You Want a Viral Site? Do this.

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I’ve now failed twice at making a viral site (Cellarspot and Helpd). I’m starting to notice that this blog is growing virally. I think I learned something tonight. If you want a viral site, then you must at least do the following things:

  1. Create features that will allow users to share
    1. Invitations, tell-a-friends, etc
  2. Create features to get people to link to you
    1. RSS feeds, widgets, etc
  3. Offer a good product and/or good content

Invitations and tell-a-friends make it easy for users to get their friends involved. RSS feeds and widgets make it easy for your content to be placed on other sites. When your content is placed on other sites, it’s much more likely to be viewed by people who haven’t heard of you yet. For example, my blog has an RSS feed (thank you, WordPress), and some people subscribe to my RSS feed with their Google Reader. Some of these Google Reader people share certain posts with their gFriends, which puts my blog in front of the eyes of people that haven’t heard of me yet. Item 3 is a tossup, because I’m not convinced that my blog has good content ;).

Perhaps this is old news to some people, but I wanted to share just in case.

Am I missing anything? Want to add anything? Write a comment.

Update: more here and here.

  • http://www.InteractiveFish.com Eric

    you also need people to actually read your stuff, haha — i wrote a post the other day about marketing your website. But still, there’s the hump of “catching on” — i don’t know much about that!

  • Dmytro Mulyava

    Hi Alex,

    Good post. I think the other part of the equation is having a product that includes an incentive for users to invite others.

    Example: Facebook – “You should join Facebook so I can see your pictures”
    Youtube – “You should check out YouTube because I have a video on YouTube”

  • http://www.alexloddengaard.com alex

    Thanks, Eric and Dmytro! Good suggestions.

  • http://sunilgarg.com Sunil Garg

    Beyond allowing people to share the site, I think it’s important that you allow them to interact with each other. Comments let you do that with a blog, to some extent, but a better example would be the use of forums, groups, or other features that would generally fall into the realm of social networking. Flickr and Facebook Photos are great examples of this, especially when you compare the two.

    That would change the list to:
    1. Offer a valuable service and/or create interesting content
    2. Cultivate interaction to build a community around your site
    3. Enable your users to become your PR team (feeds, widgets, invites, etc)

    What do you think?

  • http://www.alexloddengaard.com alex

    Totally agreed, Sunil. Thanks for the input.

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