Believe it or not the question posed by the title of this article is being asked by a lot of experienced marketers. It turns out that every single day, hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of content go viral in the United States alone.

There are so many markets and, unfortunately, the majority of these pieces of content don’t really have a niche target. They are what you could say “general interest” content. They defy easy categorization. It’s really hard to pin them down.

The question then becomes “Given the tremendous amount of this type of content, can they be used to drive niche traffic?” For example, if you are promoting a personal injury law office in Southwestern Arizona, does it make sense for you to piggyback your website URL on content that features cars getting into accidents, trains going off rails, planes crashing to the ground and other viral content that people can’t get enough of?

Besides the professional ethics issues involved, it might not be a good idea. You have to remember that general interest viral content is not niche-targeted. People just respond a certain way to this type of content.

Maybe they’re shocked. Perhaps they think it’s controversial. Possibly, it appeals to fear or pride or whatever. People who view that content develop some sort of strong emotional response.

Unfortunately, this may not be good enough as far as your marketing objectives go. You have to understand that it’s very tempting to try to use very popular general interest content for niche marketing purposes.

It’s easy to see the attraction because you don’t have to try as hard. You already know that this funny cat video is taking the Internet by storm. You already know that if you only share that video of the singing nun winning a singing contest that you stand to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views.

Unfortunately, you have to resist that temptation because general interest viral content is not automatically going to pull the same traffic that you need. At least you need people who would actually want to stick around by joining your mailing list.

Let me tell you the vast majority of people interacting with general interest viral content probably are not going to be in your target niche. So, do yourself a big favor. Focus instead on finding viral content that is already in your niche. If you can’t curate this type of materials, curate stuff that is ‘close enough’ but let your call to action link do the filtering.

For example, your niche is sexual harassment plaintiff’s legal services. You can viralize content involving ‘jerk bosses’ and use a call to action link to filter the people sharing jerk boss content who might be interested in learning more about office harassment issues.

Your definition of viral in terms of traffic volume should be adjusted in light of the content’s niche specificity. Generally speaking, when people talk about viral content, they talk about content that gets viewed by millions of people but, believe it or not, content can be “viral enough” even if it has only one thousand views as long as the people viewing that material are very interested in a particular niche.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.