Beautiful Life Magazine

Did you notice that “word of mouth” is actually a loop?

This loop amplifies any incoming traffic that lands on your article. But the coolest thing is that it actually amplifies itself and goes in rounds for a while before it finally fades.

And the extent to which this “word of mouth” loop will amplify your blog traffic mostly relies on how well you’re going to execute the following strategies:

1 – Find A Contagious Idea And Build On Top Of It

I know that many people will go hard on me for advising to “steal” ideas from someone else. But I can easily convince you that there’s nothing wrong about it.

Take the Tesla car for example. The guys just took a car and put an electric motor into it. How unique is that?

• The electric motor was first invented in the 1740s.
• The first carwas built sometime in the 1880s.
• And the first electric vehiclewas presented by Ányos Jedlik in 1828.

So how come no one is accusing Tesla of stealing someone else’s ideas?

Because it’s not about the original idea, is about how well you execute that idea.

So why don’t you “steal” some great ideas and build a “Tesla car” of your own?

 

2 – Add Some “Practical Utility” To Your Content

Do you know what makes people want to share a certain piece of content?

In a recent study, researchers examined the sharing patterns of the New York Times readers.

Guess what happened to be the biggest driver of shares? Practical utility!

And here’s how you make your article more practical:

1. Give your readers detailed action steps that they need to take.
2. Provide them with lots of examples and case studies to prove your points.
3. Show them the exact numbers that they can achieve.

You won’t believe how much people love case studies and exact numbers!

Peep Laja from ConversionXL attributes the entire success of his blog to the fact that he never gave a piece of advice if he could not support it with a research paper or a case study.

Alex Turnbull from Groove published a great article about the importance of writing persuasive research backed content which you also can’t miss.

And here’s a bonus hack that you can use to easily make your articles more practical—try to add the phrase “for example” next to every piece of advice that you give.

3 – Make Your Content Visually Appealing

I just told you that people love exact numbers and case studies.

So how about this one:

According to Jakob Nielsen, 79% of people always scan through any new page that they came across and only 16% read it word for word.

And here’s another one:

According to Josh Schwartz of Chartbeat, there’s no correlation between social shares and people actually reading your article.

If you combine these two studies together it’s easy to digest that…

People can make a snap judgement whether your article is worthy of a share just by skimming through it.

Which means that…

Your article doesn’t necessarily have to be worthy of a tweet, as long as it looks like being worthy of a tweet.

I know it sounds quite controversial, but it’s actually backed with research studies. And in fact, when I think of my own tweeting patterns, I realize that I’ve tweeted quite a lot of articles just because they seemed worthy to me.

So here’s how you make your article look more appealing to people who are just skimming through:

• Write an introductory paragraphthat will briefly tell people what’s in there.
• Use meaningful sub-headings(not “clever” ones).
• Use bulleted lists.
• Use one idea per paragraph.Users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph.
• Use a lot of high-quality graphics.This will instantly boost your credibility.
• Use a lot of outbound links. This will show that you did a thorough research and know what you’re talking about.

4 – Help Your Visitors Share Your Content

So let’s assume that your article is based on a highly contagious idea, it’s highly practical, and it looks like something worthy of a share.

That alone will guarantee you a fair amount of shares, I promise!

But you can easily squeeze a lot more shares from that same article if you go just a few steps further.

And here are these steps:

Step #1: Make sure your social sharing buttons are easily accessible.

This seems so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning. But I’m sure I’ll be able to surprise you with a few tips on something you’ve considered to be a no-brainer.

According to a study from BrightEdge, content with sharing buttons is 7 times more likely to spread than content without.

And if you look at this blog, my social sharing buttons are floating at the left side of my article, which makes them always accessible no matter how deep you scroll.

I also have two big bold buttons at the very end of my article, so that people could share it immediately after they’ve finished reading it.

But the fun doesn’t end there. You can push even further and optimize the design of your sharing buttons to get even more shares!

Optimize the text on your social sharing buttons.

Guys from Pixable carried out quite a few A/B tests to identify what makes people click on their sharing buttons more often.

In their first test, they’ve tested the call to action and discovered that the “Share with Friends” phrase outperformed the phrase “Share” by 107%!

That Twitter button increased the total number of shares, which was quite expected. But the amount of Facebook shares increased as well!

It seems that by providing the visitor with a choice, the second option gets them deciding on which platform to share, instead of whether or not to share.

Step #2: Ask for shares.

As I’ve already mentioned above, only 16% of your visitors will actually read your article from start to finish. But these 16% are your most loyal visitors!

You should not miss your chance to ask them for a share.

You’ve just given them tons of great information for absolutely free, and all you’re asking in return is a simple tweet. It should make them feel bad if they won’t reciprocate.

Step #3: Add sharable “sound bites”.

People share tons of different stuff on social networks: thoughts, quotes, takeaways, images.

So why are you leaving your visitors with a single option—”whether or not to share your article”?

Remember that fun experiment when the guys added a tweet button, which reframed the situation from “whether or not to share” to “which platform to pick for sharing”?

Well, you can move that frame in a different direction—from “whether or not to share the article” to “whether to share an article or a quote from it”.

This strategy was adopted by lots of popular bloggers. I see the “tweet this” quotes on almost all of my favorite blogs.

5 – Optimize Your “Share Snippets”

So you’ve just learned what makes people share your articles. That opens up your viral loop.

To effectively close the loop, you need to optimize your “share snippets” to get the maximum “clicks per share”.

People should eagerly click on your article when they see some of their friends sharing it. This will guarantee that your article will go through a series of viral cycles and your blog traffic will fade very slowly.

Here’s how you squeeze more clicks out of your share snippets:

Step #1: Write an irresistible headline.

There is actually tons of advice on writing irresistible headlines.

All you need to do is simply apply all these tips until you come up with at least 5–7 headlines to choose from.

I’m afraid there’s no magic bullet. The more headline variations you will write, the better you’ll get at it.

Step #2: Attach images to your “share snippets”.

What usually catches your attention as you skim through your Facebook newsfeed?

Wait-wait!.. I know the answer! It’s images!

Most social networks allow you to attach images to the things that you share, and that’s an opportunity you can’t afford to ignore.

Let’s look at some data:

Photos are the most engaging type of content on Facebook, with a whopping 87% interaction rate! No other post type received more than a 4% interaction rate.

And attaching an image to your tweet can boost retweets by an impressive 35%.

So in case an image is not being attached every time someone tweets your article—you’re seriously missing out.

Here’s how to set this up from a technical standpoint: Just install WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast and enable “Facebook Open Graph” and “Twitter card meta data” within its settings.

Once you do this, the plugin will attach the featured image of your article to every single share. Yes, it really is as simple as that.

---

---