One of the biggest misconceptions about viral content is that you have to create it yourself. If you are launching a viral content marketing campaign, the idea is for you to come up with the next best piece of content in your niche.

In fact, according to this thinking, your content is so awesome that people can’t help themselves. Seriously. When they see the content, they read it, they engage with it. They can’t help but click on the link and join your mailing list, buy whatever it is you’re selling or otherwise make you money.

This is a fantasy. This is in no way, shape or form connected to reality. Not even close. You have to understand that viral content is actually very, very complicated. At the end of the day, nobody really knows why a piece of content went viral when something that is almost identical fails to get traction.

If you don’t believe me, just scour through the video collections of YouTube. There’s a tremendous amount of funny, sad, enraging or otherwise engaging videos that have very few views. I’m talking about less than one hundred views. You can tell on face value that these materials are top-notch in terms of quality. What’s going on?

Well, nobody can really quite put their finger on it. Nobody can really say that this piece of content will go viral and this won’t. However, a lot of it has to do with influence networks. A lot of it has to do with who you share the content and where you share as well as when you share. But even that explanation doesn’t do justice to what really is going on. At the end of the day, nobody really knows.

This is why it’s really important to stop wasting your time coming up with the next best piece of content in your niche. There’s a high likelihood that you probably are going to fall flat on your face. That’s right. I know it’s depressing. I know this is the kind of thing you probably don’t want to hear, but this is also the truth.

Instead of just trying to reinvent the wheel or come up with something truly awesome or revolutionary or earth-shattering, focus instead on what already works. I am, of course, talking about content curation.

Content curation is just a fancy way of saying that you’re going to republish other people’s content. You may be thinking to yourself, “What’s in it for them?” Well, you’re driving traffic to them. You’re driving eyeballs. You’re driving attention because you are always going to post a link to where you got the content from.

That’s not the issue. The issue with this content is picking the right piece of content. If you look at all the content in your niche on a certain social media platform, you can see which content gets shared a lot. That should be your number one focus. Don’t focus on the likes. Don’t pay attention to how many times people have commented. Who cares?

The number one thing you should focus on, in fact the only thing you should focus on, is how many times this piece of content got shared. If you notice that it is very popular, go ahead and curate that content and piggyback on its success. That’s how you play the game. You really cannot afford to come up with original content.


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