Do you dream of attracting thousands of readers to your corporate blog and enthral them to the extent that they keep returning to your website for fresh content?
Or perhaps your dream is the certainty that your blog posts will go viral, even before you publish them.
When blogging for business, the holy grail each company is seeking is that one post (or indeed repeated posts) takes off and spreads like wildfire among a target audience of buyers, customers and prospects because they just can’t resist sharing it.
The definition of viral
The common definition of viral has, regrettably, come to mean something altogether unattainable. As bloggers, our innate thirst for success and sharing our content motivates us to reach the epic internet sensations that run up to the thousands and millions. We’ve all cast our eyes over those articles that leap to distract us from the daily grind promising “40 tips for a better life” or offering a clue as to “How to prevent cancer”.
In the consumer realm, such promises are enticing and difficult to ignore. Yet for B2B business, or those offering a rather less than sexy product or service, it can seem a bigger challenge to create that “have to read” sensation.
As a starting point, let’s redefine viral. A viral blog post is essentially one that has a significantly high number of shares compared to your average post.
To work this out, determine the average number of times your post gets shared on social networks. In a sense, it’s all relative and a question of scale. Some companies may want a blog to achieve ten times the average share rate before considering it a viral success, for others the same accolade will warrant a figure 200 times beyond their average.
Going viral can sometimes be a question of luck, as in when a blog post contains that magic element that chimes and resonates so perfectly with its audience’s sentiment that they all want to share said magic with their various social communities.
When that happens, it’s bloody fantastic.
Yet in our experience, there are three more considered ways to guarantee a post’s viral success. For the sake of this blog, let’s call them the three fundamentals of blogging for business:
How to make your blog posts go viral:
1. Establish your speciality
The beauty of this tip is that the more focused your niche is, the easier it is to generate content ideas for an interested target audience. Too many nascent corporate blogs fall foul of trying to be too many things to too many people. Thinking mathematically, this means that only a fraction of the blog’s readership will be drawn to a post, diminishing the chances of the content spreading.
Establish your niche (the specific area in which you are an expert and thought leader) and create informative posts on that subject; your readers will come to respect you and, in turn, want to earn respect by sharing your content.
2. Get involved in your community
Clearly, the first step here is to know your target audience and pinpoint where they ‘hang out’ to share information, ask questions and generally converse. Frequent the most popular and respected blogs in your niche and, once there, take the time to ask questions, add comments and respond to other people’s queries. See it as an invaluable research tool, for discovering what kind of content makes people tick and interact.
The more involved you become, the more likely that fellow commentators will click through to your own corporate blog.
3. Establish your tone of voice
No matter how specific your niche, you can almost guarantee that there already exist a gadzillion other blogs each claiming to offer the expert voice on that topic. Unfortunately, these bloggers will likely be attending the same events and covering the same news and tips as you.
To draw your readers to your blog above all others, you need to bestow it with an appealing character and unique personality of its own. Understand your world view and express it in a way that your readers will relate to and appreciate.
The more that you can get people to believe in your writing as a credible yet human source of information, the more likely they are to share your content.
Photo: David Sim
