Dead-Simple Blog Success through Social Media Virality – Part 2

This is the second post in a three part series on using social media virality to build a successful blog.

In the first part, you learned why it was important to find a market before you got started on anything else. In this post, you’ll learn how to find that market and how to use social networks to market the content you’ve created.

How to Find and Write for a Viable Market

Before you ever do a single thing – registering your domain, doing keyword research, or creating content – you need to find a market. But not just any market. You need to find one that has the viability to create a profit.

The internet is a fantastic place. There are affiliate programs for just about any type of product, hobby, or interest you can think of. If you can’t find something specific, you can always use Amazon.com’s affiliate program to market any products that you want.

The bottom line, though, is that if there isn’t some way to get your target audience to part with their hard earned money, your blog won’t make a single buck. You don’t have to necessarily be able to sell them products, either.

If you have a service that you can provide you’ll benefit from running a blog based on market research, too. In this case, you’ll want to think about the service you provide, who your target customers are, and what things they may be interested in. From there, you provide them valuable content that they’ll want to read. They’ll get to know you, and eventually they’ll trust you. Then they’ll start hiring you.

Once you’ve thought about a potential topic and figured out how to sell something to that market you need to actually find out what they’re interested in. For instance, if you’re starting a website based on miniature enthusiasts, do you really think that they care to read a breakdown of the different types of miniatures they can purchase?

Of course not! They already know those things. If you don’t do your research, though, you’ll never find out what they’re interested in. Find existing popular blogs, forums, and social networking groups to see what they’re talking about. Base your content around that. You can even turn to Yahoo! Answers for good inspiration for future articles.

Going Viral without Paying for Traffic

If you’ve done your market research you’ll know which groups and websites to join. Participate in them regularly and be sure that you share lots of helpful content created by other people. Every once in a while (for instance, one in every five resources that you share) slip in one of your own!

If you are running a blog based on a broader niche, such as personal finance, self-motivation, fitness, or making money online, you can even get away with just sharing the article with your friends on Facebook. Asking them to like and share your content will help to start a viral effect that could provide amazing results.

You see, if you share your post with just two hundred people and five of them share it with another 200 people, you can quickly accumulate thirty views. If this chain continues long enough you could easily find yourself with thousands of views in just a few hours.

By making sure that you have a market that is interested in reading your content you can find out what they want to know more about. By creating that content and sharing it, along with the valuable resources you find from others in your niche, you’ll gain a following that can help send your content viral.

In the final article in this series we’ll focus on how you can use paid advertising to build up highly targeted traffic within just a few days.