“‘How do you create content that goes viral?

I remember getting this question from a new blogger. They wanted a post to go viral on their blog, thinking it would suddenly shoot their blog’s traffic and profit into the stratosphere.

And who knows? It may have done just that. Unfortunately, without having plenty of content in their archive there’s a good chance those numbers would have come crashing down pretty quickly.

So I told this particular blogger what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. And I thought it would be worth sharing what I said with you all this week.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing content that might be shared hundreds or even thousands of times. I often talk about how important it is to write sharable content. But ‘going viral’ won’t necessarily give you the sustained traffic you need to make it as a full-time blogger.

While some bloggers may have achieved overnight success on the back of a single post, in most cases it took months (if not years) for them to become full-time bloggers. I’ve met thousands of bloggers over the years, and the fastest any of them have reached the full-time level is four months. And that was certainly the exception to the rule.

Most people take a longer to reach full-time status. And they achieve it by taking one step at a time.”