appearances on BBC and with celebrity hosts like members of the boy band One Direction (when they were quite popular in 2012 – 2014). At one event, he answered fan questions who were using social media to send questions to a television show, the videos of which are up on YouTube. By involving himself with people who might normally be outside of his sphere of influence, he engaged more new minds to videos and TV shows that feature his talents as an illusionist, magician, and mind-reader. By answering questions from those viewers, he gave his brand of content a major boost and made his videos much more sharable.

To Be Continued …

As usual, if you like this article and care to help us in our efforts to put Google’s quality content claims to the test, then I ask you to please share this page with your peers and colleagues on your social networks or any place where web publishers may find it beneficial.

Follow us: @yashaharari on Twitter

Previous Lesson: Web Marketing Lesson 5: Adding and setting up important Plugins