Getting Viral Ideas before creating your first post

Although we told you that viral content needs to be emotional to become viral, there is not too much that can be said about what is bound to become viral.

There is not a surefire way to know if something will become wildly popular just by looking at it. Things that seem insignificant can become huge overnight hits without anybody seeing it coming.

The same happens with stuff that looks like the kind of thing that is supposed to make a lot of noise online, but never quite manages to do so. The good news is that there is so much content online that you can just go and take a peek at what can become viral to get ideas before creating a would be viral post.

This chapter mainly deals with ways in which you can spy on trending topics to get a fresh idea about the things that you can capitalize upon at any given moment in time, because something that is in everybody’s mouth today, won’t be there tomorrow, so you better get prepared for it. Let’s get started with some truly useful tips.

You know what’s sad? Arriving late to any party. It’s worse to get there when everyone has already left. To leverage the power of a piece of potentially viral content, you’ll need to put a foot forward and get in the know.

There are plenty of online sources that will allow you to browse trending topics.

We recommend you use one called Buzzsumo.com. This website allows its visitors to use any type of keyword to see how it relates to trending topics.

You’ll enter a keyword in the search bar and buzzsumo.com will show you the results related to that keyword. The first results that you’ll see are the posts that have become viral on social media. You’ll be able to filter your results by date, language, country and content type.

The Anatomy of a Viral Post

There are so many things that can make content go viral that they’re pretty hard to number and dissect on a whim. You have seen this many times by yourself already: you are on your own, minding your business on Facebook or wherever, and all of a sudden you see something on your wall that immediately grabs your attention.

Then, a gut feeling telling you to click on the link

in the post overwhelms you, and you can’t do a thing about it. You click without too much of a second thought, and find the story to be short yet compelling, and you can’t help but click on the share button corresponding to your social network of choice.

That is the exact same reaction that thousands upon thousands of people just had with that same post. It is worth asking: How do they pull it off? We mean the creators of the post. How do they make a post go viral so easily? The secret, besides cool, engaging content, lies in the post’s structure.

Here is a breakdown of the anatomy of a successful viral post. Use this information wisely and you will soon see people reacting the same for your posts!

Title

Common sense would tell you that a great title is a self-explanatory one. A title that tells you just what you need to know. If it contains the information you are after, it will lead you straight to what you wanted, but does this apply to everybody?

The short answer is a flat “NO”. A self-explanatory title will just get the attention of people interested in what the title promotes, but everyone else will pass it off. If you want your titles to grab everyone’s attention, you have to create a title that drives curiosity in people.

Image

Images are great previews for your posts, and are a great compliment to your title. A well-placed image under a well-crafted title will make a huge difference between getting lots of traffic and attention, versus getting just a few clicks here and there. You will always need to accompany your title and body of your posts with high quality images.

What makes a great image viral? Depending on what your title promotes and what your actual content is about, you might get away with using a common image or you might not, especially when your viral content is all about something really specific.

Posting your viral content like a PRO

 You know what it takes to make a post viral: a cool, enticing title, great looking and attention grabbing images, and premium shareable content.

All of those elements combine to make a successful viral post that is sure to make all the rounds.

Now, it is time that you apply the right techniques alongside those elements to create your first viral posts like a pro.

It is easier than you think, and there are various ways to post content that will go viral online, so let’s take a look!

Creating a Viral post

As a first step you’ll need to create your viral post, so let’s do it the easy way. Start in your WordPress dashboard, and go to the “posts” tab, then click on “add new”. This is where all of your viral posts will be born, so bear with us here. There are three basic stages when you post your viral content in your WordPress dashboard, and we will teach you to go through them step by step.

The first one is the title, located in the “enter title here” text box. Use the tools that we recommended before to create a title that people will want to click on, and enter it here. Next comes the viral image, which can be inserted with the “add media” button. You can insert two types of images here: “featured” images and “into post” images.

A “Featured image” is a headline image that will go along with your title, usually on top of it, so this is the first one that you need to insert, just click on “upload files” and search for it in your computer or use one from your media library.

Into post” images are images that will accompany your content, so you will insert those depending on how you structure your post.

The last stage is the structure of your content. Like we said, it is better to structure your post in list format, and WordPress allows you to do so with a little code in the “text editor”.

Just type your numbered titles in between “<h1></h>”. To give you an example, our first numbered title would be “<h1>Hack Number 5</h>”. You will have to do this for each one of your subtitles.

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