What do you do if you are disappointed with the revenue that is generated by your online products and services? How can you promote your website to achieve success online? There is no easy answer to the problem, but a Search Engine Optimization company can come to your rescue. It can play a vital role in ensuring that your business gets the maximum amount of exposure from potential customers.
First of all, an SEO company analyses your website and all your other web-marketing assets. Next, it pinpoints the areas where your online marketing is poor; and finally it immediately starts making improvements to your presence online. The methodology that an SEO company adopts is known as Search Engine Optimization. It is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics employed to increase the number of visitors to a website by getting a high-ranking on the Search Engines. This methodology ensures that a website is accessible to a search engine and enhances the chances that you will get new visitors to your website.
Potential customers normally use a Search Engine to find products and services. They usually choose a company on the first page or the second page majority of the time. SEO companies use a combination of keyword optimization, article marketing, link building, social networking and other Search Engine Optimization methods to elevate your presence online. Attracting more customers is the main goal, which can be done only by promoting the website hence the need for Search Engine Optimization. An SEO company builds that badly-needed bridge between your products, services and your targeted customers. SEO is one of the best ways of helping a business gain better visibility online.
SEO companies usually have a range of SEO packages for you to choose from. These packages usually contain a combination of SEO techniques, systems and services, all designed to work towards getting you on the first page of the search page. SEO is an ongoing process with monitoring and traffic analysis being part of the package. You will certainly want to know whether the money you are paying to an SEO company is being properly used. Taking a look at your weekly and monthly results is a good way of getting an idea of your return on investment along with many other things.
SEO companies usually provide SEO services at an affordable rate, especially with their range of virtual and web solution packages. But there are many SEO service companies out there, so how do you go about finding a company that suits your needs? A way out of this conundrum is to go for a company that has years of industry experience – a company that constantly reviews its processes and that can work with different types of businesses. Nothing is more diverse than SEO, so find a company that is on the cutting edge of new technology and SEO processes. A good SEO company, which is known for carrying out successful and affordable Search Engine Optimization, will help you select the best package to suit your needs. If you need any guidance or help around Search Engine Optimization, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital as we would be more than happy to guide you.
Nobody likes to fail, whether it’s a classroom, sporting event or your professional life. We have seen many changes in 2013 with regards to Google and Search Engine Optimization techniques. Many important updates have been rolled out which have changed the Search Engine Optimization process, thoughts, and strategy. EMD (Exact Match Domain) Google update was a massive crackdown on spam websites that were trying to beat the system by changing the domain name of their website so they could rank for specific keywords. Another example of an update that was rolled out in 2013 was known as Google Penguin, this algorithm analyzed the quantity, quality, and relevance of websites that link to yours. When Google looks at your link profile, they’re looking at things such as what types of websites link to yours, are they spam sites, how quickly you acquired these links, and the anchor text used by the linking website.
Google updates its algorithm over 500 times a year in order to fight low quality sites from appearing on the Search Engine Result Page. In the future we will also see many updates from Google to ensure that its users are getting the most relevant results. The reality is people how to Google because they feel they get the most relevant information according to the searches they perform. If that were to stop happening, then users would look elsewhere to find what they are looking for.
Search Engine Optimization is no longer an easy task that you can do sometimes or even in your spare time. As Google changes its website ranking techniques constantly the ultimate goal is to ensure that the users are getting the best experience possible. What Google holds as the most valuable today is the content you are providing and sharing. As a result of this, it is critical that you constantly refresh, add, and share content on the Internet. If you are doing white hat ethical SEO and are providing good content then you will not have to worry about any Google updates.
Many people think these updates cause a lot of disruptions and problems. The reality is that these updates are teaching online marketers an important lesson which is do things the right ethical way and Google will reward you for your hard work & efforts. To reach your online goals it is critical that you stay up to date with all the Google Algorithm changes to ensure you are getting the best results. Most importantly, create great content that people want and only perform white hat ethical SEO. As always if you have any questions or have been affected by a Google update, please reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group. We are always happy to help with any of your Search Engine Optimization needs.
Search Engine Optimization has a lot of mystery surrounding it and there are many people who do not understand what exactly a Search Engine Optimization Specialist does. While the technical details of this process are certainly not very interesting to someone who lacks technical knowledge. The misconceptions surrounding this industry often cause people to get scammed by unscrupulous SEO professionals who claim to be a Search Engine Optimization Specialist but provide their clients little or no benefit. In addition, sometimes clients hire a SEO specialist who partakes in black hat SEO which is looked down upon and can seriously hurt your rankings. It is important that you know what an SEO specialist really does in order to help your website get a good search engine ranking so that you can avoid being scammed. In addition if you understand what an SEO specialist does, it can help you pick a good SEO company out of the many options presented to you.
Basics of SEO You do not need to become an SEO expert in order to tell which SEO company will provide you the best results. As long as you have basic knowledge of what a Search Engine Optimization Specialist really does, you can safely pick a quality SEO professional to assist you with your rankings. SEO is divided into on page and off page optimization and before you delve deeper, you need to understand what they are.
✓On page Optimization – Any changes that a Search Engine Optimization Specialist makes to your website are part of the on page optimization. Usually this involves ridding the website code of errors and ensuring W3C validation. In addition, an SEO specialist will also add proper tags throughout the website and complete all metadata so that search engine spiders can analyze and classify your website with greater ease. He or she will place to correct tagging on your site so that the search engines know what your site is about as well as what to rank your site for.
✓Off page Optimization – A large portion of time that a Search Engine Optimization Specialist spends on SEO for a website is spent on off-page optimization. Off-page optimization includes sharing links for your website on social networks, popular websites, developing links for your website and getting them placed on websites with a high PageRank. In addition SEO specialist submit articles relevant to your company on different sites, embed quality anchor text links which help you get high search engine ranking for the keywords that you want and more.
Summary Search Engine Optimization is a time taking task that needs to be handled by trusted professionals who have the experience and expertise to deliver good results. It is something that is a long term task and cannot be done overnight. Any company or individual who claims to get overnight success will be using black hat unethical tactics which you should stay far far away from. If you need any assistance or advice with your Search Engine Optimization or any other digital marketing, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.
When IBM decided to enter cognitive computing and developed their Watson computer system, they decided to first develop it specifically to answer questions on Jeopardy and famously pitted the computer against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The resulting publicity has made Watson more or less a household name. The Jeopardy match-up resulted in invaluable coverage in the media which would otherwise have cost IBM millions of dollars in publicity expenses.
Marketing and publicity are a key part for any brand or business. Which is why the expensive half-time commercial slots during the Super Bowl cost $4 million for a 30-second spot and yet, there is no shortage of buyers.
In the online world, making a website popular is clearly one of the necessary conditions for website owners and Ecommerce businesses if they want to survive and flourish. One of the ways to achieve popularity is via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with an SEO company. SEO is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Super Bowl half-time ads. SEO is entirely free and the only investment being the SEO professionals themselves times.
Of course, digital marketing is an ever growing activity and online businesses need to opt for paid online marketing activities such as search advertising, PPC advertising and online video ads. Such paid online marketing campaigns can be effective in the short run and they are typically the preferred method when the intention is to promote a short-term activity such as an end-of-season sale. But nothing beats SEO as the preferred vehicle of online marketing to increase a brand’s online profile in a sustained manner as once you achieve rankings, it’s free traffic.
SEO company For those who are serious about their online business (which includes all Ecommerce businesses at the very least), there are two essential requirements for enduring success: 1) have a user friendly, functional and simple-to-use website with a great user interface and 2) engage a digital marketing company to help you with the SEO aspect of your business in an ongoing fashion.
SEO is for the long haul Why do you need to hire an SEO company instead of doing it in-house? Well, that is because SEO is a job for professionals who have gained long years of experience by working in the SEO business. They have in-depth knowledge and perspective about both the past and the future possibilities of SEO.
With SEO professionals at an SEO company are taking care of SEO for your website, you will be assured that all the basics are taken care of: such as on-page and off-page optimization. SEO professionals will also know to avoid the deprecated practices or black hat SEO techniques.
Search engines like Google are taking action against those websites who try to artificially enhance their organic search rankings on the search engine result pages (SERPs). An SEO company that knows what they are doing will ensure that the website is appropriately optimized, no illegal quick fix solutions are tried. When it comes to SEO and website organic search rankings, the smart ones know that ‘slow and steady wins the race’ is the motto to remember and follow. There are no quick fixes. For example, if a site is old, it will a get certain amount of value and weightage in Google’s rankings irrespective of other qualitative aspects of that site.
SEO is a many-splendored thing SEO is not a single monolithic thing anymore — if it ever was. SEO comprises of many things. Apart from the off-page and on-page optimization mentioned earlier, SEO professionals at an SEO company will ensure that there is no duplicate content on the website. Google chooses to punish sites with duplicate content (since in Google’s view, such sites do not add value to the internet; and Google is right here) and it is better to remain careful rather than seeing your hard-earned position in the SERP suddenly vanish. With numerous algorithm changes such as Google Penguin, Google Panda (not named after the cute animal), and Google Hummingbird, Google is trying to adapt to changes in user behavior as well as trying to provide the best and the most relevant links in the organic search results.
After all, Google’s (and other search engines’) reputation relies on such website providing authoritative answers to users’ queries. The changing nature of audience behavior includes such seismic shifts as the inevitable predominance of mobile devices to access the internet. To cater to these changes, Google is changing its algorithm to be able to better meet the needs of its customers. These are all things that your SEO company that you are working with will need to keep mind.
With the growth of mobile, voice search has grown. And with the Google Hummingbird changes, Google has revealed how it seems to answer truthfully any question put to it. Today of course, Watson is much more than a Jeopardy winning computer server. Watson has morphed from being unbelievably good at Jeopardy to helping cancer specialists make sense of the growing volume of medical literature comprising of endless data from current and old studies, clinical trials, side effects of drugs, drug combinations to avoid, etc.
Similarly, SEO professionals will take the guess work out of SEO. Apart from making sure that the website adheres to all the rules from search engines, SEO professionals that are working at an SEO company will develop and implement long-term plans to improve your site’s SEO. That includes running content marketing and social media marketing campaigns to improve the website’s SEO.
SEO includes content marketing & Social Media marketing For a website to get good ranking in the organic search results, it needs to have great on-site content which the SEO company you are working with can advise you on. Google gives great weightage to authentic and authoritative content. Hence, SEO professionals ensure that websites have a deliberate approach towards content marketing which includes regular blog posts.
Blogging, email marketing, white papers, Slideshare presentations, etc. are a few of the ways of generating and then sharing great content. If the community of users likes this content and consumes it and shares it, this will give a signal to the search engines that this is valuable content. That will translate into those sites getting good rankings in the organic search results. If the content on a site gets many Social Media shares, this tells the search engines that this is authentic, meaningful and powerful content created by experts or industry leaders.
Search engines will display such sites higher up in the search rankings. Of course, the final rank of a site is determined based on ‘more than 200 factors’ as Google might put it but having good content is one of the most effective ways to enhance your site’s SEO in an effective and long-term fashion. An experienced SEO company can guide you and the do’s and don’ts in this area.
An SEO company specializing in content marketing will ensure that your site has great content. Social Media is the other great battlefront for the modern SEO professional. This battlefront must also be conquered if your website wishes to last for long. Social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — is the place where you have to post funny and relevant content which will get widely shared and disseminated among peers in a user group.
When a blog post shared on Social Media gets numerous Likes or Retweets, that gives the search engine the idea that this is a good site with interesting content. Of course, for content to be shareable, they have to avoid the cardinal mistake of being boring. Content can be boring because of many reasons — it can be too technical, archaic, or arcane, it can be presented in a soporific manner, it may lack the factors that make a post go viral such as having images or an emotional core to it. A good SEO company knows the balance that needs to happen in this respect
Social Media is sort of a pressure release valve for many busy working people. Hence, the popularity of cat videos on the internet — or videos of human twins doing funny stuff and so on. An effective Social Media marketing strategy will take into account such rules of the game as when to post content and how often to post content to each of the different social media platforms.
SEO companies with proven social media marketing strategies and expertise will be long-term assets for your company Once you get your ‘content strategy’ honed, you will likely get a pretty popular website which attracts endless unique visitors as well as a devoted band of regular readers. The deep engagement with your community of readers apart from the large number of social shares will give the right signal to the search engine that the website is an authority on that given business vertical. This will help your website rank higher in organic search results leading to more search engine users discovering your website.
Conclusion For the above reasons, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by an experience SEO company can lead to greater popularity for your website. If you are looking for a reliable, trusted and experienced SEO company that can help you achieve higher rankings, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your digital marketing needs.
Many things need to be considered when integrating your E-commerce and SEO strategy so that they work as cohesively. The way to integrate SEO features into your E-commerce site is by having an SEO consultant as part of the core team of web designers, developers, and information architects. As an example, your Developers need to be aware of duplicate content issues and how to resolve them. Products on the E-commerce store should be organized by category and sub-category. This improve the E-commerce website’s optimization. Conduct keyword research of both your website and competitor websites. Remember that “long tail keywords” is where most of the action lies in terms of search. Make sure your website has breadcrumb navigation. Having descriptive meta tags that include prompts such as ‘find out more about’ is an essential technique. It’s a must to write Img Alt Tags. This helps non-visual readers such as vision-impaired consumers. There are so many things to keep track of it can be quite intimidating hence the reason for having an SEO consultant can surely easy these headaches.
While SEO and automation used together can have negative connotations, for E-commerce websites with thousands of products, it is important to facilitate automation whereby programmers can automate on-site elements such as title tags. User generated content should be leveraged to help improve the site’s ranking. Since user generated content tends to be original and fresh, this improves the site from an SEO perspective. Allow buyers to write product reviews and testimonials. This creates a community of happy users and convinces visitors that they can trust you. Help visitors spread the word about all the products on your site by integrating social media on product pages. Also, this will help you avoid using manufacturer product descriptions which can lead to duplicate content which is a no-no from an SEO perspective.
You can maintain a blog where you talk about new products and offers and have an FAQ page that helps answer the most frequent queries of your users.
Optimized product pictures and videos should be used on the site as the quality of your product pictures can influence how visitors feel about your product. Make sure customers feel comfortable sharing their financial information on your site. Prominently display the logos and text certifying that you comply with security standards (SSL/Visa). It’s better to offer peace of mind to visitors rather than take the security aspects of the website for granted.
Mobile and smartphone usage is growing like crazy. This trend will only persist. For E-commerce retailers, the website should be optimized for mobiles via using responsive web design or having dedicated mobile sites.
If you have local presence apart from being an online retailer, then your business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP) for all locations should be present on your website. All the branches should be listed on Google Local Business via a Google+ page. You should allow reviews and rating on each branch of your business. This will be displayed by Google when someone searches for a local branch of your business.
These are some of the basic E-commerce techniques that should be taken care of at a minimum to ensure survival and growth for your business in the online commerce space. If you need any help or assistance with your SEO strategy, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.
One of the biggest challenges for a business is to engage with more people and convert those people that are engaged into customers. Entrepreneurs spend a good amount of money on creating websites that have brilliant design and a great user-experience. However, none of that matters if you are not getting any traffic to your website. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play and allows a site owner to gain visibility online. SEO services usually fall into two categories; white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO also known as organic Search Engine Optimization does not violate the terms of service of the search engines while black hat SEO completely ignores it. Any company that you engaged with for SEO services should be thoroughly vetted and you should be absolutely sure that they are only engaging in white-hat SEO services. Below, we will take a look at how white-hat SEO services can help you take your business to the next level.
✓Achieve Your Business Goals Every business online or offline has certain goals that they want to meet and exceed. If you implement the correct SEO methodologies and techniques on your website, you will be able to reach your goals quickly and efficiently. With the help a professional SEO company that can provide you great SEO services, you can see the rankings on your website increase in the search engines which will generate traffic to your website. When you generate traffic to your website, this will generate you customers and help you to achieve your business goals
✓Increased Visibility When a prospective customer is searching for a specific product or service, are you getting found online in the search engines for these services or products that you are offering? If the answer is no, then you need to be working with an SEO company that can help you increase your rankings in the organic search results ensuring that you are getting found for all the relevant keywords you want to be ranking for. The SEO company you work with will provide you SEO services which will help you get found and help you gain more visibility online across the multiple search engines.
✓Cost Efficient They are many marketing channels that you can opt for which will increase your sales and add to your bottom-line. However, SEO is one of the most cost-efficient methods that is available in the market today. Granted, it does take time and effort to rank high in the organic search results but once you are ranking within the search engine for your relevant keywords, the traffic is absolutely free. Compare that to Paid Search (PPC) where you are paying each time a visitor comes to your site, this can become an expensive affair! SEO services is one of the most cost-effective ways of generating traffic and sales to your website. The SEO company you work with will be able to provide you guidance and help you to execute the necessary strategies so that you are ranking high within the search engines for all your relevant products or services.
Summary Working with a company that can provide you SEO services can be a very profitable and fruitful venture for your business as long as you can find the right partner to help you. The SEO company that you choose to work should undergo a due diligence check, reference check, credit check and so on to ensure that they can deliver what they claim to. SEO is something that needs to be taken seriously no matter what size business you have and is something that can help your business flourish. If you are looking for a reputable, experienced and trusted SEO service provider, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your digital marketing needs.
The use of content marketing has increased in recent years as a very organic way to engage with existing and potential customers. Content marketing takes various forms — be it blogs maintained by any large or upcoming technology company such as IBM, Microsoft, Twitter and so on or an active social media presence maintained by small companies and others. No matter which form it takes, content marketing is one key element for consumer-facing companies to keep in touch with customers.
Content marketing and digital advertising such as banner ads or Google search ads (Google AdWords) constitute the bulk of digital marketing. Specialized digital marketing and content marketing agencies have built expertise and reputation over the years and can design specific content marketing plans to meet the needs of specific businesses and execute on those plans on time and within budget. Digital marketing agencies and SEO agencies in India such as Mind Digital have built a strong reputation in this arena with their demonstrated track record of having executed many projects successfully.
A thousand marketing campaigns are sure to bloom around hashtags such as #RioOlympics and #Olympics2016 and they may be effective for brands. But such campaigns are time-sensitive and can only last while the Olympics lasts. Big businesses can afford to invest millions in such expensive, short-term campaigns. You’ll need to invest more to be visible in the clutter of campaigns all trying to get visibility at the same time.
So, if you are not a big business and don’t have a vast budget to spare for a dedicated content marketing campaign, outsourcing this activity to a digital marketing agency in India is a good option.
India-based SEO companies such as Mind Digital will take care of the many SEO aspects of content marketing. One key and common part of content marketing across all the different social media platforms — especially on your company’s blog, LinkedIn, and Quora — is ensuring that the content is written with the targeted keywords in mind.
Getting the SEO right using while hat SEO techniques — and content marketing can arguably be described as a white hat SEO technique — will ensure that your website will feature on page one of Google’s organic search results for your desired keywords related to your business.
SEO experts at India-based SEO agencies such as Mind Digital will undertake the necessary content audit of your company’s existing online properties and look at your competitors and how they are performing in Google searches for what keywords.
Long-tail keywords are better and get you a bigger bang for your buck.
For example, it’s better to target ‘bike shop in Pasadena, California,’ or ‘bike shop in Mountain View, California,’ rather than ‘bike shop’ or ‘bike shop in California.’ It will be easier for your business’s website to appear at the top of the organic search results in Google if the SEO is done correctly and the right keywords are targeted.
SEO professionals at India-based SEO agencies will ensure the right SEO strategies are planned and the correct SEO techniques are deployed for a visible, verifiable, and sustainable improvement in the client’s website’s search engine organic results rankings.
Depending on how competitive your business is, you need to target getting into the Top 5 search results on Google. Most customers will never bother to scan beyond the Top 5 results or at most the page one of search results.
Four Steps: Strategy, Target, Schedule, Tools (STST)
Digital marketing takes various forms such as search engine marketing, (mobile) video ads, and social media marketing as well as content marketing. Small businesses may feel intimidated by the cost prospects of a content marketing campaign. However, there are ways to keep costs low and one of the tools available is outsourcing the content marketing campaign to companies such as Mind Digital.
It’s important to have a long-term outlook and be careful of “content marketing agencies” and others who promise sparkling results and search engine spikes in a short timeframe.
Strategic Objective:
The key to having a successful content marketing campaign is starting out with a strategy for how to execute it. The strategy part includes deciding what you want to accomplish through the campaign — whether greater visibility, higher search engine ranking, better customer connect, and so on.
The execution of the strategy or plan will take perseverance since content marketing is about the long-term and not like a 30-second Superbowl ad. Think of the perseverance of, say, Paul Salopek, now into year three of his seven-year journey of 21,000 miles.
A low-cost or almost free content marketing tool is having a blog where you post 5 to 7 pieces of content — articles or blog posts — on a weekly basis and you do that persistently over years. You will see results and better organic search engine visibility for your blog as long as the articles you post have value, provide useful information, or are of interest to users for similar reasons. Digital marketing agencies in outsourcing destinations such as India have the skills needed to write regular blog posts if your business wants to outsource this piece of content marketing.
Viral content can provide return on investment on a quicker timeframe. So, how to go about creating content that goes viral?
Strategy for creating viral content
You want to create evergreen or viral content that people notice. So, how do you ensure that your content manages to stand out over long periods of time? There’s no foolproof way to guarantee that some content will go viral or some technique will ensure that the content goes viral but the best practices are well-worth following or adhering to.
All content creators might aspire to come up with something like the historic Apple ad from 1984.
Or the other famous Apple ad, the ‘Think Different’ commercial.
But that’s a high bar to meet. Somewhat of a lesser bar is to follow well-known “content marketing secrets” such as using cute baby images or animal images. Indeed, surveys have empirically verified that using cute animals or cute baby images improves response rates. Cute babies help increase response rates by as much as 88% while cute animals do so by a more moderate 42%.
How do you make babies relevant to your content or marketing message? Well, even a very tenuous link may be enough — think of the Evian ad.
Why babies and cute animals work is because they generate an “emotional connect” with the reader’s brain. A great many of our purchasing decisions and similar behavior as consumers is driven by subjective experience that is in turn built on top of the right emotions. It’s no different when it comes to how the typical reader or consumer interacts with content online.
For content to be engaging and share-worthy, it must look interesting on first sight. You massively improve the chances of your article getting clicked or read if you start with an interesting headline. The importance of having the right headline cannot be stressed enough. In fact, as this New York Timesarticle shows, the right headline can generate twice or thrice the traffic of a boring headline.
Attention spans are getting shorter all the time and nowhere more so than in the online world. To catch the attention of a reader in the short time span you have, you need to have a strong enough emotional driver in your content. Viral content usually goes viral when they are able to create a strong emotional connect in split seconds with the use of visuals as well as simple-to-understand language.
Which emotions lead to greater sharing of content? Perhaps companies like Facebook have a lot of internal data about this which they may not freely share with the public. But it’s common sense that positive emotions — say, an article that’s inspirational in some noble way — will lead to greater sharing of content than negative emotions.
Some positive emotions that lead to greater sharing include amusement, surprise, happiness, hope, excitement, and affection. See how these emotions can be incorporated into content that you create.
And the Web is becoming more visual than ever. Our visual cortex takes up a major part of the entirety of the cerebral cortex. Humans are highly visual creatures. Hence, content that is rich in visuals — images, infographics, video embeds — is more likely to go viral.
FAQs are another way of creating evergreen content that stays useful for a long time.
You can become a “thought leader” in your chosen niche. If you can stay on top of the news cycle through social media, then nothing like writing articles that provide perspectives on the latest breaking news related to your industry — whether it’s Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn or the latest rumors surrounding the iPhone 7.
You can draw your audience by asking them to participate in some manner by having content that is interactive. Take the JunoCam on the Juno spacecraft that just entered orbit around Jupiter. There are many such initiatives that seek to make the audience an active participant and which seek to empower consumers of the content.
Gamified content or content gamification is somewhat similar and related. Numerous examples of brands using such techniques exist. Think of the progress bar on your LinkedIn page. The U.S. Army uses gamification in its recruitment ad and Khan Academy uses gamified learning concepts to make learning maths fun for kids. Think of the weekly quizzes on various news websites such as Slate and The Economist. They let readers measure themselves on a scoreboard and they also maintain an overall Leaderboard. These will appeal to highly educated audience members of the sort who might be used to solving the dailyNew York Times Crossword and who tend to be more educated and belong to higher income groups.
Human interest stories will engage readers by appealing to them on an emotional level. The articles that you publish on blogs can have an occasional personal element or tell a personal anecdote — how a product benefited someone personally or how someone was helped by someone in a tight situation and so forth.
Look at the top articles from 2015 on the New York Times website or the most read stories from the New Yorker site. What distinguishes or characterizes those stories? Among the top 15 stories from the NYT are articles about people — about Justine Sacco, George Bell, the anonymous New Yorker and what happens when someone dies alone in an apartment, and Sandy Bem, the Cornell psychology professor who decided to take her own life upon learning she had Alzheimer’s.
Viral content can come from many different sources. Think of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address or Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. Different people gather their news and views from different sources and their definition of viral content may different. Meaning, some piece of content — say an article or a YouTube video — may be quite popular and may have gone viral in some circles but not in others.
People who are Tesla enthusiasts — and these days, that means the electric car company and not the inventor — may be familiar with the viral videos of people driving their Teslas in “insane” mode or Autopilot mode and so on. People in academic settings or doctors or college graduates may be more familiar with Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s writings and his book or the recent CalTech commencement address by Dr. Atul Gawande.
Being imaginative and quirky can also lead to wonderful, viral content. Think of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from a balloon from the edge of space. His sponsor Red Bull made it a worldwide event even if for a day or a few minutes. Buzzfeed’s watermelon exploding video went viral for a day and must have made many media executives at established news outlets despair at this new outfit eating the lunch of the old giants who claim to be the “paper of record” and so on.
