How To Create Viral Content And Prepare Your Blog For It

Big part of a successful viral marketing strategy is promotion – the way you promote your content, the timing and people willing to help you, including your followers and influencers who share it with their followers. 

But there’s more to it: mass sharing isn't that difficult to achieve, but it won’t do you much good to have hordes of people just take a look at your content and leave. 

Your content has to be able to keep them interested, your website has to be prepared for them, and besides, with all the noise on the social media and tons of new content being produced each day, the bare minimum of marketing efforts won’t be enough.

Do you want your content to spread like wildfire and to be remembered? Do you want it to be able to generate new quality leads for your company? Here is what you should do.

Blog preparation

First of all, you have to be aware of the fact that, should your content go viral, many people who don’t know about you yet will come to your blog – which is great, but then what? If you haven’t prepared your blog for them, they will see the content and probably leave without remembering the name of the website they've just visited. Surfers are like that. You have to give them a reason to stick around.

So, there are two things that you need to prepare before launching your viral campaign:

-     First, you have to have some sort of engagement trigger in place – a banner or a pop up that invites them to download your free guide, an invitation to subscribe to your future fantastic content, a list of suggested additional articles (related or most popular posts), a visible notification about the contest you’re organizing – anything that will make the visitors stay longer and/or leave their email address.

-    Second, have the sharing buttons at place. You are the one who has to make it easy for the readers to share your content – how many of them do you think will be willing to do the extra steps like copying the URL, pasting it into the URL shortener, then copying and pasting it all again, looking for your Twitter handle – in order to share your article or infographic on Twitter? That’s right, not many; they are already used to doing it with one click, so one click it should be.

Content

Viral content is a mystic thing to many people, and yet it has its laws which can be discovered by simply observing the characteristics of content that’s already gone viral – in yours, or in any other industry. These include:

-    Strong headline: the headline is the first thing people will see, whether they see the link in their social media stream, on the email they’ve received or in the RSS. It has to be inviting and unique, very specific and useful to the people who see it. If you have no idea on how to craft one, then take a look at several posts in your industry that you know went viral, and try to find the common points for their headlines.

-     Content that touches emotions: several studies have confirmed a strong relationship between emotion and virality. Anger, surprise, joy, fear, disgust or sadness – tackle any of these, and your reader will just have to share your content with their circles. Just think about a piece of content that you’ve read and shared recently (something unrelated to your business – something that you’ve shared with your friends). It was an emotion that has enticed you to do it, right?

-   Include visual elements: social networks reward visual content – Pinterest is the obvious example, but Facebook updates with images receive a lot more shares than those without it, and even on Twitter people love to see a visual media attached to the tweets. So carefully choose the featured image of your post, because it will be seen a lot; a well chosen image, or more of them, will also give that little extra to the post itself.

Finally, pay attention to SEO and optimize your posts around the selected long tail key phrases – that way, your content will be able to drive traffic and leads not only while you’re promoting it, but months and years later as well. You’ve spent a lot of time creating it – do this one small thing as well, for the maximum results.

Guest Author: Nicole Gore from www.innovativepaymentprocessing.com, is an avid blogger and Internet marketing consultant for many small business companies. In her work, she is always trying to make a viral content knowing that natural links are necessary for website's success.

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Top Misconceptions About Video Content On A Website

Creating and hosting a website gives you a wide range of content options that you can experiment with to enhance your rank, popularity and entertainment value. Depending on the type of site you have, whether it's a mobile site or not, or how its content is best presented, you can and should carefully consider presenting with video instead of purely using text and images.
In order to help you make that choice, here we give you several popular misconceptions about film content that you need to stop worrying about.

1. Video is not SEO Friendly
A lot of people with some web design knowledge know that search engine bots are incapable of reading most video content. Because of this, it's easy to accidentally assume that video is somehow less SEO friendly than standard text based content. However, the idea is badly wrong as long as a few little details are accounted for.
You as a website owner/designer can create a perfectly well optimized site even if it's almost entirely filled with video content. The trick is to tag or anchor your videos with properly written HTML attributes and even a text content blurb that made to accompany each film clip. These text descriptions should contain keywords and do a search friendly job of describing exactly what the individual videos on your site are about. Additionally, if your videos are being hosted from YouTube, they should also be accompanied by a targeted series of tags and a clip description right on the YouTube site itself. More modern HTML5 supported video is also an option since it's built in characteristics make it indexable by search bots.
By applying these simple tactics consistently, you can have a well-optimized video site that generates at least decent rankings on select search terms.

2. My Video Content has to be TV Quality
Nope, not at all. Most online videos are homemade and their quality is less than perfect; despite this, many, and we mean many, of them still generate up to millions of page views! The important thing about creating most useful videos content is that it has a clear video image and be easy to hear.  That it isn't loaded with flashy computer graphics or shiny special effects and Hollywood quality film editing is really not important at all. Online consumers of video already accept that the web isn't the same as a movie theatre or TV and they're mainly worried about getting the information they want, even if it doesn't have fancy editing.
The best thing about this rule of video quality is that you can get away with using fairly cheap video cameras and even smart phone cams to make perfectly fine online film content that will absolutely generate as many as hundreds of thousands of views -as long as it's satisfying someone's information or entertainment demands

3. Online Video Content Won't Generate as Much Interest as Text
On the contrary, while most of the web is still filled with text content, video is steadily growing in popularity and all sorts of trends are only reinforcing this growth. For one thing, a very large percentage of online viewers actually prefer videos to text and have only endured the latter because they've grown used to it.
Now that high-speed broadband connections are permitting better streaming videos quality while more and more people also happen to view the web through smaller tablet and smart phone screens, the popularity of video is only going to go up. The statistics bear this out by clearly showing that annual online video consumption and production are both steadily growing; if video were deeply unpopular, YouTube alone would not contain several billion videos and grow at a rate of 100+ hours of new video per minute!

4. Video Content is Too Expensive Compared to Text Content
Video content may be slightly more pricey to create than something as simple as writing a bunch of paragraphs in WordPress, but it's still an absolutely fantastic deal for the cost it creates: a single video that takes less than an hour to produce with a $300 digital camera can possibly generate over 1 million page views on YouTube for you. Best of all, if your video clip contained links to your website, you just advertised your domain to over a million people practically free of charge. Try achieving the same with most text blog posts. You see, assuming you're using a third party page to actually host your films, not only are you generating views through your own site, you're also getting them from the hosting site, this gives you a much better return for your time and money.
If you’re truly interested in a cost-effective way to connect, virtual environments can be created by companies like InterCall in order to have an interactive environment for your visitors.

5. Video Will Eat into my Hosting Costs
While it's true that hosting videos on your website is going to cost you more bandwidth than using simple text or images would, modern video encoding technology has eliminated a lot of the once heavy expenses behind film. Today you can stream high quality videos over formats such as Flash, which can give you up to 1080p over even medium quality broadband connections. There are also other, less HD formats that let you create nicely visible and highly device compatible streaming videos at densities as low as 480p.

Author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, mobile technology, marketing tech and digital security. He also loves to read and write about location-free business, portable business management and finance. When not busy writing or consulting on technology and digital security, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico, where he spends part of the year. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.

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How We Can Stop Asteroids From Hitting Earth

The best that NASA’s chief could offer, if an asteroid was heading to Earth, was “pray”. This year alone, we have seen a “close” incident of massive space bodies in close proximity to Earth. The question is: What must be done if one is on a collision course with us?
Earlier this year, YouTube was ablaze with recorded footage of a remarkable and terrifying event in Russia. In the middle of February, a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia during the morning. A bright streaking trail tore through the sky, followed by an incredible light. There was then a sonic boom, which shattered glass, shook cars and caused injuries to about 400 people. A 6000-square-foot roof from a Zinc Plant fell. Though this was a terrifying event, no one was seriously injured or killed.
The question is: What do we do with much larger bodies heading for our planet? Firstly, we must understand the difference between space bodies: meteors, meteorites, comets, and asteroids.
Meteoroid, Meteors & Meteorite
A small rock or debris particle from the solar system is called a meteoroid. The range is not that large: from the a grain of dust to 10m metres in diameter.
A meteor, on the other hand, is a meteoroid that has burnt up and passed through Earth’s atmosphere. Often called a “shooting star”, what we’re actually looking at is a meteoroid that has entered and is passing through.
Those meteoroids that do not break up after entering the atmosphere, and collide with the Earth’s surface, are called meteorites.
Comets
Small solar bodies which orbit the sun are called comets. They are commonly depicted with a long, blazing tail that comes from solar radiation.
Asteroids
Similar to comets, asteroids are also bodies that orbit the sun made of rock and metal.  They do not however have a visible outline and tail, like comets.
Considering how small meteorites are, it’s obvious that it was either an asteroid or a comet that killed the dinosaurs (assuming they were killed by a Near Earth Object).
Assuming one such large object is heading for us, what can we do to combat it or prevent the inevitable destruction?
What we can do
Science-writer Phil Plait points out that an object just 10 kilometers could, if it struck our planet, eliminate all of us. This makes it pivotal that we continue our search for Near-Earth Objects (NEO), despite concerns that such objects won’t hit for a very long time, statistically speaking.
There are ways to combat an incoming NEO, should we have to. Many of these solutions aren’t fully funded or available, but should be possible in the future.
For example, we could use nuclear weapons to steer or destroy the incoming object. It would be much harder to land one directly on the incoming object, so we could also detonate one nearby. This should (hopefully) fling it off course. We could also pull it in different directions, using infinitesimal tugs from nearby controlled objects – like a satellite – since every object has gravity. One student even suggested tethering a NEO to a ballast and shooting the ballast away from Earth, pulling the NEO with it.
These and other ideas derive from methods from various areas: scientific journals, presentations delivered at an oil conference, and elsewhere.
Those these ideas might sound like science-fiction our future might depend on making them science fact.

Author Bio: Terrence is a long-time writer, reader and researcher, and shares ideas and information on a wide range of topics.

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Entertaining Your Customers With Whiteboard Animation

Everybody loves being entertained. However, everybody does not love being entertained in the exact same way. Still, it can be said that a good way to win the hearts and minds of your customers is to entertain them. The real trick is finding out what entertains them and providing enough of it to keep them coming back to you. This does not necessarily mean that your company website has to become one huge ball of fun to keep your customers. In many cases that would just annoy them. It does mean however, that you need to present your important marketing and other business-related messages in a way your customers and clients can connect with and enjoy.

Using Whiteboard Animation

An excellent way to keep the attention on your company is by entertaining your customers with whiteboard animation. This type of video is relatively low in cost to produce, quick, and enjoyable to watch while still allowing you to maintain the level of professionalism your industry or brand requires.
Whiteboard animations are an especially useful way for companies with a small budget for website enhancements to add video to their site. This is important in today’s internet-centric business world because including video on your website increases its perceived value and ranking with search engines.
The reason for this is that videos are much more likely to get backlinked to other sites and shared over social media. So, simply including video on your company site makes it more likely to come up earlier in the search engine results lists. We all know how important that is for getting customers.

Indexing Videos

Furthermore, most website viewers look at the video content of websites first—even before they read the text. Putting entertaining whiteboard animations on the splash page of your site allows you to get your message to customers in a fresh and entertaining way in the first few seconds they spend at your site.

Short Videos

Whiteboards are quite short, just as most website videos should be. This allows you to really distill your message into the most important details. Customers in all industries appreciate when company messages tell them exactly the information they need right away, and if you can entertain them while informing them—which is exactly what whiteboard animation was created for—you can build a rapport while looking more credible.

Mass Audience Appeal

Whiteboard animation can help you appeal to a wide and diverse audience of consumers. This can be crucial for your business in our ever-growing global economy. With whiteboards, you are never pinned down to a single ethnicity, race, or age of an actor. You can add color or make your video stand out with simple black and white illustrations. You can add text, diagrams, symbols, scenarios—pretty much the sky is the limit—and because it’s illustrated, taking your viewers to exotic places won’t increase your production costs.
On that note, whiteboards can make difficult-to-understand content much easier to digest. Again, drilling your content down to the bare essentials and providing captivating illustrations with your whiteboard animation videos can keep your viewers tuned in and your message clear. That’s essential for winning business in today’s world of short attention spans.

Author: Erik Kerr specializes in creating whiteboard drawings and animation. He founded one of the leading companies in marketing videos, The Draw Shop.

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