You must be thinking what’s the trick to make a piece of content popular on the Web? Is it a magic? Or is it a sheer luck?

Well, it’s neither of ‘em. There are certain specific elements that determine the fate of your content on the Internet.

Regardless of the fact whether you’re a newbie content marketer or a seasoned content maven, you’d already know that it’s nearly impossible to predict whether a piece of content will go viral. If you ask the marketers as to what do they attribute their content’s success, we bet you’re going to hear one thing, which is the most common answer as well, “It’s really random!”

But, is it really? Random? Well, based off of our years of experience into content marketing as well as our continued exploration of human psychology and behavioral actions on the web, we can tell you that it’s NOT random. There are specific elements, which if added to your content, can almost always ensure that it becomes popular.

You might want to keep this checklist handy before you hit that “publish” button for your next piece of content:

1) Feed them with numbers

If you look at the successful posts on the famous news sites as well as private blogs, you will notice that they use numbers a lot. Take a look at some of the examples below:

In a recently conducted survey, it was found that over 35% of the users preferred numbers in the headlines. And if we bifurcate these by the genders of readers, then 39% of females and 32% of males preferred numbers in the content they would read. And, many industry experts suggest that you should include odd numbers in your headlines to get users’ attention. In fact, odd numbers attract 20% higher CTR than even numbers. To clarify, it doesn’t mean at all that you should fake your numbers just so that they become odd. The idea is to stay relevant and practical.

2) Clarify with parenthesis

It is seen generally if the parenthesis is included in a content, the CTR goes up by close to 40%.

Including parenthesis in your content helps you clarify your point to your audience in a better manner. At the same time, it is an extra opportunity for you to target your additional set of secondary keywords. Many news sites and industry blogs use this technique to increase their readership and views. The parenthesis helps your reader to foresee what is there in the content even before starting to read it. This helps in building expectations around your content.

The readers are not only more likely to click if you add a parenthesis in your content, they are likely to be more engaged with your content than the normal content.

3) Keeping the URLs short

Another industry research suggested that content with short URLs perform 2.5X better than the ones with longer URLs.

Long URLs are seen to deter and stop the viewers from clicking to read the content. That’s because they spend significant time and effort in analyzing the URL itself and eventually lose interest into the content. On Google, the links with short URLs tend to get higher clicks than the ones with longer URLs. By keeping the URLs short, you can focus on the title of your content, which is the most important element to the popularity of your content.

4) Scannable sentences in the introduction.

A recently conducted industry research suggested that content that has shorter sentences in the introduction have about 58% higher readability. Why? At this initial stage of reading your content, they are not sure how useful it is to them. Therefore, they like to scan your intro rather than reading it in detail.

Scanning saves your readers a lot of time. They don’t like to read your content word-by-word. They come across hundreds of content pieces in a day, in different forms, such as emails, blogs, news stories, articles, etc. And therefore, they are easily distracted. They want to read content in bullet points. They can easily bold and highlight their key takeaways this way. The old paragraph format may seem boring to them. It is also sometimes intimidating. Readers appreciate content that is broken up into bits and pieces. Therefore, shorter sentences help in getting the point
across easily and fast.

5) Using high quality images.

If you include visuals in your content, then people are 80% more likely to read your content on the Web. Content pieces published with images enjoy as high as 94% more shareability amongst users. Images help increase the content credibility by 75%.

Colorful images reduces their information scan time by 80%. Images help in reducing the reading errors by 78%. If the colourful images are used in content, it becomes easier for the readers to locate information that they want from your content. Using colourful images along with your call to action statements on the website trigger 45% higher favourable behavior. Images increase the comprehension of your content by 73%. It also increases their memory of your content by 78%.

According to the research conducted by Skyword, including high quality image in the content increases content performance. Such type of content attains 94% higher views than the content without images, across different types of niches. Optimizing images for search engines, in the
form of image captions and metadata further enhances the popularity and findability of the content.

6) Adding personalized Call-to-action in the content.

A recent study suggested that personalized call to action statements in a content piece perform 42% better than using standard call to action statements or no call to action statements at all. It’s all about getting smart with your CTAs.

Personalized call to action statements in your content allow you to provide the right kind of messages to your visitors based on their preferences and also their position in the content or lead funnel. In order to include smart CTAs in your content, first you need to identify the personalization stages. The objective behind using CTAs is to convert the random readers into potential leads. Smart CTAs help you cater your content to them as per their tasters and choices. As mentioned earlier, consider using images and visuals along with your CTAs in order to make them more engaging. Here’s one such example:

There are many more tactics to make your content go viral. Are you interested in learning more about them? Leave us a message in the comments section below and our content experts will reach you shortly.