Creating captivating blog posts that get seen by thousands of people really isn’t as complicated as its made out to be. Granted, the execution of successful content distribution is an art in and of itself, however, the factors that cause content to spread many times can be boiled down to a few things. Many times, the real nuts and bolts of the blogpost can be total garbage, and with the help of a few tactile modifications the content can go viral.

Consistent Image Sizing

Consistent image sizing is critical, many times posts that have 25+ images laid out and sized consistently can go viral, just because the fact there are so many consistently sized images, no matter what the content of the images are.

Tutorial Posts With Clear Imagery and Explanation

Tutorial posts are another great way to convey information on a blog. Rather then explain how to do something with just text, breaking up the flow of the document with concrete call to actions and examples via imagery can help a lot. Many times I find tutorials that are completely inaccurate or represent false or dated information, but because the post is laid out so well, it gets shared around.

The OMG Photo

The OMG photo as I have coined is that awesome hero shot you find on some blogposts. I see this time and time again, where a unbelievably funny or creative hero shot causes a blogpost to go viral, no matter what the actual article said.

Lengthy Infographic Content

One of my favorite ways to convey information is through an infographic. Although time consuming to create, they tend to go viral.

Consistent Giant List Round Ups

This really is where quality gets washed away sometimes. Want to create a hit on your blog? Simply round up 146 sources that discuss a niche topic, write up brief descriptions about each and lay it out in a consistent, readable manner. I see several specific sites that make a killing doing this all the time, and guess what, typically the sites listed are not that great and sometimes are lucky to be on topic.

If you notice one of the biggest factors people will overlook in executing content distribution is consistency. Messy, outdated, false, regurgitated content gets shared all the time. Consistent, easy to read layouts is king, content is queen.

The snapshots I sourced in this article are examples of consistency + great content which will yield the greatest chance for success.

Dapper.net is one of my favorite services for turning content into a form or stream that I can better utilize. It gives you the ability to turn content into the following sources:

• xml
• rss
• html
• google gadget
• netvibes module
• image loop
• google maps
• icalendar
• json
• csv
• email
• xsl
• yaml

Below you will see a demo video I made in which I grab images off of a page, and only images, and turned it into HTML that I can then embed wherever I want. Have you used Dapper for any projects?

Happy new year everyone! I wanted to bring in the new year with a silly post of sorts: 6 outrageous occurrences in life that if happened – would go viral. Video is one of the most prominent ways to get your message out nowadays, and I can say without a doubt if the following scenarios played out, were recorded, and seeded on a site like youtube they would get thousands of views.

Lets get this started off with a situation where a man stumbles in front of a car and the car pummels over his leg, but the man manages to walk away!

Your buddies are out horsing around on the ice and accidently fall in.

An endzone dance is a typical occurence in the NFL. Could you imagine a guy doing a move only to faceplant into the ground.

Lets imagine your neighboor is up on he roof blowing leaves off, trips and take a head first dive towards the ground from two stories up. Miraculously he lands on the hood of his care, bracing the impact, and gets up and walks away.

The day has come, you have prepared your whole life for this. You get the local NBA team to place a message up on the scoreboard asking your loved one to marry you – only to be rejected on national TV.

Cats are amazing creatures. In fact so amazing one managed to rescue himself from the blazing house fire that tore through the neighborhood.

There is more to Social Media than front page Diggs…

If you think Social Media is all about getting on the homepage of Digg and only that, then you are wrong. Keep digging, there is a LOT more underneath the surface to be discovered. Most SEO’s get stuck on instantaneous traffic sources. The fact of the matter is that you need to take a holistic approach when implementing tactics in todays market for clients.

If you sell Social Media as a service on your SEO consulting site, you better be able to back it up with other tangible explanations vs. simply submitting content through power accounts, getting traffic (that wont convert for crap) and obtaining 25 backlinks from the linkerati and calling it Social Media.

There is more to reputation monitoring than subscribing to RSS feeds and other glorified RSS reader tools…

This space is growing as rapidly as any right now. Simply typing in a brand term and seeing results that come up from the major engines, blogs and websites just does not give you the whole picture. Aside from your key terms and brands you are monitoring, are you looking into trends around that phrase, are you looking into key influencers that you want to put on your radar around that term? There is no one solution here atm that does it all. However, understanding there is more to Reputation Management then exact match keyphrase monitoring, will help you going forward.

There is more to Social Media than Facebook and MySpace…

Facebook and MySapce to a degree got this all started. It really got marketers thinking about engagement beyond one sided conversations, and how to use it for business, outside of the daily personal ongoings that Facebook and MySpace facilitated. In reality that is exactly what Social Media is, leveraging two sided conversations in any form or fashion possible.

With all that said, I have decided to make a move. 3 years of in house, hyper competitive SEO poo slinging with theMadHat has taught me a lot (personal side note: look who’s ahead, your shady link tactics have been foiled! ). However, as of late things have started to get dull. Learning and connecting is the name of the game at this point so Ignite Social Media made sense. I am really looking forward to building out my Social Media skills and knowledge base over the coming years. I think Ignite Social Media Agency is a great place, and is going to be doing some fantastic things in the space. Keep an eye out.

Andy Beal, reputation management expert and avid blogger has put together what seems to be a great reputation monitoring tool called Trackur. It attempts to scour the web and find any and all mentions of the keyphrase you enter.

Other tools in this niche are some what far and few between. However there are a few tools already in existence, such as:

http://www.brandseye.com/
http://reputation.distilled.co.uk/
http://reputationdefender.com
http://www.sentimentmetrics.com
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.reputrace.com

There are several pricing models and options offered by Trackur:

• Trackur Standard
  1 saved search
  Email and RSS reports
  Updates every 12 hours
  $18/month

• Trackur Pro
  5 saved searches
  Email and RSS reports
  Updates/ 6 Hours
  88$/month

• Trackur Enterprise
  15 saved searches
  Email and RSS reports
  Updates/ 1 Hour
  188$/month

Is Trackur.com worth it?

It is hard to tell off the bat how thorough of a job the tools does at finding every single mention for a specific phrase. However, at first glance it seems to do a solid job. It scours technorati, blogs, flickr, the interweb and apparently video’s (guessing via the tagging system) as well as other sources.

What will make or break this tool in my eyes is the effectiveness and thoroughness of searching the web. I definitely sense the need for a tool that can do a good job of the aforementioned. One thing that stands out to me initially is the tool is very user friendly. It is simple and easy to use. You can quickly find the information your are looking for and can utilize a “saving” mechanism to come back to searches you have done in the past. Furthermore, you can subscribe to your searches via email alerts and RSS feeds, which is handy.

Get ready to open up the pocketbook if you plan to sign up with Trackur. The pricing model definitely seems aimed at businesses. If you do not have the means to large amounts of dispensable income then you will probably not be able to afford this tool. I can somewhat understand this because I am sure the tool is an absolute resource intensive hog. However, I would love to see a cheaper option for Trackur.com that allows individuals like myself to have access to the tool without breaking the bank account.

All in all, this tool looks promising. I am looking forward to seeing how the tool grows and will be updating this post as more details become available.

What are your initial thoughts on Trackur?