How to Increase Your Daily Traffic by 4029% (and Why You Don’t Want To)

One month ago, I made a very calculated effort to take Blog Design Guy viral. By the time my experiment concluded, traffic to the site had increased by 4029%, from about 100 visitors per day to 5079 on the day of the experiment.

It’s actually much easier to do than you might think. I’ll show you.

How to Write Viral Content

While it might be time consuming to figure out all the specifics, there are really only three steps to creating a viral post:

1. Choose A Distribution Channel
   How will your post travel across the web? Some channels are more suited to viral content than others. Viral posts need to reach as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time while also enabling those people to spread the post further. Sites like Reddit, Digg, Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon are perfect for this. Since Blog Design Guy is about the geeky subject of blogging, I decided to try Hacker News.
2. Study What’s Already Popular
   Since I read Hacker News every day, I already had some idea of which posts would be voted up and which wouldn’t. Hacker News isn’t a site about blogging or WordPress tutorials, so I knew I needed to create a post that would appeal to the community at large. It just so happened that on the same day, I witnessed a website gaming Digg by paying for votes and comments. Few things enrage a geek like people abusing technology to the detriment of the community. Rage also happens to be virally contagious, so I decided to write a post calling out the owner of the site. I framed it as a “what-not-to-do” article for bloggers.
3. Give Your Post An Attractive Headline
   Make people want to click on it. The title is the most important step in making a post go viral. For mine, I went with the sensational, “How to Avoid Irreparably Destroying Your Reputation Before You Even Have One.” This can be kind of hit and miss, though. You can make some good guesses, but it takes experience to really know what to expect. This headline earned me over 5000 clicks, so it’s safe to say it worked out pretty well.

That’s really all it takes. For me, this worked the first time. Maybe it will take you a few tries, but whatever the case I guarantee you’ll get a post to go viral sooner or later.

Do you really want to, though?

Why Going Viral Sucks

With over 5000 people coming to the blog, I must have seen some pretty great results, right?

Nope.

Truth is, if you want to earn a living from your blog, you probably don’t want to attract viral audiences. You don’t want to go out of your way to avoid them, but there’s definitely not much benefit in working hard to attract them. To understand why, just think about the reasons a post would go viral.

Viral posts provide some kind of immediate gratification without requiring any work. It’s content that appeals to “lazy” people, people who are on a lunch break or just killing time for a while. It’s for people who have a few seconds to spare and want to be entertained. They probably won’t care about your newsletter or that ebook you’re offering or that webinar that’s coming up. They only care about having something to do for the short amount of time they have.

That being the case, viral audiences don’t do a lot. As I mentioned before, I have a particular hierarchy of action that I want readers to take. At the top of that list is joining my free blogging course/mailing list. At the bottom, RSS and social media shares. With 5079 visitors coming to my site, I managed to get 20 new RSS subscribers and a higher number of Tweets and Facebook Likes than usual, but only 4 email subscribers.

Of course, there are many things I could do to increase the conversion rate, but in general, viral audiences aren’t passionate about you or what you’re doing. They don’t care at all, they’re just killing some time.

So, What Should You Be Writing?

If viral content doesn’t really benefit your blog, what is there to write then? To borrow terminology from Corbett Barr over at ThinkTraffic, you want to be writing some epic shit. I like to think of epic content as “microviral” content because it should be especially awesome, especially attractive and especially shared by a smaller group of readers in your particular niche.

Epic content reaches your people, not all people. It’s the kind of content that gets consumed by readers who actually give a damn about what you’re doing and what problems you can help them solve.

How to write that epic content, though… well, that’s a topic for another day!

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