Tutorial: How to Write a Viral-ready Article in 2 Hours Flat

How to write a viral post
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.

Step 1

Spend 10 minutes studying what has worked before. Look to other sites in your niche and find a list of popular posts, or a ‘best of’. This will give you a quick overview of the styles of content that are popular in your niche, and of the formulas that have been effective in the past.

The aim of this exercise is not to write an article with the broadest possible appeal to attract anyone and everyone. Instead, we want to create something that is viral among the right kinds of people. I can easily write a viral article about sport on my darts site, but even if it brings in 10,000 visitors, only 1% of those might be into darts. The rest are never going to come back. I would rather get 500 visits from darts aficionados only.

Step 2

Write down the three core wants of your target reader, only as they relate to your niche. Here are two examples:

For someone learning to use Adobe Photoshop, this is likely to be:

Become very good at using Photoshop.
Earn good money for the things I make in Photoshop.
Learn how to do something very cool and useful in Photoshop that I didn’t know before.

For someone reading news about Tennis, this could be:

Learn more about Tennis and its history.
Keep up with my favorite players.
Know more about new developments in Tennis.

I’ve picked these specific examples because the first is probably going to be applied to advice based content (like what you’re reading now), while the Tennis example applies to informational content. Most of you will be writing in one style or the other, or a mix of both.

These three core wants are very powerful individually. I believe that whenever someone is reading content online, unless they are idly passing time, they are making the choice to read something because it might satisfy one of those core wants.

Explicitly addressing an entire core want in your article is a very powerful viral strategy. Here’s an example:

I read an article about ‘How to Tackle in Soccer’ because I want to learn how to be a great soccer defender. Don’t you think I would be even more excited to read ‘How to be a Great Soccer Defender’?

I read an article about ’5 Best Spanish Wines’ because I want to keep finding new and better wines, so don’t you think I’d be excited to read ’50 Legendary Wines to Try Before You Die’?

As you can see, one strategy to creating a viral article is to present a blueprint for satisfying a core want. It’s certainly not the only strategy, but it’s one of the easiest and most effective methods. In this tutorial it’s the method we’re going to run with.

Step 3

Pick the core want you’d like to focus on in this article. Think about which one you’d like to write about most. This means you’re most passionate about it, which will lead to better writing.

Step 4

This viral article will be a ‘How to’ post. List posts are also an excellent framework and the same post can be framed in either way:

‘How to Always Have Great Ideas’

‘Top 20 Ways to Generate Amazing Ideas’

Even if you never write advice content, you can do so for this viral article. While there are plenty of ways to create information-based viral content, I’ll be covering those in another tutorial so I can keep this one focused. For now, be prepared to try something new!

Your headline formula will be this:

‘How to ‘

From my earlier Photoshop example, I could choose from one of the three following headlines:

‘How to Become an Advanced Photoshop User in 30 Days’
‘How to Earn Good Money and Work in Photoshop’
‘How to Create Rare and Awesome Photoshop Effects’

For my Tennis example, which is not advice based at all, I could write:

‘How to be a Tennis Expert’

Step 5

When converting one of the ‘core wants’ for your niche into a ‘How to’ headline, make sure to jazz it up a bit if the result is plain. Instead of:

‘How to Make More Friends’

I would use:

‘How to Make Five New Friends in Five Weeks’

Here I am making the concept more appealing by promising an immediate benefit (you can satisfy your core want quickly) and adding specificity (the post will help you make 5 new friends). Promising immediate benefits will encourage action, in this case reading the article, and specificity helps to eliminate doubt about the return on time-investment.

Another way to jazz up your headline is to add detail, description and if possible, a dash of magic. Instead of:

‘How to Be a Better Runner’

I would use:

‘How to Run (Almost) Forever and Feel Incredible Doing It’

Both articles are likely to read exactly the same, but the second one is more evocative.

Step 6

Now it’s time to begin working on your article. Follow this 2 hour plan:

30 minutes of planning – work out your headline and write a skeleton framework of your article.
30 minutes of research – will help you find links and ideas to include. If you’re mainly writing off the top of your head you can substitute research for more planning or start writing earlier. Note: articles are always stronger when they lead-off with a great picture. You can use this guide to find a great Flickr image to include with your post.
60 minutes of writing – with a framework in place, it’s time to flood the page with all your best tips on how to satisfy the core want you’re addressing. Try to cover as much as possible in the time you have. Go as broad as you can, then as deep as you can. Give your readers a complete guide.

Step 7

You can create something even stronger by spending more time on it. While 2 hours is very manageable and enough time to produce a viral post, the final product will be even better if you spend 4 hours on it. Consider using the following model if you have more time:

30 minutes of planning
60 minutes of research
120 minutes of writing
30 minutes of editing and revising

Step 8

Before people can begin to spread the word about your great article, they’ve got to read it! This is why you should do some simple promotion of your article as a final step.

If you have Twitter, tweet about it. If your headline is good and you have enough followers you should be able to generate some valuable re-tweets.
Send it to your friends on StumbleUpon. Do this by clicking ‘Send to’ in the toolbar and clicking the friend you’d like to send to.
Email 3 other peers in your niche letting them know about the article. You can ask them for a link or a tweet.
Ask readers to share the article if they liked it (this is usually done at the end of the article).
Give your article a review on StumbleUpon (only if you haven’t thumbed or reviewed your own stuff many times, because the effectiveness wears off after you stumble one domain often.)

If you complete the exercise following either the 2 hour or 4 hour plan, post your results. I’d love to see what you come up with.

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Published On May. 02, 2009 by Skellie

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