Spending money to make money

‘Viral’ is a word that gets thrown about a lot on the web. Creating great content is the ultimate monkey when it comes to search engine optimisation, but creating great content that goes viral is even better.

I wrote previously about how great content can result in a large increase in backlinks and how it doesn’t have to be expensive but it does need to be interesting and link-worthy. It’s not always easy to create great content, but you do have to spend money to make money. You should view your website (and your blog) as another marketing tool – any money you spend on creating great digital content is money invested in the marketing of your business. Do it right and the dividends will soon start to outweigh the cost.

Where to Get Started:

Infographics

For a minimal cost and a little expenditure (on a paying a graphics designer), you could start your content campaign with an interesting/amusing infographic. Infographics are extremely popular and even supposedly ‘boring’ subjects can be turned into something more appealing and share-worthy when turned into an infographic. Infographics aren’t perfect for SEO (as all the content is lost in the image) but they are a great way at building backlinks to your site by encouraging people to share interesting articles.

Real-World Marketing

With the rise of mobile use in the UK, you can pretty much guarantee that every man and woman on the street has a smartphone of some sort in their pocket, which means if you do some interesting real-world marketing it’ll hopefully get noticed, photographed, video’d, tweeted, Facebook’d and Instagram’d.

Just to make sure, record it yourself and stick it on Youtube as well. This Volkswagen effort is a perfect example:

Obviously this probably involved a bit more expenditure, but you get what you pay for and a campaign of this calibre is much more likely to pay off.

Clever/Funny Video

Video is fantastic for SEO. Everyone loves video as it caters to short attention spans and easily goes viral with little effort. Creating great content and uploading it to YouTube can be a great way to improve your brand reach and increase links to your site if done correctly (don’t forget to include a link to your site in the video blurb and embed the video on your site!).

If you’re don’t know how to produce good video content, there are people who do. Approach some clever video makers and get them to make a video for you. Just take a look at this clever stop motion video made by Rhett & Link for McDonalds. It got 3 million views on YouTube channel and no doubt help raise both their and McDonalds profile.

Regular Content vs Quality Content

We usually recommend you regularly update your site (and blog) with new (unique) content. Keeping your site fresh is an important part of achieving good search engine rankings. But on the other hand we’d recommend avoiding adding content just for the sake of it or creating new pages just to target every variation of your main keyterm.

There is a logical counter argument that regular updates aren’t always necessary if your content is good enough. Some websites and blogs are famous for getting regular views based on just one or two new articles a week (or even month). If you can implement some great ‘viral’ content on a semi-regular basis, then you’re bound to get more value out of it than simply producing poor quality content on a more regular basis.
It’s important to remember that quality content costs money, but if you take the time to invest in really good content you’re more likely to see better results.