What everybody who owns a website wants is for their content to go viral. However, actually achieving this seems to be incredibly difficult. Some experts believe that this is because website owners are looking at it from the wrong perspective: they think that they have to offer something completely original in order to go viral. However, at the risk of throwing buzz terms at you, why reinvent the wheel? Why would you fix something that isn’t broken? Why not simply look at techniques that have worked before and adapt them to your own content?
There are rules that you have to follow, particularly in order to avoid penalties from Google. Hence, you cannot simply copy and paste other people’s content and hope it works for you. However, you can be inspired by it and use it develop something similar for your own website. This is known as reverse engineering and it has a range of benefits. First of all, it helps content to go viral, thereby building traffic and creating earnings from trending topics. Not just that, it also creates a larger amount of backlinks, thereby increasing page rankings.
But how exactly do you do this? How do you copy something without actually copying it, in other words? Reverse engineering, as it is known, is a skill and a fine art, but definitely one that you can learn too. Let’s take a look at some of the steps you could follow in order to reverse engineer your content.
1 – Do an Inventory of What You’ve Got
You will never be able to reverse engineer your content unless you already know what you have. This means you have to do a full inventory of which pages of your content are popular and what the content is on these pages. You can use Google Analytics to do this research. Do make sure you check on your CTAs, as this is invaluable information.
Once you know this, you have to figure out just why people are coming to these specific landing pages.
“What are people searching for when they come to a specific landing page? What are they typing in the search bar? Line up your content to anticipate needs, answer questions and meet the expectations of what they’ll find on the page.”
What you then have to do is go back to your CTAs and make sure these are in line with what your customer is doing. There is no point, for instance, encouraging your customer to immediately start buying when you know for a fact they are only searching for information about a product at the minute. Figure out which part of your sales funnel is aligned with thee pages and identify whether there are any gaps, and whether the sales funnel is aligned appropriately. Make changes as and when necessary. Last but not least, you are ready to edit your content, which follows further steps.
2 – Find Trending Topics
The first thing you have to do is finding what is trending at the minute. This will tell you what sort of things people are looking for and how you can incorporate that into your own content.
“The concept of reverse engineering viral content from trending topics is actually pretty simple. To start, we find one or more topics that are trending rapidly across the search engine results pages and social media networks, and then we write content that relates everything back to the website we’re working on.”
This really is a lot easier than you may think. For example, a current hot topic is the death of Paul Walker, start from The Fast and the Furious. If you are a shoe company, for instance, writing content with a title like “Six Pairs of Shoes Paul Walker Would Like to Wear”, you are immediately on a winner.
3 – Remember Social Media
Last but not least, never take your eye off social media. Social media is hot right now and if you haven’t got a presence there, you may as well not bother at all. Since reverse engineering is all about figuring out what has already worked and adapting it work for you, using social media is one step you cannot do without.
“Social media by its nature is very transparent and it’s easy to see which content is the most popular. Facebook tends to display the most popular posts for previous years so when you go to a company/product page and scroll down a bit you see the most liked and shared posts. For Twitter it’s a bit more complicated.”
It is about figuring out what has worked for others in the past and how this will work for you as well. See yourself as a spy. There are plenty of tools out there, many of which are free, that allow you to “spy” on other websites. These tools will tell you exactly which parts of their websites are the most popular and what is on those sites. It will allow you to see which Tweets and Facebook posts are the most popular. It is up to you to figure out why this is popular and how you can gain the same popularity.
Your competition is using the exact same tactics, so don’t feel as if you are being unoriginal by repeating what they have already done. Reverse engineering is quite a lot of work, so it isn’t even as if you are taking an easy option out. You have to do a great deal of research and regularly make changes to what you already have. However, nobody got rich by sitting back and doing nothing, so if you are unwilling to put the energy into checking your website, creating an inventory and improving on what you’ve got, then you may as well not bother at all.
Remember two main things: firstly, your Google Analytics account is your best friend, your mentor and your confident. Secondly, it is all about having an insight into keywords. Get those two things right and you should be able to reverse engineer your content without too much difficulty.