Viral Posts and Hit Songs

This is a video recap of the post from the Food Blogger Pro blog on viral posts and hit songs. And in this post, we're going to talk about how to increase traffic to your blog, which a lot of times comes down to viral posts. But the trick is, a viral post isn't what you should be focusing on. You should be focusing on continually creating awesome content. And I want to show you a little background, a little sneak peek into the previous life of Bjork Ostrom. I'm on MTV here, and yes, that is me listed as an artist on mtv. There's no other information other than than my name and hometown. But the reason that I bring this up is because back in the day, it was 2006 or 2007, there was an M. Here it is right down here. 2007, there was an MTV show that featured a song that I had written. And in college I played a lot of shows. I did kind of the singer songwriter thing. And the real world got in contact with me and said, hey, we'd love to use one of your songs. And it was kind of my hit song. And it wasn't, uh, this. It wasn't this episode down here, so you can ignore that thumbnail. Uh, and the video itself doesn't seem to be loading right now. I think it's because it's so old. Um, but the idea was this song for me, this hit song is called Long Drive Home, was something that really allowed me to grow my musical career. But I never would have been able to get to this song. I never would have had this for me, what was a hit song if I hadn't written a ton of other songs. And the same can really be said for a blog as well. And here we're looking at Pinch of Yum. And on Pinch of Yam, there are almost 600 posts now. And of those 600 posts, there's about 50 that represent 50% of the total traffic. So if we switch over to Google Analytics here, this is all of the traffic from April 2010 to today, which is mid September 2014, about half of it comes from 50 posts. And those would be posts that I would consider kind of viral posts. So how do you get those viral posts? Well, as we talk about in the viral posts and hit songs blog post on Food Blogger Pro, which is if you're watching this on YouTube, there'll be a link down below as we talk about in the post. The way that you get a viral post is by coming back to this right here, the add new button in WordPress or whatever blogging software you use. And the idea is if you focus first on getting traffic and getting viral posts, you're not going to get those viral posts and that increase in traffic. Because what you need to focus on first is creating content that is as valuable as possible. And then that traffic in those viral posts will come after. And in order to get to that place where you're creating that awesome content, you have to do it again and again and again. By coming back to that add new button, by publishing a new post, by thinking about how can I get a little bit better when I publish this time? How can I create a recipe that's a little bit more enticing, or a photo that's a little bit sharper, or content that's a little bit more engaging? And if we look here on the analytics, you'll see every once in a while as you continue to do that, you'll have these little spikes in traffic where those posts that you're creating will have a little bit of viralness to them and those will become your popular posts. Those will become the posts, the 50 posts that are representing 50% of the traffic. Or if you're a band, those would be the handful of songs that are kind of your foundation as a band. So it's a really important concept to think about as you think about growing your blog. As you think about viral content, the important thing to realize is that it's not about creating that viral post or that post that's perfect for whatever social media sharing site. It's about creating that awesome content and doing it over and over and over again and having a long term view of it. It's a really basic concept, but I think it's an important one as you're thinking about growing your blog. Two other things here before we sign off. Number one, if you would be interested, we have an ebook available for free. It's called 10 mistakes that bloggers make and how to Fix Them. You can get that by going to foodbloggerpro.com ebook and number two, we would love it if you subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are slowly but surely growing. Just like we talk about in this post. We're all about consistently creating content and trying to get a little bit better each time. And we're going to continue doing that with our blog and our YouTube channel as well. And you can subscribe by going to YouTube.com foodbloggerpro. Thanks for checking it out and we'll see you around. Sam.