Every online marketer hopes that someday their content will go viral. When content goes viral that definition is different for everyone depending on how large their audience is now. For some having something shared 100 times is viral, for others 10000 times is viral. But, when your content goes viral what happens now? Are you ready for it?
Nothing is sadder than having a situation occur that puts your business or name at the top of mind of a lot of people all at once only to have your website crash, your sign-up forms not work, or your shopping cart be a pain to use. That’s why, if you’re in the content marketing and social media marketing game at all, you must assume that eventually content you create will go viral so that you’re ready.
Check Your Hosting Account
Contact your hosting to ask them how much traffic you can reasonably send without crashing the platform. Ask them if their hosting is backed by a Content Delivery Network to route traffic so it won’t crash your system. Smaller hosts usually cannot handle more than 10 to 15 requests per second for your website. If you go viral it will crash.
Keep Your Website Updated
One thing that can cause problems is not keeping your site updated. If you use WordPress, make sure you always keep it updated with the newest versions of plugins and instance of WordPress. Also, if you use any technology with your website like Aweber.com for email marketing, and Amember.com for a shopping cart, make sure everything is up to date with that too and that they can handle a lot of traffic.
Use the Best Tech You Can Afford
Don’t skimp on the technology you use. If you’re intent is to build a high traffic website so that you can make more conversions, then build your business with that in mind. It’s much simpler to use the best tech you can afford now than to try to cobble together freebies and just hope they’ll work. This is especially important if you’re going to go viral.
Check Your Images
You want high-quality images, but you don’t want them to take up too much space or your website will load slowly. Loading speed must be almost instantaneously because people will not wait around for the site to load. Images should be compressed so that they aren’t so big but still look great. Most of the time you can find website technology that will accomplish that for you via a plugin for WordPress.
Test All Tech
On a regular basis test out your website and all the tech that you’re using with it. Start with loading speed, check for broken links, check all your SEO, and your shopping cart and email marketing system to ensure that it’s all working correctly. That way you’re not caught off guard when something goes viral and nothing is working right.
Thank your website visitors. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from one particular blog post, which is causing a lot of commenting n the post, consider either adding an overlay or editing the post at the top to thank people for reading it and commenting and to offer them an incentive to sign up to be reminded of more awesome content.
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