Everyone wants to publish a viral blog post, but if it were as easy as following a formula or template, all of our posts would be runaway hits. Alas, viral blog post ideas are the unicorns of the content marketing world. Now, popular blog posts that readers want to share? That’s a little bit easier! Here’s a quick guide to writing blog posts that make an impact.
You Can’t Make Viral Happen
You just can’t. Here’s why: You have no control over how people are going to react to your content. Viral implies a blog post that has tens of thousands—if not millions!—of views. That’s a tall order, and it’s even more of a feat for a small business blog as opposed to an editorial one.
Editorial blogs exist to create content that engages and entertains. By doing so, they generate ad revenue. As a small business owner, your blog’s job is to convert. You don’t make money from views, you make money from sales. That said, you can borrow some blog post ideas from the editorial world to help you create content worth reading.
Create Shareable Content
If you have Facebook, scroll through your feed and look at what your friends and family are sharing. Setting aside news and content about current events, there are probably a lot of recipes, tips, listicles, and articles that could be categorized as “Isn’t that interesting?”
And what don’t you see? Blog posts like “10 Signs You Need to Hire a Chicago, IL Roofer” or “5 Benefits of Duct Cleaning.”
Those blog posts have their place in the content marketing world—they’re for SEO. But they’re not interesting, engaging, or shareable. Of course, you want to make sure the content you create is relevant to your business, but if recipes, how-to posts, or tips make sense for your products or services, make an investment in original recipe development, beautiful photography, well-designed infographics, and talented writers. In return for your investment, you’ll get content that people will visit your site to read. (See the West Elm blog for a great example of this!)
Dig Into the Research
Editorial websites don’t just willy-nilly publish articles and cross their fingers that they’re not duds. They do a lot of keyword research. As a small business owner, you’re probably familiar with looking for keywords that relate to your products and services, but in this case, you’ll want to take a different perspective: what keywords will bring people to your site for your content?
Here’s an example of what this looks like in practice. If you’re a beekeeper selling your own honey, you might want to research keywords relating to home remedies for sore throats, DIY honey face masks for breakouts, baking with honey, or overnight oats sweetened with honey. Use Semrush or Ubersuggest to determine the popularity of your blog post ideas and how competitive the keywords are.
What if you have a less exciting business? What if you’re an accountant? Here, listicles, guides, and informational posts are ideal. Your posts should be well-researched and well-written to show that you’re a reliable source. Offer your unique perspective on the topics you write about to set your content apart from other blogs. Consider a case study comparing taxes done using tax software vs. using an accountant—people will be interested in reading it with a headline like, “Use Tax Software for Your Taxes? This Is a Must-Read!”
Build Collaborative Relationships
There are obstacles to building traffic—much less getting a viral blog post!—for a business blog. One way to bring more attention to your content is to partner with a popular blogger or influencer. Pay them to create content for you, then have them leverage their following to drive their audience to your site. As an alternative, you can invest your money in creating your own high-quality content and pay to have one or more influencers share these posts with their followers.
Look at What’s Trending
Pay attention to what’s happening on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. These are where viral content is born these days—especially TikTok. You can take the viral trends from these platforms and use them to inspire blog post ideas. When someone searches these trends, they’ll find your content.
Going back to our hypothetical beekeeper, a recent trend on TikTok was freezing honey. She might want to write a blog post all about freezing honey, including an explainer on why honey changes its consistency when frozen, embed some clips from TikTok, and maybe share a recipe for honey-sweetened popsicles.
Need to brainstorm blog post ideas? We’d love to help. Reach out to the bees by filling out our contact form.
