The best type of advertising has three characteristics. It is
free, impactful and viral. What kind of advertising fulfills all
three characteristics? Word of mouth! It is free because it is
spontaneous, unsolicited and natural. It is impactful because
the persons spreading it were impacted and they spread the news
out of their own impacted emotions. And it is extremely viral
because it spreads exponentially. Imagine if your blog posts
could be passed around this way.

What kind of blog post can achieve such a viral nature? A viral
blog can be one of several kinds:

1. A HOW TO blog post

The HOW TO blog post shows the reader how to do something that
many people want to know. If you know how to do something that
most people do not, you could post a step-by-step guide on how to
do it to your blog. Once the right people discover your blog
post, they will naturally and spontaneously spread your blog post
to others. You could write about how to speak in public, how to
write HTML, how to play the piano by ear, how to take great
photos etc. There are literally thousands of 'how to' things you
could post about.

2. A UNIQUE TWIST blog post

This type of blog post is closely related to the first HOW TO
type. This is where you blog about something that is common
knowledge but you put your own unique twist to it, something that
most people have never thought of. It may well be totally
contrary to conventional practice. One example is article
marketing. The conventional practice in article marketing is
where you write articles and submit them to article directories.
But if you have a better and more effective way of article
marketing, post about it in your blog. For example, instead of
submitting articles to directories, you could offer your articles
to blog owners or newsletter owners in your niche. Tell them
they can make your article available to their readers for free as
long as no changes are made to any of the content. This way you
get much more targeted readers reading your article and more
powerful link juice back to your blog because it comes from
another blog that is related to your own instead of from a
general article directory.

3. A HOT REVIEW blog post

This type of post follows the principle of the early bird
catching the worm. This is where you blog about the latest hot
topic in your niche and give an honest appraisal of what is good
and what is bad about whatever is happening. Since the topic is
new, virtually no one has much knowledge, much less a view about
it. This works tremendously well for political blogs. But the
review can also be about the hottest gadget or the latest book or
the newest trend in your niche. One great place where you can
find out the latest happenings is Google Trends. If you are the
first to blog about whatever is happening, you can capture the
initial interest of the public and people will start passing your
blog post around like wildfire. When that wave dies down, simply
find the next sizzling development and review it and the process
repeats itself.

These are just three ways you can make your blog viral.
Obviously, you will not succeed every time, but if you keep at
it, you will hit the jackpot sooner or later. And as a result,
the readership of your blog experiences an exponential spurt of
growth.

Andy Henry