If you’re thinking of launching a new site and want to know how to go viral on the day you launch it, read on.
In my last post I revealed the exact process I went through to find content holes and craft highly share-able content.
In this post I’m going to explain how I’ll be using BuzzStream to introduce my new authority site to the world with viral carrots that will lure people down conversion rabbit holes.
Viral Carrots
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been beavering away creating 18 epic pieces of content – 12 of which have massive potential to go viral. Let’s call these “viral carrots” (tempting fodder for inquisitive rabbits).
All 18 pieces of content have killer titles, over 50% of them are fun lists and the most informative articles are all at least 1500 words long. Blimey :S
NOTE: Most of the sites in the niche I’m attacking are still writing crappy 500 word articles.
Here’s what the 18 pieces of content will consist of (I’ve included example links to explain what I mean):
As you can see, 12/18 are of the viral variety (LOL lists, Shocking Truth Lists & Infographics). Because these are going to capture a wider audience with not so many wallet-out buyer types, we’ll make sure we direct these people to more light hearted content first, before diverting those truly interested in the niche further down the rabbit hole.
Conversion Rabbit Holes
Here’s the plan for directing rabbits (traffic) down the rabbit hole to eventually land at conversion optimized Product Reviews or the Convincer Article (both of which will have direct links to affiliate products).
- LOL List >> Shocking Truth List >> Helpful Article >> Convincer Article >> Product Review
- Shocking Truth List >> Helpful Article >> Convincer Article >> Product Review
- Infographic >> Shocking Truth List >> Convincer Article >> Product Review
- Helpful Article >> Convincer Article >> Product Review
These aren’t set in stone, and I’ll probably mix and match a few combinations to see which rabbit holes perform best.
Some bullet points to explain my reasoning behind all this:
- The initial 3 products I’ve chosen to promote are all VERY different and targeted towards a niche within the main niche
- Because the 3 products are so different, and it is clear they each solve a very different problem, people won’t be conflicted about which to choose
- 2 products have high gravity on Click Bank, the third product has an amazing video sales funnel
- The LOL Lists, Shocking Truth Lists & Infographics are all about subjects related to one of the 3 products (no exceptions)
- The LOL Lists will attract a wide audience, many of which won’t buy, but will likely be interested in the Shocking Truth Lists, which they should also be inclined to share too
- The aim is to get an audience that wouldn’t usually share LOL Lists & Shocking Truth Lists from this niche, sharing like crazy, so they will attract the audience truly interested in this niche when they see it erupt on social media
- With 12 highly share-able pieces of content at the forefront of the site, people will hopefully stay on the site longer and share some of the other stuff. If they’re interested in buying, they’ll hopefully continue down the rabbit hole
So far about 14 articles are in the bag, so once the remaining 2 infographics and 2 articles are done, I’ll begin building the site 
Now, you’re probably wondering how the hell I’m going to get an audience to all these articles when the site goes live?
Planting Viral Carrots with BuzzStream
Naturally, I don’t expect for one second that once I hit publish on the blog, swarms of traffic will come rushing in after I simply announce the site launch on Twitter and ask a bunch of friends to like it on Facebook.
No, instead I am working on a predominately email outreach strategy, using BuzzStream, to reach out to every single person interested in the niche.
Here’s exactly who I’m going to reach out to when the site goes live:
- All 200 of the primary contacts in the niche to tell them about our new site and suggest an article their followers will like
- All the blogs I link out to in each of my 18 pieces of content and thank them for their useful resource (each piece of content has no less than 10 outbound links)
- All the sites that have created infographics in the niche before (and some of which I’ve cited to create my own infographics)
- All the sites ranking in the top 100 Google results for each of my 18 articles’ target keywords
NOTE: I haven’t included link building (e.g. fixing broken links) above because I’ll need to wait 2-3 days after the launch once all the posts have plenty of social shares and look worthwhile linking to.
So, now I’m going to reveal the process I’ll be using to reach out to groups #1 and #2 in the list above: the 200 primary contacts & the blogs I link out to in my content. (I’ll share deeper insights into the extent of my email outreach in a future post once the site launch is complete and I have more templates and results to share with you).
#1 Email outreach to the 200 primary contacts in the niche
If you read my previous article, you’d have seen that I created a list of 491 potential people to reach out to in the niche. I’ve since whittled this list down to just over 200 contacts who would genuinely be interested in my content and whom I must consider building relationships with. These are the creme de la creme of the niche, the girls and guys who will most likely link to my new site and share it on social media.
I made an excel with organised columns, so that when I upload the contacts to BuzzStream it’ll be easy for me to see who I can reach out to for certain types of posts.
With BuzzStream, you can tag your contacts which makes it easy to find the right people to reach out to with one click. Here are the tags I used:
And here is how I assigned the tags to websites in excel:
Once I’d visited all the sites and assigned tags I saved the file as a CSV file and uploaded to BuzzStream. Because I named the columns the same way as BuzzStream’s fields it matched them up easily:
Now whenever I want to reach out to just the big magazines, I click the big mag tag, and BuzzStream filters all the big mags:
Pretty cool right?
When the site kicks off I’ll make sure I suggest content the 200 primary contacts will like based on their tags. So if they are “Fencers”, (sites that are sitting on the fence) I’ll suggest broader content that they’ve loosely written about in the past. If they are “humour” sites, I’ll suggest the most hilarious of our articles, and so on.
Relationship Building
I have already started building relationships with a small handful of bloggers in the niche. These are predominantly star writers for some of the “big mags”. I chose these people based on how often they are writing about the niche, how many hoards of Twitter followers they have, and also how high the PR of their site is.
I’ve been tracking my interactions with them on the BuzzStream dashboard. Here’s what this looks like (screenshot example is from an expert roundup I’m currently working on for clambr):
When the site launches, I will have hopefully built up a strong enough relationship with these “big mag bloggers” so they’ll share my kickass content with their thousands of followers as soon as I hit them up with a friendly email like this:
Mark Trueman from Zen Spill recently shared some killer insights about how to get influencers to share your content with regular back and forth conversation and keeping your emails short.
As well as bouncing email conversations back and forth, I have also got quite a few big mags following me on my new Twitter account by interacting with them regularly:
I usually use Hootsuite (recently voted the best social media management tool), to keep track of my Twitter interactions.
So what about the remaining 190 or so primary contacts?
Because I don’t have time to build relationships with everyone, on the day of the launch I’ll email the remaining 190 or so contacts with something simple like this:
All 12 of my viral carrots will be dispersed evenly among these contacts. I will NOT promote any of the Helpful Articles, Convincer Articles or Product Reviews when introducing the site for the first time. This is because:
- people will be much less likely to want to share them
- it might instantly scare them off (the last thing I want them to think is we’re just another generic site in the niche)
- if the viral carrots perform well, they should lead people down the rabbit hole to the more serious stuff later anyway
#2 Email outreach to the blogs I link out to
The importance of linking out to cool resources and then emailing the authors to thank them for their resource is widely known as a great strategy to get people to share your content.
This is why I’m making sure each of my 18 pieces of content have at least 10 outbound links so I have 180 people to thank, who will potentially share the articles with their followers.
I’ll implement this by using a very simple email template:
I’m making sure all the resources I link out to are from sites with a large social following, so if the person does end up sharing my content, it will get exposed to a decent sized audience each and every time.
Conclusion
This post shares a few ideas on how to leverage your content to maximize your new site’s potential of going viral on launch day! Do give it a share if you think it’s cool
Key takeaways:
- promote your new site with only the most share-worthy content first
- make sure the fun stuff gradually leads to the serious stuff
- avoid promoting conflicting products so people are clear about what you recommend
Although I will also be doing a bit of forum marketing and a couple of promoted posts on Facebook, email outreach is going to be at the forefront of my strategy because I don’t have an audience “on-tap” to share to as soon as the site goes live.
What ways would you build up a ready to share audience without a website?