Viral Videos: How to Use them to Build Traffic to Your Blog
Viral videos are a great way to get folks to come and visit your blog. If you can get a large amount of eyes to your site that way, you can bet that you are going to have a flood of traffic to your blog as well! However, getting it to go viral is not always that easy. Here are a few tips you can use to get you a better chance for that video of yours to go viral and get you the blog traffic that you are looking for.
Humor
People love to share funny stuff, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sites out there that are dedicated to just funny videos that people post on YouTube and other sites. However, doing humor can be tricky. Make sure that you are careful not to be offensive in your post and let other people look at it before you post it to see if they think it is funny. Ask them for their honest opinion. If you are sure it really is funny and creative, put it out there! Hopefully you will have the next viral videos on your hands!
Excellent Information
If you do not want to try to be funny, you can instead go for excellent information about the topic of your blog or something related. Find a topic that people ask you a lot of questions about or that you always had questions about and provide a really good explanation to your viewers about that topic. Use good visual aids to help them understand it even better.
Make sure, of course that the explanation you give is clear and accurate. If it is really helpful, people will likely share it with friends and colleagues, which is exactly how many viral videos get started.
High Quality
Make sure it is high quality as well. Keep the camera still and shut off anything that will cause you a lot of noise while you are trying to record the video. Turn things like the television and radio off and make sure no one is going to be walking in and out of the room while you are trying to record.
In essence, your video does not have to be high definition quality. It just needs to be easily watchable by viewers and something that does not include distractions for you or them.
Keyword Research
These days, a lot of videos are showing up in the search engine results. You might be surprised how much traffic you can get to a video if you take the time to do some keyword research before youpost your video up on sites such as YouTube.
Obviously, the search engines do not notice keywords within the video; however, they can pick up on keywords in your video’s title and description. If you can find some good related search terms, include them in your title, description, and tags.
Video Distribution
When people think online video, the first name that usually comes to mind for them is YouTube. However, there are hundreds of other sites out there that get a large amount of views. You might be surprised how many views sites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion get on a daily basis.
Therefore, make sure you do not limit yourself to posting on just one site. Post on several sites if you can to get your production the maximum exposure it can get. You can even embed the video on your blog and any other sites you might have access to in order to get it even more views.
Encourage Sharing
Make sure that you ask people who watch to share it with others. Just a little “please share this” request can add a huge boost to the percentage of people who will view it elsewhere or share with others.
To do this, add the request in the description field. You can also mention it in the video or in a little message down at the bottom while it is running. Of course, as mentioned above, it should be something of good quality and worth sharing, as people will probably not share something they did not like themselves!
Social Networks
Facebook and Twitter along with other social networking and social bookmarking sites are great places to get it more exposure. In fact, many if not most of the viral videos out there got their biggest boost from social sharing on these sites.
If you do not have a presence on these sites already, you should go ahead and start getting involved and adding content and friends. If you do have a profile, make sure you add the video to your Facebook profile or page and add the link to the video to your Twitter page.
Make sure the title on these status updates is catchy, as you are vying for the attention of people bombarded with all kinds of information on these social networks.
You can also add the link to your video to social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and others.
Link Back
Of course, all of this would be for nothing if you do not tell people where to go after the it is done! Make sure you link back to your blog in the description field. Give them a compelling reason to go back to your blog in the description as well. You can also put together a slide or something within, preferably toward the end, letting viewers know where to go when is over.
If you will try these few simple tips, you will give your videos a much higher chance of going viral and will hopefully see a flood of traffic to your site because of them! Happy recording!
