Stupid Easy Viral Outbreak Rundown

Viral marketing case study

I logged on early yesterday morning and quickly realized that an article I had automagically set to go live minutes after midnight had already gone viral. Late night west coast and early morning European Twitter users found it first–15 Way Cool Social Networking Sites You Never Heard Of–and tweeted it some three dozen times before I woke up.

I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing!

By late morning my stats pushed past 1000 visitors, topping 2000 late in the afternoon. This morning I reviewed my stats and have found that nearly 5000 people have stopped by to read this one article alone. And the traffic is still flowing!

I promised Dominique over at 4 Walls and a View that I would give a recap today about what exactly transpired as she noticed that something was up too. Though all isn’t “said and done” when it comes to this story I can tell you this: when all is said and done, this viral outbreak will rank in my Top 3 of all time. Not bad for five years of blogging.

Importantly everything came without much effort—in other words it was stupid easy.

Background Details

But first for some background info. The site—SayCampusLife.com—belongs to a customer of mine. I’ve been blogging there and on another site of his, SayEducate.com, since late 2007. Both sites have a decent amount of traffic, but as you might guess some of the competition is formidable.

SayCampusLife is a college information website, offering college bound high school students, current college students, and their families information about scholarships, college life, careers, schools, you name it. The site ranks well for certain keywords and has a decent following. But it is the occasional article about social networking sites which seem to bring in the traffic, particularly those working a certain angle.

Planning Stages

I set out as I do every day to pick an article I felt people would be interested in reading. Sounds simple, but it isn’t always easy coming up with a good read.

But I also wanted to write about a topic that had a chance of going viral, with the appropriate amount of link bait added, which meant that I would turn to Wikipedia to find something different. Sure enough, a listing of social networking sites caught my attention, so I set out to pick 15 from that list and modify accordingly.

I wanted a large enough number to help the article stand out, but I didn’t want to go crazy either. I visited many more sites than the 15 I chose, but I narrowed the list down quickly to add a good mix of sites. I also knew that having just enough information about each place was important which meant that I had to give these sites more than a cursory glance.

Once I got everything together I worked on my headline. I needed something to catch your attention and I wanted to use a more contemporary term besides awesome, amazing or stupendous. I thought “way cool” would work and decided to use it.

Big Push

When I want an article to get an extra amount of attention, I’ll often give it a big push by tweeting, stumbling and sharing it with friends. But in this case I had some help as someone shared it via Delicious which ended up having far more “juice” than StumbleUpon. SU has been a big disappoint for so many reasons, but I thought I’d at least get some noticeable action there.

Thankfully, Delicious, Twitter, and natural search traffic was more than enough to propel the article. And thanks to each of you who helped spread the word too: everyone who added a comment will certainly benefit. Yes, you can still jump on the comment train (40 and counting) if you have something of value to share too.

Customer Satisfaction

I mentioned to my customer late yesterday morning that the article went viral and he was pleased. Later today I’ll provide more detailed traffic information to him and I’ll also be tracking the article long term.

So what lessons can be learned from how this article performed? A few things including: working a unique angle with whatever topic you choose to write about, create an eye-catching headline, and then hope that a number of invisible hands come to your aid.

In this particular case all three worked together, delivering a viral outbreak I won’t soon forget.  Stupid easy? You betcha!

Hanging In With Entrecard

I forget how long I have been using Entrecard, but I am still active with this traffic generating social networking site. I don’t drop cards every day and rarely do I come anywhere near the 300 card drop limit.

Funny, all those blurbs about dropping 300 cards in 5 to 15 minutes just doesn’t seem to work for me. It takes me at least 45 minutes, sometimes longer to get through 300.

Regular Visitors

What I do not do enough of is to acknowledge people who visit Matt’s Musings by way of Entrecard. I know a lot of you do and some of you are my top droppers.

January 2009 statistics are in and I would like to thank and recognize the Top 10 Entrecard droppers for the month. They are:

The Way I See It

Patsy’s Words of Wisdom

One World Realty

Cooking Japanese Style

Doocci.com

Cornymans Money-Blog, everything about financial independence

AsTheCrackerheadCrumbles

The One Minute Guide

WordJourney

Best travel pictures in the world

I have started to use Adgitize again and must say that I am disappointed in this service. Twice within the first ten days they were down, sometimes for two or three days at a time.  I understand that websites have problems but prolonged outages are annoying.

Using Adgitize

Entrecard, thankfully, seems to have moved past its growing pains so let’s hope that Adgitize will soon be able to do the same thing. In any case, these kinds of sites can be useful in helping bring in some extra traffic as well as comments to your blog. I have been leaving comments more often too so hopefully our combined efforts will benefit everyone.

I also appreciate my advertisers, many of whom are regulars too. That means I will need to keep track of who is advertising and thank them in a follow up Entrecard post.

Unrelated Business

Not related to Entrecard or Adgitize but still of importance are people who are leaving comments but are doing certain things that are definitely not kosher.

For example, when filling out the spot for your name please use only your real name. The name of your company or anything besides your real name should never be used. Granted, I will sometimes change your comment to reflect your real name (if known) or if your comment is still good, I’ll make up a name. All other comments I delete.

It is considerate when people fill out there comments correctly. You already get a nice link back to your site, but I don’t want to see links within comments unless they are related to the article. Still, use the line on the comment form to include that link.

I apologize for closing with this point, but I have seen a sharp uptick in the number of people who are spamming this blog.