As Viral marketing continues to increase in popularity as a means of driving huge volumes of traffic to a website, more and more people are beginning to realise that it’s not as straightforward as it may seem initially. A single error can be the difference between success and failure. Between notoriety and obscurity. Between rags and riches….

Well not quite…..

In the following article I’ve tried to outline some of the major pitfalls which you may have already encountered on your way down the dark and windy path of Viral Marketing.

Trusting Content As The King of Kings

To give an analogy, writing an article is somewhat like building a bonfire. For example let’s take the wood itself as the content. The more care and effort you place into assembling it into a solid structure, the more potential it will have to succeed (or burn in the case of our fire). However this is not enough in itself, just as a bonfire needs fuel for it to combust properly, your story also needs exposure.

If you’ve just created a Wordpress blog you’ll have little to no exposure. Your only sources of traffic will come from news aggregator services such as Technorati. Even if you’ve built a substantial piece of content it is likely that it will go unnoticed since so few people will have had the chance to read it.

Submitting your work to social bookmarking websites will give you a varying amount of additional exposure depending upon a number of variables - including the quality of your content (which will be the main influence on your articles popularity) the title/description and tags you’ve used to to describe your story (which should drive people to read it in the first place) and your influence in the blogosphere itself.

If your story is to reach the front page of any of these sites - it must accumulate votes quickly otherwise it will disappear into oblivion. Great content is not always enough, especially if it isn’t coupled with positive influence on both your blog and the social website in question.

You can increase your presence in the blogosphere by writing quality content and interacting with other webmasters in your niche through post comments and emails. As you probably already know SEO book, SEO Moz, Problogger and Shoemoney excel in providing best practices in this area.

Time Really Isn’t On Your Side

It’s imperative for your story to receive votes quickly as this will help increase your exposure throughout the upcoming or new pages on the site, which will subsequently attract more readers and potential voters.

Do’s

• After you’ve submitted your article - drum up awareness for your post on one of the popular webmaster forums (Digitalpoint, Sitepoint, Webmaster World by including a link to your site in your signature and answering questions that are related to the article you want to promote. Never directly spam your posts address in a reply. A better solution would be to provide a legitimate answer to the authors question and then offer your article as an additional resource. You can easily find posts that are related to your article by doing a quick search using the forums native search tool. Alternatively most forums offer a related posts section which appears at the bottom of the thread. You can use this to browse to other similar posts.
• Aim to contribute positively to the Digg community in both the long and short term. Rather than simply submit your own stories (which I’m guilty of at the minute, whoops) add material which will interest others . Do not be afraid to voice you opinion on topics that you feel passionate about, through honest debate comes friendship……most of the time. Although to be honest I think I was stretching it when I called it “debate”…..at least on Digg anyway.
• Digg allows you to enter your homepage URL in your profile, don’t be afraid to use it, especially if you intend on making a worthwhile contribution.
• In the “How To Build a Digg Culture” article on Pro Blogger, Darren mentions that every Friday one of his articles would mysteriously appear on the front page of Digg thanks to the additional awareness that his weekly newsletter would bring to the specific posts. It might be worth consciously adopting a similar approach where you leverage your own userbase to boost your articles popularity. For example you could plan to release your story at 2PM and send out your newsletter a few minutes later. Incorporating a Digg prompt into your post can help boost your efforts here too, especially if you have a newly established blog.
• Know when you are beaten. If your article has received 2 votes in 20 hours - it should be obvious that it won’t make the front page. Instead of resorting to self pity ask yourself why it wasn’t successful. Did the content suck? Was it an article dispelling Atheism? Go to the front page of any of the popular social bookmarking websites and look at what is popular. If you are lucky enough to find a hot topic that you also have experience in, try rewriting it from another angle. Try not to get discouraged, keep researching and writing and sooner or later you’ll get lucky.

Dont’s

• Never spam your link in a comment on Digg or Reddit unless you want to risk damaging your reputation.
• Ask all of your friends/colleagues to vote on your stories. Especially if you are all in the same office as you’ll likely trigger the site’s SPAM filter and be banned.
• Desperate measures such as setting up a PPC campaign in a last ditch attempt to attract votes should be avoided at all costs. You can just send the money to me for god’s sake. Heaven knows I need it more than Google.

Adsense Units As Suicide

Never place Adsense units at the start of an article - you’ll be sending a clear message to your readers that ad revenue is more important than content - making the back button appear all the more appealing. It’s not entirely true that Digg and Reddit users are ad-blind, they do see them, they just don’t normally click on them. Why bother with the risk of losing your reader without them having read a word of your work for a few measly cents?

Misusing Social Bookmarking Icons

You aren’t going to fool anyone into submitting your content to the social bookmarking sites if it is poorly written or generally inadequate - in most cases it just makes the chances of your story becoming popular even more remote. This is especially true if your content is 3 paragraphs long and sports 300 spelling mistakes.

Social bookmarking icons are most effective with content rich sites that already have a loyal group of subscribers. Instead of spending your time devising ways to fool the user into favoriting the work - aim to identify and satisfy their needs effectively. If you make this into a habit your readership will grow organically and the rest will follow on from there.

If you are going to use icons, it’s best selecting only one site to focus on. I’d recommend targetting Digg if your content will appeal to a tech-savvy audience. If this isn’t the case - you might have more luck with Reddit or Fark.

In the past I’ve used Avrian’s Digg This Wordpress Plugin to generate a clickable “Digg This” icon. However, I’ve moved recently to embedding my Digg requests organically within paragraphs which I’ve found to be more effective.

Remember, if your article provides little value to the reader, it won’t matter how well you’ve integrate your vote requests - you will have lost their approval and any additional plugs will fall upon angry ears.

It’s kinda like George Bush walking back-and-forwards up to Michael Moore repeatedly asking for a vote. It just isn’t going to happen.

The worst thing you can possibly do is unintentionally offend an informed reader.

Oblivious To Hosting Capacity?

If you are on a shared hosting account and are about to launch a viral marketing campaign be aware that a server crash is probable if a) the campaign is successful and b) you fail to make provisions for the surge in traffic.

It’s not uncommon for providers to ask you to upgrade to a dedicated package on the back of a server-melting influx of visitors. This can be a real disaster if you were hoping to make a quick few bucks from contextual ad clicks and are instead presented with a hefty hosting bill that you can’t afford.

Here are a few cool articles which can help you avoid the wrath of the “Digg Effect”

How To Prepare Your Site For The Digg Effect
Avoid The Wrath of the Digg Effect
Help End the Digg Effect

Memes Are Cool But Can Trigger Alarm Bells

One of the most famous memes currently in circulation is Technorati’s “How Much Is Your Blog Worth” which places a provisional value on your blog by evaluating the number of backlinks your blog has.

Memes provide a great opportunity for masses of free traffic as well as plenty of backlinks if they are executed correctly. Finding a format that will be wildly popular with bloggers is the tricky part, as is avoiding Google’s link profiling spam filters which can quite easily detect backlinks of this nature.

In the example below I’ve wrote a template for an extremely basic blog tool. In it I’ve tried to reduce the likelihood that backlinks would be discounted by randomly changing the link text.

Please note it’s a proof of concept rather than anything serious. It would be quite easy to create something with a little more detail.

[html]

// has the blogger inserted their name? if not display the index meme form
if(!$_POST["your_name"])
meme_form();
else {
// all the different types of blogger that you can be!
$types = array(
"I am the eternally boring blogger",
"I like blogging about my toilet habits",
"I am the drunken blogger",
"I am the naked blogger",
"I am the one who loves to alienate the audience with absolute nonsense",
"I am the depressed blogger"
);
// provide different versions of the link text to reduce the chances of Google discounting some/all of the links
$link_texts = array("The Stupid Site", "I am Stupid", "The Stupid", "You are Stupid for visiting");
$type_key = mt_rand(0, sizeof($types) - 1);
// select the blogger type at random
$type = $types[$type_key];
$link_text_key = mt_rand(0, sizeof($link_texts) - 1);
$link_text = $link_texts[$link_text_key];
// now generate the code which the user will paste into their blog
$code = "

Your Name :

What type of blogger am I?

$type
$link_text
“;
echo $code;
// output the code in a textarea so that the blogger can copy and paste it into their site.
echo ”

Here is your code

“;
echo “$code“;
}

[/html]