Have you ever had a post go viral? It’s awesome, especially when you publish your post in the evening, wake up to look at your web stats (you know you always do), and think, “How the hell did we hit that number?” I can’t argue with the excitement associated with viral blog posts. But viral blog posts are not how you accurately measure a blog, and they should not be a goal that guides your DevOps content marketing.
Virality does not have a clear definition. The best angle I can come up with is to base virality on your average web traffic. If a post exceeds your average single-day visit for a post by 20x or more, that bad boy went viral. Note that you have to put virality in relative terms because some blogs (such as those relating to DevOps) are far too niche to compare their traffic to more general, high-traffic blogs.
With that metric, I can say that for our media site Sweetcode, we can expect one post to go viral for every 100 we publish. So about one percent. This, on average, is pretty high. A typical blog will never get to experience virality. Yet many companies I’ve encountered will set virality as a goal, and compare their posts to that one article that went viral somewhere else. Or they’ll ask, “Okay, so how do we make viral blog posts?” That is a trap.
Why Shouldn’t Virality Matter?
Avoid the pressure to make your blog posts go viral. Virality certainly shouldn’t be one of your content marketing goals because:
- Virality usually also implies short shelf life. Viral content will often be super timely, yet short-lived. To build your blog’s traffic, you need posts that have long tail interest. Practitioner blog posts are particularly good at this.
- Post success is not blog success. One post may do well, but if the rest of your content is poor, then your blog will never be a destination. Think about the blog’s overall success, not the success of an individual post.
- The post might win, but does it contribute to the bottom line? The most viral posts are often the most independent. Posts go viral because they appeal to their target audience in a way that is very personal. But that personal experience may have nothing to do with your DevOps product or brand.
- Sometimes a post goes viral for a bad reason. Reddit shares are famous for making a post viral because someone ripped it apart. (That is not necessarily a bad thing.) But viral does not equal positive.
- A one-hit wonder will make everything look bad in comparison. If virality becomes a stated goal, then all other posts will seem disappointing, even though your content quality remains consistent. If you have never witnessed a post going viral, and your reference point is someone else’s post, you can feel you’re falling behind.
The Takeaway
Your blog’s overall success is key. How you leverage the content outside of your blog (e.g., on social media) and as a sales enablement tool will reap additional benefits for you.
It may feel like your company has arrived at success with a viral post. That is a great feeling but is often misleading. Measuring your blog based on a few viral posts is a bad way to quantify your DevOps content marketing efforts. Instead, focus on the quality of your blog content and its relevance to your market.
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This post was originally published in January 2019 and updated in August 2021.