$25 For Best Layed Out Plan To Make My Blog Go Viral!

[Ilya Feynberg]

Ok Warriors...

I'm going to keep on my little tradition of these mini contests for the best advice, titles, plans and so on by running another fun little contest.

$25 goes to...

The Warrior who can come up with the most nifty, workable, realistic, and proven ways of making my new and controversial blog go viral and spread like wildfire!

While I don't want to release all the details on my blog just yet, or for that matter release the url just yet (I will here shortly), here's a lowdown on what I'm trying to get at...

The blog deals with college students, high school students, and young adults by directly speaking to them and others about certain current issues. However it is not limited those groups only as anyone of any age will find the blog something to talk about. It won't be the nicest blog either...meaning I'm not mr nice guy, and plan on doing a fair share of bashing and maybe even some directed insulting regrading certain issues.

The goal here would be to catch as much attention as possible with everything from a press release, to word of mouth....to get everyone talking about it, and it is an issue that grows more real and serious by the day for people, and most people will get defensive about it too. Anything can be considered...from facebook to forums, to blogging, to whatever to make it work!

One last thing of note is that this won't exactly be something that I can target people through traditional keywords and optimizing for them. So picking a keyword, writing an article blah blah blah ain't really do it.

I'll probably run the contest for 2 or 3 days depending, and if you have any questions than ask away!

Let's get this contest on baby!

Mike

[Dan C. Rinnert]

Do a humorous video that tackles something in current events. Get people to stumble and digg it and try getting it mentioned on some of the college and young adult targeted websites and blogs out there. I think the college sites just eat that kind of stuff up. Find a way to work an attractive young woman into the video, and you're golden. Humor, beer and attractive (and generally scantily clad) women is what seems to go viral fairly well among that crowd. Mix them together, and you've got a good chance of getting it to go viral.

[e-mail2u]

Run a giveaway campaign if they can get one new visitor to your site they get a free product. Make the give away a good one worth $***** and they will be e-mailing their friends. Here's the catch they only have a limited amount of time before this offer runs out. If the person receiving the e-mail does not visit your site within the set period the referrer loses out.

Use a script like Tell a friend detonator Xl ... it will run your viral giveaway on auto pilot. So you can concentrate on your blog.

[Paul Wilson]

Buy TS2, watch all the CDs (in particular CD 7) and apply.

Regards,

Paul.

[Ilya Feynberg]

Some interesting answers so far guys....but the $25 is still wide open

Anyone else??

[Ilya Feynberg]

Jose,

Wow...I haven't started reading your post just yet...but with the content in there...it looks exciting...and also...you might want to make a post to rid yourself of that oh so wonderful post count you got going on there

Get to back ya'll soon!

[Jack Humphrey]

Add a couple 0's to that $25 and you've got a deal.

No offense to the poster or the participants, but if you are willing to take advice from people who will give it for $25 - or you are willing to write advice and you know it's going to give the blogger a massive outcome for $25....

I think you see the problem. Our clients pay tens of thousands for our advice on making their sites go viral.

But hey - great for up and coming folks. Especially if they actually know what they're talking about and need the money.

[Lance K]

Originally Posted by jdh358

Add a couple 0's to that $25 and you've got a deal.

No offense to the poster or the participants, but if you are willing to take advice from people who will give it for $25 - or you are willing to write advice and you know it's going to give the blogger a massive outcome for $25....

I think you see the problem. Our clients pay tens of thousands for our advice on making their sites go viral.

But hey - great for up and coming folks. Especially if they actually know what they're talking about and need the money.

Jack, your response saved me a lot of typing. I couldn't agree more.

[seree]

1. Know what your targeted visitor want.
2. Give away some exciting gift if visitor tell-a-friend.
3. Give me $25 or $100.

hehe :-)

[edynas]

Goto Social Media Daily and Authority Black Book - Social Marketing Tactics and Web 2.0 Traffic Generation Strategies...

Social media daily is the blueprint you are looking for. If you follow even 25-50% of the steps in socialmediadaily your blog will be more viral and receiving more visitors then you can imagine. That ebook was initially made as a guidline for the outsourcing partners of Michelle MacPhearson (30minutebacklinks.com) to get sites she had traffic and viral. So it's a step by step book.

Authority blackbook will give you more details about al the web2.0 resources.

Ohhhh...and both are free (I am Dutch so that's important to me )

[Ilya Feynberg]

Originally Posted by Jack Humphrey

Add a couple 0's to that $25 and you've got a deal.

No offense to the poster or the participants, but if you are willing to take advice from people who will give it for $25 - or you are willing to write advice and you know it's going to give the blogger a massive outcome for $25....

I think you see the problem. Our clients pay tens of thousands for our advice on making their sites go viral.

But hey - great for up and coming folks. Especially if they actually know what they're talking about and need the money.

Jack,

You do make very good points, and I do indeed see and understand where you're coming from. I would love to talk to you a bit more...expect a PM from me sometime tomorrow

As for everyone who has responded to my post, thank ya! I'm still searching for a winner, and trust me you're responses are all dully noted! I promised a winner $25, and like I've done every time before I'll live up to it!

Mike

[John Taylor]

this is not original

Originally Posted by jose delgado

here are 13 practical ways you can grow the readership of your blog to help it go viral:

1. First determine why you’re blogging. who is your audience? What are your goals? What are your readers interested in? If you create compelling content for readers, readers will naturally come back to your blog to read more.

2. Do basic research. go to technorati and search for keywords related to your target audience and the topics you want to focus on. While there, try to answer these questions: Who are the influential bloggers in your space? Who is successful at getting in front of the readers you want to get in front of?

Technorati is a great resource for this because it ranks recent blog posts based on their "authority," or how many people link to that blog. High-ranking blogs are the ones you'll want to check out. See what they write about, what people comment about… and while you're at it, also note any posts you particularly like, because later you can link posts you write to those posts, which might generate return traffic through track backs.

3. Avoid sub domains. never set up a blog under a sub-domain. Install your blog on your own domain as a sub-page, or if you don’t have a domain, get one.

If you’re using blogger as your blog platform, i recommend switching to wordpress. The reason is that while blogger is free, your blog will be a sub-domain of blogger (like myblogwentviral.blogspot.com), and people that visit your blog may never find your website.

4. Create a content schedule. determine a steady schedule for how you’ll post, and plan ahead to create structure around your workload. If you plan to post on tuesdays and fridays, for example, put it on your calendar. While you’re at it, take the time to determine what topics you’ll cover on those days.

Whether you start with a schedule of one, two, or a dozen blog posts a week, stay on that schedule. The more scheduled and consistent your blog postings are, the better. You can also start out with occasional posts, but only if those posts are extremely thought-provoking – make sure each of those posts is a home run.

If you plan on blogging frequently, stick to that plan. If you post regularly and then drift away for a few weeks, your readers will also quickly drift away. Your posting schedule in effect creates an expectation on the part of your readers (“hey, it’s tuesday, let’s see what she has to say today”) so make sure you meet that expectation. Don’t disappoint your audience.

5. Be personal. post a photo of yourself and/or your team, and write good bios to enhance your credibility and demonstrate that you’re a real person to your readers. This engages your audience.

At the same time, if you have a business blog, don’t blog about your family or the new restaurant you tried unless somehow you quickly tie that into a business topic.

6. Be first. being the first one to post breaking news is a relatively easy way to go viral.

To make the process a little simpler for yourself, create news alerts from yahoo news!, google news, and rss feeds. Then just link to the news source, but don’t forget to put your spin on it.

You’ll get your opinion out there before others do and over time readers will come to rely on your blog to find out what’s new – and for what you think about what’s new.

You can also create resources like how-to articles or lists of helpful sites, such as “100 tools to help you be more organized online,” “home staging tips to raise your home’s sale price by $5,000,” or my favorite and yours, “thirteen ways to make your blog go viral.”

if you find sources that the average visitor doesn’t know about, you can draw in folks who can’t find – or don’t have the time to find – those sources themselves. Visitors love blogs that provide useful information while saving them time.

7. Stay on top of what other bloggers are saying. if an influential blogger posts about a topic and you disagree with their viewpoint, link to their post and state your position. Don’t worry about taking a different position or even being negative, as long as you’re not insulting. Disagreement creates interaction and interaction builds a community. If you say the same thing everyone else does, why should people read your blog?

8. Pay attention to social networking sites. take the time to study the social sites to see what people like. An article that goes “popular” on digg can generate tens of thousands of visitors to your site. The same is true for stumbleupon or del.icio.us.

To get a feel for the kinds of posts that can be popular on social networking sites, do searches on social networking websites for keywords to identify content that works well.

On digg: Do a search and change the search criteria to only show stories that have gone popular and you’ll see articles that reached the first page in your subject area.

On del.icio.us you can search for a keyword and see what articles have been “tagged” – the more people that saved those articles, the more popular they were.

Stumbleupon works the same way.

9. Stay in control of your blog. real time statistics from your blog are important, so keep up with your live stats so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

The reason real time stats are important is because new blog postings have a “hot” shelf life of about 24 hours, and if you wait until the next day to find out what’s happening, you can’t take steps to add to the popularity of your posting. For example, if your article gets picked up by a social networking site, you can grab a button off digg and post a vote count for the article on your site, which will entice readers to check you out, hopefully vote for you, be more interactive with your blog, and help your blog grow.

Google analytics is a free tool that takes about five minutes to sign up for. I use and recommend this tool, but the downside is you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get a report on today’s traffic.

Mint, which is available for $30 per site on haveamint.com, gives you live, real-time statistics. You can post to your blog and almost instantly watch the traffic that goes to your site.

10. Make it easy for your readers: put your rss feed in a prominent place. Rss feeds let users display the content from multiple blogs through one program so they can easily see the latest posts from all their favorite blogs. Many visitors prefer to use rss feeds to subscribe to your content so they don’t have to visit your blog through a browser.

Also, use feedburner, a free, analytical tool that lets you see how many people subscribe to your blog. Google analytics and mint won’t give you statistics for your rss readership, so without feedburner you’ll miss critical information about your blog’s readership.

For more information about rss feeds and feedburner, check out patrick bennett’s article “8 must do’s to start a successful wordpress blog”.

11. Rinse and repeat. watch your blog carefully to see what works. And know that some blogs do better on stumbleupon, some blogs do really well on digg, and others seem to perform better on del.icio.us.

To figure our what works for your blog, first determine where your traffic comes from and which resources bring the most visitors or comments. If three articles are failures and one is a home run, don’t rehash the same content used in the home run but use it as a blueprint for other posts.

If news works well for you, spend time finding ways to get news alerts more quickly so you can grow that audience. If how-to articles are popular, make sure your blog contains a healthy dose of how-to information.

The bottom line is that you should experiment and pay attention to the results so you can see who your audience is and what that audience wants. Find out what works – and then stick with it.

12. Don’t try to please everyone. have opinions and stand by them. Even if everyone doesn’t love what you do, that’s okay. Some of my favorite blogs are ones i frequently disagree with. Even though i have a different opinion their posts make me think … which makes me come back for more.

13. Finally, don’t get discouraged. many bloggers write a couple of posts, don’t see much traffic, and give up. Building a readership and going viral takes time and experience. It takes effort to find ways to get your particular audience to visit, comment on your posts, and recommend you to others – but it’s worth it.

[edynas]

Originally Posted by John Taylor

this is not original

Thirteen Ways to Make Your Blog ?Go Viral? | Elance

[Jack Humphrey]

"this is not original"

lmao! Now why didn't I see that angle? I imagined him typing all that up special just for this thread, lol.

[John Taylor]

Originally Posted by Jose Delgado

I never said it WAS original. And he didn't either.

So you think it's OK to enter a competition to win $25 by plagiarising someone else's work?

That's disgraceful.

John

[edynas]

I thought also that it was a good post and very time consuming.
I have nothing against refering good sources but have a link to the resource and don't pretend it's your work. it would have been the same if I took your ebook and cope pasted it here and pretended i wrote authority blackbook ...guess that would have been spotted faster

[e-mail2u]

Another idea,

Link a affiliate program to the blog, running only one offer the person who refers the most unique traffic with in a set period wins for example $200. Collage students are hard up for cash well some are anyways so this will be a good incentive to drive traffic to your site.

Your affiliate program will track the click (unique only)

Just think they will tell their friends in which turn will tell their friends they all will want to win that money. Just change the prize each month and post the winner on the site so all can view.

[Ilya Feynberg]

Great idea's guys! I think I'm almost ready to select some winners here.

And Jose....you could have just told me where you go it from man and might have $25 now. But I can't ethically let you win a contest that you entered with pirated work. Sorry!

[Lance K]

Originally Posted by mdunn123

Great idea's guys! I think I'm almost ready to select some winners here.

And Jose....you could have just told me where you go it from man and might have $25 now. But I can't ethically let you win a contest that you entered with pirated work. Sorry!

Drats, now he'll have to find someone else's $25 to burn a hole in his pocket.

Frankly, I'm shocked that anyone would risk their credibility (even if unintentionally) for $25. Cite the sources...ALWAYS!!!

[Ilya Feynberg]

Originally Posted by lakading

Drats, now he'll have to find someone else's $25 to burn a hole in his pocket.

Frankly, I'm shocked that anyone would risk their credibility (even if unintentionally) for $25. Cite the sources...ALWAYS!!!

Lance,

I got a PM from Jose last night apologizing and explaining himself a little bit for the post. I respect that. I'm sure it was just a small mistake or blip on his part. No hard feelings on feelings on my part!

I do already have a winner...the contest didn't go the way I planned but I promised to award someone $25 and so I shall.

I'll post back here in a couple of hours as I'm not on a secure network right now and don't want to do any paypal transactions here.