Anyone that writes blog posts hopes that their writing will be read and appreciated. Every time I publish and share a blog post I’ve written, I secretly wonder if this is the one that will go viral. From over 10 years of blogging (both personally and for business) and over 200 blog posts published, I’ve had a few that have gone viral. Now when I say “viral”, I don’t mean a million people read the post – I mean 5,000 or 10,000 people (which is a lot for me and for the average blogger and small business owner). Maybe “semi-viral” is a more accurate term.
One of the main reasons that those blog posts went semi-viral is because I used guerrilla marketing to promote them. According to creativeguerrilamarketing.com, “Guerrilla Marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics that yield maximum results.” While there are many types of guerrilla marketing, the tactic I specifically use is to blog about a trending topic. When a topic is trending, it is being read by many people. Usually it is a current event or a new idea that people are talking about and sharing. When you blog about a trending topic, you are taking advantage of the wave of attention that topic has.
Here’s 3 ways you can blog about trending topics:
1) Share Information About a Trend that No One Else has Written About
Last week WestJet celebrated their 20th anniversary and announced a redesigned logo. I saw this on the “Trending Topics” on my Facebook sidebar. This is where I regularly look to see what’s going on in the world. Being in marketing and being a fan of WestJet I was naturally curious to see their new logo. But I couldn’t find the logo anywhere. Some news stations wrote about the new logo but no one showed a picture of it.
I saw an opportunity to be the first person to find and show the new logo. If I was curious to see the new logo, then other people would be too. I quickly did some research, found the new logo, and created a graphic that compared the old logo to the new logo. Then I whipped together a blog post talking about WestJet’s new logo and why I enjoyed their marketing. I published the post and shared it on social media.
Then I opened my Google Analytics, sat, and waited.
Nothing happened.
So I went back to work. And came back to check 5 minutes later. Still nothing. I felt a bit disappointed. This was a bit of an experiment. But 30 minutes later I started to see some traffic to the blog post. In Google Analytics you can see how many people are on your website in real time. It’s a pretty neat feature. I checked 3 hours after the blog post was published and there were 59 people on the website.
That was pretty cool. Now it might not seem like a lot to you, but there were more people that visited my website in 24 hours (over 2000 people) than in previous 6 months.
Where did all these people come from? Facebook. Through your Facebook business page you can check the analytics of your posts. This particular post seemed newsworthy to many other people, partly being it was an interesting and recent topic, and partly because no one else had shown the new logo.
Now it’s great that your blog post goes viral. It feels pretty good (but it’s probably not good for my ego). But the real question is, why would you want your blog post to go viral? Why does it matter? It matters if you are reaching your ideal customer. On my blog post I offered my Two-Page Marketing Plan for Business Owners for free in exchange for joining my email list. 5 people signed up (welcome Jonathan, Greg, Mike, Seb, and Roccio!) These are people I do not know and now I have the opportunity to send them my blog posts, add value to their lives, and maybe, just maybe, win their trust.
2) Respond to a Trending Topic 2-3 Days After It Goes Viral
The second way you can blog about a trending topic is to write a response. If you’re on social media regularly you’ll see this trend happen. First a topic will go viral and many people will write about it and share it. Then 2-3 days later, there will be a bunch of backlash and the topic will be criticized.
An example is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge from the summer of 2014 that helped to raise over $100 million. It was everywhere. Then I think people got sick of seeing it over and over again. So people started criticizing the trend saying drinking water was being wasted, there were other causes that needed funding, and most people still didn’t know what ALS was.
In November 2013 there was a blog post cleverly titled “Marriage Isn’t For You” that received over 30 million views. I saw it in my Facebook feed a few times before I read it. Then I kept seeing the post getting shared and re-shared. It was picked up by the Huffington Post, the Globe and Mail, and many other major news stations.
A friend of ours wrote me this message, “Can you please write a rebuttal blog post about this article?” She was upset that many of the university students she was working with were sharing this article and that this article represented an unrealistic view of marriage. She knew that my wife and I blogged about marriage so she suggested we write a response.
Our personal blog is a place where we get to try things out and see what works and what doesn’t. So we wrote a response titled “Why Saying ‘Marriage Isn’t For You’ is Naive“. It was a criticism of the original article stating why we didn’t agree.
Now every time you criticize something that has gone viral you will receive both positive and negative feedback. The reason the original idea went viral was because it really resonated with people. Some of those people will not be happy with your criticism. But there will be the people that are so sick of seeing this article being shared that they will love your criticism.
The guerrilla marketing worked. In 7 days there were over 28,000 people that visited our blog. As a comparison, the previous 7 days we had 2,500 visit our blog. We had 50 people join our email list (compared to 6 the previous week).
There were a full range of responses from the negative ones, “This did not need to exist” and “SOMEone’s upset he didn’t write an article that went viral” to the positive ones, “I completely agree with what you are saying” and “Excellently said!” Reading a few of those negative responses stung more than I’d like to admit, so if you are going to use this strategy, be prepared for some backlash.
3) Write a Blog Post on a Birthday, Anniversary, Birth, or Death
Milestone events, both personal and business, are natural times that people are interested in you. You’ll notice that the posts that get the most attention on social media are birthdays, anniversaries, births, and deaths.
My friend has a leadership blog and one of his most popular posts was a list of quotes by a leader that recently passed away. My wife and I wrote the post “7 Things We Learned in 7 Years of Marriage” that was published on our 7th anniversary that did much better than our average blog post.
Guerrilla marketing can be an effective tactic to gain some extra attention without have to pay for it. I will regularly check what’s trending on Facebook and Twitter. Google trends is also a good place to look.
Ultimately it’s only worthwhile to use this tactic on events and ideas that your ideal customer cares about. After all, why does it matter that you are getting a lot of attention if that attention is not from the people you care about and want to serve?