The Secret Sauce of Viral Content : Humour or Homer

Just over 3 weeks ago I submitted a post to a blog, contained within a very stiff collar market – health and safety. The site in question was under a year old and mostly deriving it’s traffic from the Google shopping feeds (which I ran as well). It required, nay, needed a stiff injection to shake it from the shackles of peripheral seedings within the search engines. The post was constructed to help address the situation that the site found itself within. No one, within the inner circle, expected, not even I, the bloated results that we were soon to witness.

It’s no secret that social media is a great resource for getting information in front of many eyeballs. But, because it is no secret, sometimes the message gets lost or buried so fast in a waterfall of submissions, that only those that have the ability (through whatever means) to sprout some web waterwings float to the top of the home pages. However, those that succeed can then bask in the attention of some server melting traffic (kudos to Andrew).

Watching those figures churn over in your analytics page is a joy to behold. 10, 20, 30 40 thousand unique users skim on past, and still it churns. 50, 60 , 70, 80 thousand and still it shows no signs of petering out. Finally, the meter slows and the real economy of the blog post is revealed.

Total No of Visits : 97,929 and from those visits, a rather nice, almost round 1,785 backlinks showing in Google Webmaster Tools, not Yahoo, for a post that took less than half an hour to create and also highlight a product that had been available to buy for over 3 years. Just no-one had ever bothered to market it properly online. Now, the site is becoming more visible, sales have increased, and I get a deep satisfaction of a job well done.

*** This was NOT intentional linkbait, it is a post to SHOW the power of blogging and social media ***