The story of how one of my articles went viral

Dear readers, for long it has been my burning desire to write a blog post narrating the tale of how one of my blogs went viral. For those who are not much aware of SEO facts and practices, a viral post is one which attracts enormous amount of traffic and benefits its contributor in many ways apart from translating into a considerable stream of passive income. From the very name, as even a layman would be able to guess, it becomes clear that the popularity of the post spreads as fast and voluminously as a virus multiplies. Very often an online writer needs to use SEO tools to write such posts but sometimes one may write a viral article by fluke. I am still not sure what happened in the case of my article but nevertheless the fact remains that it went on to become a viral article. Here is the link of my viral article:

JEE ADVANCED(IITJEE)Follow these 10 tips to get selected with a good rank

The intent behind writing the present article is to help the community of newbie on-line writers. By reading this article, I am sure, one can plan to write a hugely popular article and given that newbies always suffer from a want of cash to stay in the writing market, this article will definitely serve as a reference article to be looked up to write SEO friendly posts.

Article statistics, the traffic-rise graph

I published this article on 6^th of May, 2012 and at the time of writing this article on 26^th October, 2013 the post has received a whopping 107,630 views and about 100 comments leaving aside my own replies to readers’ queries. Even when I do not care much about the article now, it is receiving a daily viewership of about 200-300. At its peak the post was viewed at 1100 plus views a day. The rise of traffic was not consistent. For the first month the traffic was ordinary. Towards the end of the second month it started to grow up and in third and fourth months it was firing on all cylinders. The traffic rose exponentially and comments from interested readers started flooding in. The post reached its peak in October-December, 2012 period. Up to about March, 2013 the traffic was considerable and I was editing and updating it at times. After March, 2013 I have been concentrating on other posts and was not able to find time to reply properly to readers’ queries. So the traffic is gradually dying down. Still it earns about one fourth to half a dollar daily for me. The moral is

 “ONCE YOU WRITE A VIRAL POST, IT MAY EARN PASSIVE INCOME FOR A LONG SPAN OF TIME”.

What was the article about? 

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) is a brand name in India to reckon with. All the students with a dream to become an engineer yearn to enter the golden gates of IITs. Preparation for the entrance examination of IITs, question papers and coaching houses thereof, results, placement in IITs are some of the most discussed topics in India. The article was about how one should prepare for IIT JEE (The name of the entrance examination) to get selected with a good rank. From 2013 onwards, owing to some changes brought about in the format of engineering entrance exams in India, the name of the examination has been changed to JEE ADVANCED. So I edited the headline of my article later and changed the words IIT JEE with JEE ADVANCED.

Factors contributing to its success

At this point of time I know the proper meaning of a post going viral. SEO experts advise different tools to make your post viral. But honestly speaking, I was no SEO expert at the time I published the article. That is exactly why I did not use any images or videos. I did not try researching or applying any professional promotional methods. I did only as much as I knew. Then what factors took my article to such heights. I analyzed and found that there were indeed some latent aspects, unknown or little known to me at that time, which contributed to the success of the post. Let us brainstorm for a while:

Subject: The niche of the article was a natural choice for me since I had been writing on academia and career for some websites. The IITs were and are, the most talked about subject in academic circles in India. Hence the subject was a viral subject in itself. Moreover it is a subject where a viewer visits the same post again and again. The crux is that the post proved useful to my targeted audience.

Service

More than anything else I had an intent to help a certain group of people. In my post, along with tips I had encouraged the students who generally lag behind. In fact as a student I, myself used to lag behind sometimes and in spite of trying hard it used to be difficult to catch up. So it was a ‘straight from the heart’ post. I discussed ways to catch up and even move ahead of the advanced lot. Besides, I was always consulting previous question papers, hand-outs and reading articles about how to prepare for the examination for quite some time then. Obviously   I enjoyed writing the article and I could explore the facts very thoroughly with all the research I had done on the topic.

Timing of the post

The article, as I have already mentioned, mainly discussed the strategy to be followed by late starters so as to make it to the final list and that too with a good rank. It went into publishing at a time when not even a complete year was left for the exam date. Serious candidates start their preparations for this test at least two years before the scheduled dates and many coaching houses intake students from ninth standard onwards. So it seems now that timing of the post was excellent, though frankly speaking I had not planned for that. The students who, perhaps, were lagging behind at that time must have found it very inspiring. That was a point when serious preparation could be started. So it struck and the force with which it did so was breath taking.

Head line and Keywords

These were no fluke. Even though I did not know much about SEO tools then yet I knew that a catchy headline would be a decisive factor to attract surfers. I made it a point that the words ‘IIT’, ‘select’, ‘JEE’ and ‘rank’ must be present in the title of the post.

For the keywords I did this: I keyed in words relevant to ‘IIT JEE’ in Google search space and when the results were shown I looked at the bottom most section. There, we can find a list of the most searched combination of words relevant to the words keyed in. I selected some words from this list and used them in my post. I took care not to pump too much of these words into the article. Now I know that too much use of such words is known as keyword-stuffing and is not an ethical practice from SEO point of view. The substance is that one’s post must look and in fact be natural.

Promotion & incoming links

I admit I was and am still not a good promoter of my posts. Only while speaking to few of my friends and students I referred to my article and sent the links through email at their request. I also posted the link to my article on Facebook and Google plus.

Interactivity

After about a month of publishing the article students started writing comments about the post and asking advice. I consider myself to be spontaneously good at this. I used to write detailed replies in most cases. I think this might be a big factor in carrying the level of the article to where it is now. At the root was a desire to serve the needy students and that served my purpose as well.

Backing of a great website

As you must have known from the link provided above, the article was published on hubpages.com. At the time of writing this article the Alexa rank of hubpages.com is 545 which is very high up by all means. Again condescending to the layman level, Alexa rank is a rank given to websites based on the traffic that they get which goes into determining the popularity of the website.  As a result the posts going on air through hubpages.com get a good viewership. Armed with its keywords and the subject, the article perhaps caught fire due to the backing of this great website.

It was a detailed post

I did not compromise with the length of the post while writing it. I tried to put in as much information as I could so that those interested in the article could be benefitted to the maximum. The parts of the post which I thought, became redundant with time, were replaced later with new, useful information. I still tweak the post from time to time, the last one being on 4^th of August, 2013.

So, was it a fluke or an article can be planned to go viral?

I won’t say it was a fluke. I won’t accept I planned it either. I knew very little about SEO at that time but applied common sense to make it popular. Besides, I had a true desire lying in my heart to help the students preparing for the examination. SEO tools were applied to find keywords and write the headline partially with intention and partially by fluke.

But now I understand that if you have some knowledge of SEO tools and have a good subject to write about, a viral article can be planned. With addition of more elements which I did not use, like images, videos, polls and many newer tools one can plan and write a viral post. Rest of course remains with your audience like a box-office new release.

I remember having written an article for indiastudychannel.com about Christmas gifts. It was by pure fluke. I had no idea that it would be ranked so high in Google search results. So, in many ways your new post is like a newly released movie. Be ready to accept this 10%-20% unpredictable behavior from your targeted audience.

What has the post done for me?

I have reaped numerous benefits from my viral post.

Apart from bringing traffic, which translates into cash since the site is a PPV (Pay Per View) site, it serves as a good back link creator for my other articles on hubpages.com.

When I refer to my any other article in the same niche on hubpages.com through a back link on my viral article, a portion of the incoming traffic definitely comes to my new article. So I keep editing the back links originating from my viral article. Linking to my own articles on hubpages.com is allowed by the site with certain conditions.

Besides everything else the post has taken my online writing stature to a different level and boosted my confidence to have a feel that I can write many more viral posts like this.