Photo by Dreamscape Photographs.

Viral articles are game-changing content that can fling your blog, website or portfolio into the stratosphere. Viral articles get links, retweets, social media votes, comments and lots of traffic. The success of a viral article is usually followed by a powerful subscriber jump. Once you learn the strategy to create viral content, things will never be the same.

In this post I want to show you how to create a viral-ready post, customized to your niche, in exactly two hours. This is a plan anyone can follow. If you have some spare time now I urge you to read this article and then set aside a couple of hours to follow the steps outlined here. If you’re short of time, bookmark this post and come back to it when you next sit down to write. I’m confident that the final result of this exercise will be one of the most popular content items you’ve ever created.

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Photo by notsogoodphotography.

For a number of years bands have been using the web to create ’street-teams’ - exclusive groups that turn fans into promoters. In exchange for spreading the word about the band, fans in ’street-teams’ would get early notice about ticket sales, discounts on merchandise and other bonuses.

This might seem irrelevant to the usual scope of this blog, but I think the ’street-team’ concept can be powerfully adapted to building your own audience in areas far outside the music industry. By giving your biggest fans the tools to spread the word about you and rewarding them for doing so, you can create a powerful grassroots promotional machine for your work.

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Bloggers are very privileged to be able to share our creative output with so many people, and in some cases, to profit from that creative output. We’re able to do this because we’re not living in poverty. We can afford to run computers, electricity, pay internet bills, purchase domain names and hosting–something that many people can’t do, and will never do.

Blog Action Day 2008 presents an excellent opportunity to remember this, and to avoid taking the privileges we have for granted. That’s why I’m glad to take part this year, with this post.

Here’s a challenge: today, do at least ten things to help in the battle against poverty. Don’t worry–I’ve made it kind of easy for you. Below are 30 things you can do. Some take a few hours, others a few minutes, others only a few seconds. Some you’ll only able to begin today, others you’ll be able to begin and end. Best of all, (almost) none of them require you to leave the chair you’re sitting in right now.

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Photo by Freeparking.

Posts based on the Number + Adjective + Contents headline formula are probably the most popular form of web content we’ve ever seen. For every one person who loathes them there are one-hundred people who are enchanted by them. For reasons that others have previously explored, this kind of content pushes all the right psychological buttons.

The formula isn’t a secret weapon known only to an elite set of maverick writers. Anyone who reads blogs or uses social media gets it: that the formula is very much in fashion. Blogs that have never used it before are now tapping into spikes of social media traffic with its help. Writers who can stick to the formula are highly sought-after and increasingly well-paid. Blogs that use the formula well are growing at a rapid rate (and so are some that don’t, but I’ll get to that later). The formula works.

But for how long? Trends reach a saturation point and then begin a decline. If the formula hasn’t reached saturation point yet, it must be heading towards it. In this post, I want to talk about what comes after the death of this trend.

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If you haven’t noticed already, Digg is the most deeply gamed social media service on the planet.

‘Gaming’ social media is the act of using private networks and arrangements to propel your own content forward. Asking for votes is gaming, organizing submission by select individuals is gaming, and so on.

The argument against so-called ‘gaming’ is that it’s undemocratic, and it goes against the principle of a level playing field. At first glance, this objection sounds both fair and logical. The issue is made more complex by the truth: everybody does it. From top bloggers down to little minnows in the web ocean, people are trying to maximize their chances of success on Digg using both arranged submission and private networks.

For a second, though, let’s imagine if nobody did this. Small blogs and websites would be at a huge disadvantage, as they’d be unable to get more than a few Diggs from their modestly-sized regular readership. The chances of the Digg community picking up on a submission with 5 - 10 diggs in as many hours is miniscule at best, considering the huge number of submissions made every hour. At the opposite end of the spectrum, highly trafficked blogs and websites would utterly dominate the front page (more than they already do), because they could rely on their huge reserves of traffic to propel the stories forward.

The end result? You have a service that sends CNET, TechCrunch, NyTimes and the Huffington Post even more traffic, and entrenches the web media status quo.

Is it really a level playing field if content succeeds based on the size of its servers and advertising budget, rather than on the back of human creativity and endeavour alone?

A network of voters can give even a small website or blog the chance to hit the front page, by putting its content in a position to be judged by the Digg community, and then either propelling it success or burying it, depending on its merits. This networking stage is also one of the most social and enjoyable aspects of using Digg.

If you’re serious about playing the odds game on Digg, you need a network to push your best content forward. Here’s how you can build one, and benefit everyone involved. Read More…

Most bloggers would love their content to hit the front page of Digg. Unfortunately, most of those bloggers are never able to experience the huge spike of traffic and the feelings of accomplishment this brings.

In this post, I want to argue that success with Digg is an odds game. You can never guarantee it, but you can give yourself the best possible odds. I’ll be describing how to do this, right down to what kind of post you should create, and how to get it moving up the ranks on Digg. Read More…

Photo by blprnt

1. The social media runaway train. Perhaps the most sought after (and least frequently attained) route to a popular blog is rapid ‘growth from above’ resulting from huge traffic spikes, most frequently originating from Digg. This route was traveled by blogs like Zen Habits (did you know Zen Habits has been on the Digg front page more than 80 times?) and The Art of Manliness.

Getting started on this path:
Why You’ve Got to Digg Digg to Get Dugg
The One True Cause of Rapid-fire Growth

2. Grassroots growth. The most common form of blog growth occurs at the grassroots, where blogs and bloggers at similar levels of development collaborate from the ground up. The central idea here is that a lot of little links are just as powerful as one big, top-down growth event. This is one of the most community-based approaches, though growth yielded through this route tends to be consistent and slow-burn.

Getting started on this path:
Hansel and Gretel Link-building Read More…

The thought of making the front page of Digg is something that divides most content-creators into three camps: those who want it and strive for it, those who want it but feel they don’t have a chance, and those who don’t want it at all.

The latter group usually believes (from experience) that Digg traffic is worthless traffic, though I think it has more to do with the combination of that blog with Digg’s audience, or that content with Digg’s audience, which determines whether the event of being on the front page will be worthwhile.

Having gained several hundred subscribers each time this blog has been Dugg, and having enjoyed the snowball effect of going popular on Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon as well, my own experience paints a much more positive picture.

The rapid rise of blogs like The Art of Manliness, which has gone from a few hundred to 5,000+ subscribers in a matter of weeks, mainly on the strength of Digg, demonstrates that brushing aside Digg users as fickle and commitment phobic might just be the easy (and certainly not the best way) out.

In this post, I want to talk about the most often overlooked aspect of what is required to write content with strong potential on Digg (and the same principle applies to StumbleUpon, Reddit, or any other social media service you can imagine). Read More…

Photo by millicent_bystander

Repeated and huge torrents of social media traffic over many months.

That’s it.

Think about the blogs you’ve observed grow from zero to many thousands of subscribers in a relatively short period of time.

Zen Habits has been on the front page of Digg 82 times.

Freelance Switch, 18 times.

Copyblogger, 22 times (but is now on the auto-bury list).

Dosh Dosh has never made the front page of Digg, but it eats StumbleUpon alive every day.

Here’s the truth about how they did it. Read More…

Image by 4_EveR_YounG.

Headlines can make or break a story. With thousands of different articles vying for our attention, web users can afford to be picky.

In an ideal world we’d give articles a fighting chance to prove their worth, but in truth, unless we have pre-existing faith in the author, we often make the decision to read or ignore before our eyes have reached the end of the headline.

Web writers have only recently, it seems, started to realize the crucial importance of the headline. The ascendancy of the headline has been one aspect of Web 2.0 culture which hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

This post is a tour of the key web headline formulas being used today. Some will inspire you, others will make you cringe. All of them are sourced from real examples. Read More…