Part 2. Two major strategies of growing a blog
So on one hand we have "viral traffic,"
the one that comes as a result of generating buzz on relevant communities
and reaching out to influencers asking for support.
And on the other hand we have the "SEO traffic", the one that comes as a result of putting effort
into making your content rank high in Google.
So which strategy is easier and more effective?
First of all, I have to mention that these are actually two extreme cases, which
in reality don't exist one without other.
I mean there's no way to consistently go viral and not get a single visitor from Google.
As well as there's no way to pull massive traffic from Google and not have a single
person share your content on Twitter or Facebook.
But in order to prove my point, I will discuss them individually.
So here are the main challenges associated with each strategy.
If you want to grow your blog with viral traffic, you have to be really good at creating content
that will resonate with your target audience.
It should resonate with them so much that they won't be able to resist the urge to share
it with others.
That's the challenge #1.
But virality doesn't happen out of nowhere.
You need to get support from influential people in your industry, who will promote your content
to their huge audiences and kick start the viral effect.
Influential people are insanely hard to pitch, so that's the challenge #2.
And finally, the goal of your blog is to consistently reach new people,
who will become your new customers.
So if you rely on viral spikes of traffic, you'll have to regularly produce sticky viral content
and regularly get support from industry influencers.
Because if you stop publishing, your traffic will fade.
And that's the challenge #3.
Now what are the challenges of growing your blog with SEO traffic, that comes from Google?
Well, your content still needs to be awesome.
It doesn't necessarily need to resonate with people that much, but it has to be insanely
useful to them.
Which is still a challenge, if you ask me.
However, the real challenge is to get backlinks to your piece of content.
Because backlinks is one of the key things that push you up in Google search results.
And building backlinks is something that most people struggle with.
But here's something positive about SEO traffic.
You don't have to publish regularly!
That's because the traffic from Google doesn't fade over time.
Unless of course your competitors put enough work to outrank you.
But I'm about teach you how to make sure that it won't happen.
So that is my rough comparison of two blog growth strategies.
I'm sure you've noticed that I'm favoring SEO traffic over viral traffic.
Well, the truth is, I don't have any truly viral articles in my own portfolio.
But almost every single post that we publish at Ahrefs blog ranks on the front page of Google
for it's target keywords.
And still, I do believe that viral traffic can be a worthwhile strategy for growing a blog.
So I went ahead and brought a guest, who's articles are read by millions of people.
This guy is seriously good at generating buzz with his content and we recorded a very insightful
interview on that topic.
Make sure you check it out in the bonus materials to this course.
But for now, let me dive a bit deeper into "Viral vs. SEO" dilemma and explain where
my strong bias towards the latter is coming from.
First of all, most newbie bloggers have a wrong understanding of how viral traffic works.
Here is the picture that they have in their head:
You publish an article and tweet it to your followers.
Some of them like it and tweet it to their followers, some of their followers like it
and tweet it to their followers.
This goes on and on and because of this snowball effect your article goes viral and gets tons of traffic.
Right? Wrong!
A few years ago guys from Pulsar studied how content goes viral
by examining a bunch of real viral campaigns.
And these are the visualizations that they have created with the data that they collected:
What their study had shown is that content doesn't go viral in a way I just described.
There's no such thing as a "snowball effect."
Even the opposite, viral content actually spreads in a decay.
Let me explain.
Content only goes viral if exposed to a super-huge audience.
In other words, someone with a huge twitter following has to tweet your article, so that
thousands of his followers would retweet it to their followers.
These two steps of the viral outburst bring the most traffic and visibility.
And from there, there goes a rather quick decay in the amount of retweets and traffic.
Back to these visualizations of real viral campaigns.
You can clearly see the big hubs that started the chain reaction.
But here's the thing.
The fact that an influencer has tweeted something,
doesn't mean that all his followers will pick it up and retweet it.
That is why the top 2 challenges of viral content that I've listed earlier are:
Creating super-sticky content that everyone would want to share with others;
And pitching the biggest influencers in your space to kick-start the viral effect.
Both of these challenges are incredibly hard to crack.
And that is why I am not a fan of chasing viral content.
But in case you want to further explore the science, psychology and mechanics of virality,
I have quite a few great resources in the Further Reading section, at the bottom of this lesson.