Comments on: You Want a Viral Site? Do this.

By: Alex Loddengaard’s Blog » More on a Viral Site

Alex Loddengaard’s Blog » More on a Viral Site — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:16:52 +0000

[...] made a post a week or so ago about how to make a viral site, and I wanted to add to my list of [...]

By: alex

alex — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:41:37 +0000

Totally agreed, Sunil. Thanks for the input.

By: Sunil Garg

Sunil Garg — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:38:56 +0000

Beyond allowing people to share the site, I think it’s important that you allow them to interact with each other. Comments let you do that with a blog, to some extent, but a better example would be the use of forums, groups, or other features that would generally fall into the realm of social networking. Flickr and Facebook Photos are great examples of this, especially when you compare the two.

That would change the list to:
1. Offer a valuable service and/or create interesting content
2. Cultivate interaction to build a community around your site
3. Enable your users to become your PR team (feeds, widgets, invites, etc)

What do you think?

By: alex

alex — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:37:12 +0000

Thanks, Eric and Dmytro! Good suggestions.

By: Dmytro Mulyava

Dmytro Mulyava — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:40:26 +0000

Hi Alex,

Good post. I think the other part of the equation is having a product that includes an incentive for users to invite others.

Example: Facebook - “You should join Facebook so I can see your pictures”
Youtube - “You should check out YouTube because I have a video on YouTube”

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:40:16 +0000

you also need people to actually read your stuff, haha — i wrote a post the other day about marketing your website. But still, there’s the hump of “catching on” — i don’t know much about that!