How to Go from Nothing to 550,000 Social Media Visitors in One Month

Glen Allsopp / 19 Comments / May 19th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

We’ve had a lot of success with a particular client recently and I wanted to share that with you guys today. They wern’t exactly getting ‘nothing’ from blogs or top sites but it wasn’t anything to talk about. However, in pretty much one month of brand building and recommendations we changed all that.

In April we sent them well over 550,000 visitors from the likes of Digg, Fark, StumbleUpon and Reddit. While I can’t give the exact details, I am going to look into the steps they took based around the advice we gave them and how you can start to look at having similar success.

Need proof?

Photo Credit

Sadly I can’t reveal any exact client details, but this screenshot of Fark and Digg traffic should be enough (April only):

How it Was Done

Nothing I’m going to reveal here is going to be particularly groundbreaking if you have read a lot on this subject already but hopefully it puts everything in a nice format for you to digest and learn from.

Creating Viral Content

This is probably the most obvious factor but it is still the most important. No matter what fancy title you put on your boring article, it probably isn’t going to spread if there is no substance to it. My definition of viral content is very simple, it’s something you see (read) and instantly want to share with others.

Usually, we create one killer article and try to promote it around the web to get relevant traffic and backlinks. However, this client is a news source and they publish a lot of viral style content on a daily basis, and that is why they have had so much success. If you want some examples of this type of content simply go to sites like Digg and Reddit and check the titles of the homepage content, pay attention to the titles that catch your eye.

Getting it Out there

Hilarious articles, videos, and images that you would imagine to do well on these sites FAIL on a daily basis. It’s not just about having the content but also about being able to promote it. Luckily for our (Bluesouth) clients we have a number of ’strong profiles’ on the top social media sites so were able to get the content off to a good start.

This wasn’t where most of the traffic came from though, it wasn’t just us doing the work which will be explained in the next section. In the month of April the site was on the Digg homepage 4 times, numerous times on the front page of fark and received nearly 100,000 visitors from StumbleUpon because the content was so unique and interesting that people just wanted to pass it on.

Having a strong profile on these sites is time consuming but the reward can be well worth it, we wrote up a guide to building your account on StumbleUpon and here is a great one for Digg.

Getting Others to Share it for You

As I said, my definition of viral content is something that people read and want to share straight away, and in the case of this client that is exatly what people started to do. Have you noticed how a lot of sites are constantly on the homepage of these social media communities and leveraging their traffic?

Our initial exposure using our top accounts helped people to start noticing the content on the site, but then people found a lot more great content and then started sharing that, take a look at this little ‘map’ as an example:

Just to put things into perspective:

• Only 1 of 4 Digg homepages were submitted by us
• Over 50% of articles we considered submitting to StumbleUpon were already submitted
• Only 1 of the Fark homepages were submitted by us
• We didn’t do anything on Reddit yet received tens of thousands of visitors from the site

The moral of the story?

1. Work hard to write great content
2. Work hard to build profiles on sites that can send traffic to that content
3. - OR network with others who can submit content for you
4. Have other great content that people can read once they are on the site
5. Make it easy for them to share it with the web
6. Rinse and repeat

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