Writing great content is one thing. People enjoying it and reading it is another.

Praise

One way to find out how well a piece of content is doing (on the front end, rather than the insights dashboards) is the “share rate”. As a piece of content gets shared online – more people get a chance to view the content. 

Simple, right?

In this article I’ll share with you some tips on writing great SEO content, creating a killer content plan and the beauty of social sharing.

How do you rate if a podcast episode, blog post or video goes viral? 

It’s straightforward – just look at the shares. If you have a blog – you’ll want to provide an easy way for people to share your content.

Use The Social Share Feature

I’d always advise having the Social Share Feature on your blog, in fact, I’d say it’s essential. That way your content has more chances of people spreading online for FREE. 

Viral content spreads thanks to the ease of sharing. 

People sharing your content is a key indicator of how well it’s performing. If people like a particular article – make more content like that. Especially if it attracts your ideal clientele.

Views to Share Ratio

You don’t need millions of people to share your content to make it successful. Popular posts have a share ratio of 1/200 or lower (possibly 1/300, meaning that you can get one share for every 200 views/ reads. 

Ordinary posts might have a ratio of 1000 views to one share. Whereas viral content might get a share rate of 1/20, according to Crossthebreeze.com. 

What does this mean for you as the blog/ content owner? Basically it equates to 200 or more people reading your blog for every share you get. Who wouldn’t like an extra 200 people reading their content?

If you then reverse this concept… 

The average person has 338 friends on social media. Therefore, each shared piece of content may reach an additional 338 people. If we round this down to 300 then each share you get boosts the possible FREE organic traffic by a factor of 300.

Exciting right? 

Let’s Look at a Real Life Example

An article that I wrote for Alo Recovery Centers – “Who Are Some Famous People With PTSD?”  got 400 shares, as you can see from the image below, 229 shares were on Facebook and 171 were on Pinterest –

reading their content?

If you then reverse this concept… 

The average person has 338 friends on social media. Therefore, each shared piece of content may reach an additional 338 people. If we round this down to 300 then each share you get boosts the possible FREE organic traffic by a factor of 300.

Exciting right? 

An article that I wrote for Alo Recovery Centers – “Who Are Some Famous People With PTSD?”  got 400 shares, as you can see from the image below, 229 shares were on Facebook and 171 were on Pinterest – 

This is a pretty successful blog post, as it has reached 400 times the amount of people, compared to the content just sitting on a website and sharing it on your own business pages. 

If you multiply 400 by 300 (a modest estimate of social media friends each person has) then that’s a possible reach of 1.2 million. 

Obviously not everyone will see the post, or even jump onto your site to read your awesome content – but you get my drift. The possibilities are HUGE. 

If you’re interested (which you should be, unless you’ve already got a share features on your blog) then the social share tool used above is FREE. The plugin is available from ShareThis.com.

Writing Great SEO Content

In the first instance, your content will need to be high-quality and resonate with your target audience.

Articles need to be search engine optimized (SEO’d) to help Google rank the articles. There is a whole art to writing SEO content, that I can get into in another article. For now here is a brief summary:

I use SEO tools like Ahrefs to find keywords and trending content topics. This allows me to create content plans that will provide informative articles that will resonate with the target market for my clients websites. 

Ahrefs also allows you to view top performing content pages from competitors. Which can come in really handy, when creating a content plan. 

The Bottom Line

Just writing great content isn’t enough. 

Sure, the articles have to be amazing to be shared in the first place. That’s a given. But giving people an easy way to share the content can boost the traffic to your site exponentially.