How to Go Viral and Make Millions on Social Media
Are you ready to stand out and make a big impact on social media? In this article, You’re going to learn the secrets of going viral and how you can use that virality to make millions. Whether you’re a thought leader, coach, or content creator, these strategies will help you elevate your social media game and achieve the success you’ve been dreaming of. Let’s get started!
The Formula for Going Viral
Believe it or not, there is a formula for creating viral content. It’s not just about luck or chance; it’s about understanding the elements that consistently resonate with audiences and compel them to share your content. Here are the key components of viral content:
1. Novelty
People go viral because they share something new and mind-blowing. Whether it’s a fresh opinion, a thought-provoking idea, or a never-before-told story, novelty is the key to capturing attention and driving shares. Tracy Rodriguez, in a podcast episode, explains that the brain is hardwired for novelty, constantly searching for new and surprising content. This is why unique perspectives or stories that haven’t been heard before spread like wildfire.
Real-World Examples of Novelty: Consider the viral success of content like the “ice bucket challenge” or the sudden popularity of a new dance on TikTok. These moments went viral because they introduced something novel—whether it was a new way to raise awareness for ALS or a fresh and fun way to dance. The novelty of these ideas captured the world’s attention.
Creating Novelty in Different Niches: Different industries require different approaches to stand out. In the wellness industry, for example, a novel approach might involve combining traditional practices with modern science, like Gary Brecka’s biohacking techniques. In the finance world, it could be an unconventional approach to saving money or investing. The key is to identify what makes your content unique in your niche.
The Science Behind Novelty: Research shows that our brains are wired to seek out new information. This is rooted in our evolutionary need to learn and adapt to our environment. When something novel catches our attention, it triggers the release of dopamine, the “feel-good” neurotransmitter, making us more likely to share that content with others. Understanding this can help you craft content that taps into this innate human desire for new experiences.
2. Sharing Your Story
As a thought leader or coach, sharing parts of your story that have never been told before is a powerful way to create novelty and connect with your audience on a deeper level. Tracy Rodriguez highlights that sharing her personal experiences, especially those related to her marriage, has significantly boosted her engagement and business growth.
The Power of Personal Stories: Sharing a story that resonates with your audience can turn casual followers into loyal fans. For example, if you’re a coach who overcame significant obstacles to reach success, sharing that journey can inspire your audience and encourage them to engage more deeply with your content.
Using Relatable Conflicts and Resolutions: Every great story involves some form of conflict and resolution. Share your struggles and how you overcame them. For example, you might talk about the challenges of balancing work and personal life and how you developed strategies to achieve harmony. These relatable experiences draw your audience in and make your content more shareable.
3. Emotional Engagement
Sharing content that evokes strong emotions—whether it’s joy, anger, or love—is more likely to be shared and engaged with by your audience. Tracy discusses how posts that elicit an emotional response, even if it’s anger or frustration, tend to have higher engagement and can convert viewers into clients.
Emotion Mapping: To create emotionally resonant content, start by mapping out the emotions you want your audience to feel. Are you aiming for inspiration, empathy, or even outrage? Knowing this will help guide the tone, language, and visuals of your content.
Risks and Rewards of Emotional Content: While emotional content can drive high engagement, it also comes with risks. Content that evokes negative emotions, like anger, must be handled carefully to avoid alienating your audience. However, when done correctly, even controversial content can foster deep connections and generate significant buzz.
Social Media Techniques to Implement Your Strategy
As you build out your strategy, you’re going to find a lot of tools, techniques, and trainings out there on how to put together a content strategy for growth on social media. People always want to know which strategy or social media feature is the best one for them to use if they want to grow on social media. The truth is, you want to build a strategy that incorporates as many of these different techniques and tools as you can so you can take advantage of each of their strengths:
| Technique/Tool | What It Does | How to Implement | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Influencer Collaboration | Leverage the audience of established influencers to boost visibility. | Reach out to influencers in your niche and propose collaborations. | Fast way to reach a large audience. | Can be costly; finding the right fit is crucial. |
| Content Scheduling Tools | Automate posting to keep content consistent and optimized for peak times. | Use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Later to schedule posts in advance. | Saves time and ensures consistency. | Requires upfront setup and learning curve. |
| Hashtag Strategy | Increase discoverability by using trending and relevant hashtags. | Research trending hashtags in your niche and use a mix of broad and specific tags. | Enhances content reach organically. | Overuse can look spammy; hashtag trends change. |
| Paid Advertising | Boost posts or run targeted ad campaigns to reach a specific audience. | Use Facebook Ads Manager, Instagram Ads, or TikTok Ads for targeted promotions. | Highly targeted and scalable. | Requires budget and can get expensive. |
| Engagement Tactics | Increase interaction by prompting comments, shares, and likes. | Use CTAs like “Tag a friend,” “Comment your thoughts,” or “Share this post.” | Boosts algorithmic ranking. | Needs to be genuine to avoid looking like engagement bait. |
Characteristics of Good Viral Content
To create content that goes viral, it’s important to focus on the following characteristics:
1. Growing Relationships
Nurturing relationships with your community and making them feel like a part of your world is essential for creating viral content. Tracy suggests making your audience feel like insiders by sharing inside jokes, behind-the-scenes moments, and personal stories that build a sense of camaraderie.
Building a Loyal Community: Your community is more likely to share your content if they feel connected to you. Engage with them regularly through comments, live sessions, and personalized content. When your audience feels like they’re part of an exclusive club, they’ll be more invested in spreading your message.
Examples of Brands with Strong Communities: Look at brands like Lululemon or Peloton, which have successfully built communities around their products. These companies engage with their followers through community-driven events, challenges, and content, creating a sense of belonging that encourages sharing.
2. Valuable Content
Providing valuable content that isn’t a gatekeeping process is key. Share what has worked for you and how others can benefit from it. This transparency builds trust and encourages sharing. Tracy emphasizes the importance of giving actionable advice and sharing the exact steps that led to your success.
Step-by-Step Guides: Break down your success into actionable steps that your audience can easily follow. For example, if you’re a coach who has grown a successful online business, share the specific strategies you used, including tools, timelines, and resources.
Content Curation as Value: Curating relevant content from other sources can also add value to your audience. Sharing helpful resources or articles from other experts shows that you’re dedicated to providing the best information, even if it’s not your own.
3. Causes You Care About
When you talk about causes that you are passionate about, it translates into good feelings for your audience and encourages them to share your content. Tracy’s passion for topics like kids, marriage, and social media shines through in her content, making it more relatable and shareable.
Storytelling Around Causes: Weave your cause into a story that your audience can relate to. For instance, if you’re passionate about environmental sustainability, you could share your journey of reducing your carbon footprint and the challenges you faced along the way.
Choosing the Right Causes: Make sure the causes you support align with your brand and resonate with your audience. Authenticity is crucial here—your audience can tell if you’re not genuinely invested in the cause you’re promoting.
Crafting Catchy Headlines
Gone are the days of generic headlines. To capture attention and make people stop their scroll, you need to craft catchy headlines that resonate with your audience. Here’s how to do it:
1. Understand Your Audience
Analyze the data from your most engaging posts to understand what resonates with your audience. Tracy suggests looking at your past posts to find common themes and elements that have garnered high engagement.
Using Data to Your Advantage: Use analytics tools to track which posts perform best and why. Look for patterns in the topics, formats, and headlines that get the most engagement. This data will be invaluable when crafting future headlines.
2. Create Catchy Headlines
Use the themes that resonate with your audience to create 20 catchy headlines and test them in the market to see what works best. This iterative approach allows you to refine your headlines and maximize their impact.
Headline Formulas: Consider using proven headline formulas, such as “How to [Achieve a Goal] in [Time Frame]” or “The [Number] Best Ways to [Solve a Problem].” These formats are popular because they promise clear value to the reader.
A/B Testing: Don’t be afraid to experiment with different headlines. A/B testing allows you to compare the performance of two or more headlines to see which one resonates more with your audience. Use tools like Google Optimize or Optimizely to run these tests.
3. SEO Considerations
While crafting catchy headlines, don’t forget about SEO. Including relevant keywords can help your content rank higher in search engine results, driving more traffic to your posts.
Balancing SEO and Engagement: The challenge is to create headlines that are both optimized for search engines and compelling to your audience. Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify high-traffic keywords that fit naturally into your headlines.
The Power of Storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful tool for creating engaging content. Here’s how to become a better storyteller:
1. Elements of a Great Story
A great story includes characters, conflict, resolution, and relatability. Use these elements to take your audience on a journey through your content. Tracy recommends introducing characters (yourself, family members, friends) and sharing relatable conflicts and resolutions to engage your audience.
Types of Stories That Resonate: Different types of stories work well depending on your audience and platform. Origin stories, transformation stories, and cautionary tales are just a few examples. Each type has its own structure and can be used to highlight different aspects of your brand.
Structuring a Story: A well-structured story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Start with an attention-grabbing introduction, build tension or conflict in the middle, and resolve the story with a satisfying conclusion. This structure keeps your audience engaged from start to finish.
2. Narrate Your Life
Take mundane, everyday activities and turn them into engaging stories that captivate your audience. Tracy points out that successful storytellers on platforms like TikTok excel at making ordinary events fascinating through their narration.
Turning the Ordinary into Extraordinary: Even the simplest daily activities can be turned into compelling stories if narrated in the right way. For example, a fitness coach might share their morning routine, focusing on the small habits that contribute to their overall health and success. The key is to find the deeper meaning in these everyday moments.
3. Leveraging Visual Storytelling
Visuals can enhance your storytelling by making it more engaging and accessible. Whether it’s through photos, videos, or infographics, visuals help to convey your message more powerfully.
Examples of Visual Storytelling: Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are built on visual storytelling. Look at how top influencers use images and videos to complement their narratives. For instance, a travel blogger might use a mix of stunning photos and personal anecdotes to tell the story of their latest adventure.
Making Millions on Social Media
Now that you understand the key elements of viral content, it’s time to leverage that virality to make millions. Here’s how:
1. Consistently Put Offers Out There
Whether it’s selling digital products or coaching services, consistently putting offers out there is key to converting followers into buyers. Tracy shares that she consistently promotes her coaching services and digital products, leveraging her growing follower base to drive sales.
Monetization Strategies: Beyond selling your own products or services, consider other monetization strategies like affiliate marketing, creating membership communities, or offering exclusive content. These additional revenue streams can help diversify your income and reduce dependence on a single source.
Scaling Your Business: As your follower base grows, look for opportunities to scale your business. This might include hiring a team, automating processes, or expanding your product offerings. Scaling allows you to serve more clients and increase your revenue without overextending yourself.
2. Get Brand Deals
With high engagement, you can attract brand deals and collaborations that can bring in additional income. Tracy suggests working with companies that can negotiate stellar deals on your behalf, ensuring you get the best possible terms.
Navigating Brand Collaborations: When considering brand deals, it’s important to choose partners that align with your values and resonate with your audience. Authentic partnerships are more likely to succeed and can lead to long-term collaborations.
Building Your Brand Appeal: To attract brand deals, focus on building a strong personal brand that appeals to companies in your niche. This might involve refining your messaging, improving your content quality, and consistently engaging with your audience.
Take Action and Create Your Viral Content Plan
Now that you have the tools and strategies for creating viral content, it’s time to take action. Create your own viral content plan and start implementing the strategies discussed in this blog post. Here’s how to get started:
1. Creating a Viral Content Calendar
Start by planning a content calendar that outlines the type of content you’ll create, when you’ll post it, and how it aligns with your overall strategy. This will help you stay consistent and ensure that your content is well-timed to maximize engagement.
Templates and Tools: Use tools like Trello, Asana, or a simple Excel spreadsheet to organize your content calendar. Be sure to include space for testing different types of content and iterating based on what works.
2. Analyzing Viral Success
After posting, it’s important to measure the success of your content. Track metrics like shares, likes, comments, and conversions to understand what’s working and what needs improvement. Use this data to refine your content strategy over time.
Metrics to Watch: In addition to basic engagement metrics, consider tracking the virality coefficient (the number of new users generated by each existing user) and conversion rates. These metrics will give you deeper insights into the effectiveness of your viral content.
3. Long-Term Strategy
Going viral is great, but it’s not a one-time effort. To maintain momentum, you need to incorporate viral content into a long-term social media strategy. This means continually experimenting with new content ideas, engaging with your audience, and staying adaptable to changing trends.
Maintaining Momentum: After a viral hit, keep the conversation going by engaging with new followers, responding to comments, and continuing to post high-quality content. Use the attention to promote your products or services and build lasting relationships with your audience.
Final Thoughts on How to Go Viral and Make Millions on Social Media
If you’re ready to take your social media game to the next level and learn even more about creating viral content and making millions, be sure to check out the coaching programs and resources mentioned in the show notes. Share this blog post if you found it valuable, and let’s work together to make your social media presence go viral and make millions!
