The 5 Ingredients of Viral Articles

I never personally liked the idea of hacking. There’s just something dodgy and unrealistic about it. When you hack something, you are breaking into a system via unsavory means. At some point, someone is going to notice and kick you out.

Over the past 9 months of writing seriously, I’ve created more than a few dozen stories that can be viewed as moderately viral, with Google giving it long term traffic and consistent organic social media sharing from readers. During my best month, I was pulling more than a quarter of a million views combined.

I did it all without hacking anything. Rather, I experimented and figured out the ingredients that give content that viral quality.

Without further ado, here are the ingredients — no secret sauce and no hacks, just real-deal ingredients I found worked for what’s needed to produce the kind of content that has the potential to thrive.

1. A Point of Difference

When you’re the same just like everyone else, your content becomes viewed as copies with no creative offering.

Content that thrives has a point of difference. While some topics and certain stories seem to crop up over and over again, it is the author’s point of difference that makes it interesting.

So how to do you create a point of difference?

The easiest method is to melt two polarizing ideas together. It’s not about creating controversy but creating something that is so intensely unique, giving it a quality of added value.

For me, I create a point of difference by melting productivity ideas, like Parento’s law, and cats into programming. For marketing-styled stories, I melt traditional business ideas, like MVP, and literature into stories that touch on the art of selling……[Read More]