Main two ways to grow your websites or blog

 Part 2. Two major strategies of growing a blog So on one hand we have "viral traffic," the one that comes as a result of generatingbuzz on relevant communities and reaching out to influencers asking for support. And on the other hand we have the "SEO traffic",the one that comes as a result of putting effort into making your content rank high in Google. So which strategy is easier and more effective? First of all, I have to mention that theseare actually two extreme cases, which in reality don't exist one without other. I mean there's no way to consistently go viraland not get a single visitor from Google. As well as there's no way to pull massivetraffic from Google and not have a single person share your content on Twitter or Facebook. But in order to prove my point, I will discussthem individually. So here are the main challenges associatedwith each strategy. If you want to grow your blog with viral traffic,you have to be really good at creating content that will resonate with your target audience. 

It should resonate with them so much thatthey won't be able to resist the urge to share it with others. That's the challenge #1. But virality doesn't happen out of nowhere. You need to get support from influential peoplein your industry, who will promote your content to their huge audiences and kick start the viral effect. Influential people are insanely hard to pitch,so that's the challenge #2. And finally, the goal of your blog isto consistently reach new people, who will become your new customers. So if you rely on viral spikes of traffic, you'llhave to regularly produce sticky viral content and regularly get support from industry influencers. 

Because if you stop publishing, your traffic will fade. And that's the challenge #3. Now what are the challenges of growing yourblog with SEO traffic, that comes from Google? Well, your content still needs to be awesome. It doesn't necessarily need to resonate withpeople that much, but it has to be insanely useful to them. Which is still a challenge, if you ask me. However, the real challenge is to get backlinksto your piece of content. Because backlinks is one of the key thingsthat push you up in Google search results. And building backlinks is something that mostpeople struggle with. But here's something positive about SEO traffic. You don't have to publish regularly! That's because the traffic from Google doesn'tfade over time. Unless of course your competitors put enoughwork to outrank you. 

But I'm about teach you how to make sure thatit won't happen. So that is my rough comparison of two bloggrowth strategies. I'm sure you've noticed that I'm favoringSEO traffic over viral traffic. Well, the truth is, I don't have any trulyviral articles in my own portfolio. But almost every single post that we publishat Ahrefs blog ranks on the front page of Google for it's target keywords. And still, I do believe that viral traffic can bea worthwhile strategy for growing a blog. So I went ahead and brought a guest, who'sarticles are read by millions of people. This guy is seriously good at generating buzzwith his content and we recorded a very insightful interview on that topic. Make sure you check it out in the bonus materialsto this course. But for now, let me dive a bit deeper into"Viral vs. SEO" 

dilemma and explain where my strong bias towards the latter is coming from. First of all, most newbie bloggers have awrong understanding of how viral traffic works. Here is the picture that they have in their head: You publish an article and tweet it to your followers. Some of them like it and tweet it to theirfollowers, some of their followers like it and tweet it to their followers. This goes on and on and because of this snowballeffect your article goes viral and gets tons of traffic. Right? Wrong! A few years ago guys from Pulsar studiedhow content goes viral by examining a bunch of real viral campaigns. And these are the visualizations that theyhave created with the data that they collected: What their study had shown is that contentdoesn't go viral in a way I just described. There's no such thing as a "snowball effect." Even the opposite, viral content actuallyspreads in a decay. 

Let me explain. Content only goes viral if exposed toa super-huge audience. In other words, someone with a huge twitterfollowing has to tweet your article, so that thousands of his followers would retweet itto their followers. These two steps of the viral outburst bringthe most traffic and visibility. And from there, there goes a rather quickdecay in the amount of retweets and traffic. Back to these visualizations of real viral campaigns. You can clearly see the big hubs that startedthe chain reaction. But here's the thing. The fact that an influencer has tweeted something, doesn't mean that all his followers willpick it up and retweet it. That is why the top 2 challenges of viralcontent that I've listed earlier are: Creating super-sticky content that everyonewould want to share with others; And pitching the biggest influencers in yourspace to kick-start the viral effect.

 Both of these challenges are incredibly hard to crack. And that is why I am not a fan of chasing viral content. But in case you want to further explore thescience, psychology and mechanics of virality, I have quite a few great resources in the FurtherReading section, at the bottom of this lesson.