As TrackMaven expands with even more corgis, or employees as non-team TrackMaven people would call them, I’ve been getting more inquiries for others on the team to write blog posts. Which, I would like to point out that I am absolutely thrilled about.

This however, lead to some funkiness. Do we use oxford commas? What about an en dash versus an em dash? What formal writing guidelines do we follow — MLA, AP, Chicago Style?

After some of those questions came in, I put together some guidelines to help streamline the entire process.

The major question that I wanted to tackle was the promotion of the content. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth to get my fellow Mavens to share a blog post, but 99% of the time I understand why something wasn’t shared as most of us are heads down working through the craziness that defines is our normal at TrackMaven.

The main point I made when making the blogging guidelines was that in order for our posts to get shared more often, to gain more social shares, or to even reach any pinnacle of virality is that we have to share it in the first place. There is even more to do after we hit publish on a blog post. This all lead me to the idea of how a spark is lit, how content goes viral, and why there is such a different view conveyed on it.

There is this beautiful and glorious painted picture of virality. You write a great piece of content and then BAM it goes viral. It’s that easy!

Wake up sunshine, it doesn’t happen that way.

I’m sure many content creators and other marketers can attest to this, but getting a piece to go viral takes a lot more grind and labor than you would think. There isn’t some magic sauce we add to certain pieces of content for the post to immediately become a viral piece of gold, a post that is just funny doesn’t make it to the top, and simple corgi pictures in a piece, unfortunately, don’t drive 100,000 uniques.

There is a ton of grind and manual labor involved in making a post go viral

The Manual Labor of Virality

Content Creation

If you build, they will come…sike

But there is some validity in that statement as you can’t have a viral piece of content, until you have a piece of content in the first place. Creating pieces of quality content that resonate with your audience is extremely important because it lays the groundwork for something to go viral. Think of the actual pieces of content as the firewood that helps keep the fire going.

Sharing Everywhere

Image via Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs

The most effective B2B Content Marketers are using on average 7 social sharing platforms, which is presents over 7 different opportunities to share your content. It’s easy to fall into that trap of thinking that it’s good enough to just share Facebook and Twitter. Don’t fall for it!

Share, with the right messages, on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Instagram, Google+, Quora, etc. to get your message out.

Asking Everyone to Share it Everywhere

Teammates, friends, significant others, customers, prospects, influencers, moms, and dads are just several of the people you can ask for help to promote out your content. It all can just amplify from this point when you start to factor in the number of social networks they use.

Did you know that giving your post some type of CTA or direction on Twitter will get you more RTs? Spelling out the entire word Retweet in your tweets receives on average 1.88 retweets. Just ask for people to share your posts and you’ll get farther than if you don’t.

Test

The components above could be considered the most laborious of the tasks in getting a viral spark going, but once you find a spark it gets easier to replicate it into a system of sorts. The quickest way to see if a piece of content is resonating with your audience is to test headlines. This will tell you what headline is capturing your audience’s attention and what they are willing to go the extra mile to share.

For example, Upworthy writes over 25 headlines per post and then tests two of them to see what is the better performing one.

Buffer also does this same tactic by testing their headlines in tweets.

Now, here’s are some tips for what you should do.

1. Make it good

There are low quality pieces of content that get shared, but ultimately the content and blog posts that make a bigger bang are of higher quality.

2. Set your goals.

Set some levels of expectation. Want 500 social shares? Or at least 3 press mentions? Aim for those targets, so then you can measure how well your content performed.

A side note for setting your goals is to define virality for your own brand. If you are in the big leagues your threshold for something to be “viral” will be different from a smaller brand.

3. List of Influencers

I have a handy list of marketing influencers and friends of TrackMaven who I seek out to share a post that I want to get some more traction than if I were to only share it on the TrackMaven platforms. Think about it, if you have a bare minimum list of 5 people it’s still shared 5 more times than if you share it by yourself.

4. Share, oh and share it again

Share your post. Yes, you may come off a bit annoying to some people, but as long as you are catering your message to different social networks there isn’t a reason why you shouldn’t share your content more than once.

Also, put in a little extra work sharing or pitching the content to some press outlets. It’s not a gurantee that they’ll pick up what you are saying, but targeting the right writers with the right messages can give your content an added boost.

5. Add some dollars behind it

Is there a post on Facebook directing to a piece of content that’s doing better than others? What about a tweet? Try adding some dollars behind these posts to generate a little more buzz. You’ll be able to reach a wider audience after you’ve already got it up and running.

Most viral posts don’t have any types of special ingredients, but maybe they have a unicorg or two grinding out the promotion to get the most buzz the content can get.