The term ‘go viral’ means that something gets shared so much that it travels around the universe like a virus. But in this case, it’s a sort of positive virus. There are a lot of sites online that claim that they’ll teach you how to make a site go viral, and it will only cost you a few thousand dollars. The truth of the matter is that this is entirely unnecessary. Getting a site to go viral is just a matter of using free options out there to pull it off. Here are a few pointers and examples.
Twitter is really exploding these days, and it’s a great vehicle for turning a site viral. People love to get little funny or interesting messages throughout the day, and they especially love little messages that are clever or trendy. There are a huge number of Twitter accounts that focus on just getting the attention of celebrities. One great way to get an account to go viral is to get a re-tweet from someone who’s famous and who has a lot of twitter followers who are loyal. This works out well because Twitter is born to do viral marketing. One person tweets something, and then it’s retweeted by another person to hundreds of other followers, and then it only takes a small percentage of those followers to retweet it to their followers, and before you know it, the thing has gone viral and is everywhere. It only takes one cute phrase to accomplish this, or one interesting or striking image.
YouTube
There are a lot of examples of YouTube videos that have gone viral. One prominent one is from Merton on Chatroulette. If you missed the Chatroulette craze, it’s understandable, since it came and went very fast like many things on the Internet. The Chatroulette site made it so that you were paired up with random people in order to talk with them using video. There were a lot of unsavory characters on that site, but a lot of interesting people as well. But there was one person online named Merton, who had a habit of going into the site and serenading whoever he was connected to on the site. He would be set up with his piano, and he would just sing about whatever was relevant to the occasion. Sometimes he would take requests, and sometimes he would just sing about the other person at random. The point is, his videos became viral pretty quick, and people were embedding them everywhere. It didn’t take any major market push to make these videos viral, they just happened naturally on their own.
MadMen
Another interesting example of a low budget trick that was used for viral advertising is the one used you Madmen. They just put together a simple application that allowed you to create an avatar of yourself that made you look like a character from the show. It got half a million visitors in the first week and boosted the Season 3 premiere. The site is actually still popular as a result.
Overall, it may only take something like some great free website templates in order to help you get a site viral. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to pull this off, you just need seriously good content that makes people want to share it with everyone else around them. This is easier than you might think and it often just takes using the right tools and sticking with it even when it seems a bit frustrating.