People are lazy. That’s just a fact of the internet. Viral marketing relies on a certain level of altruism on the part of the ‘passer-on’. Enter the retweet, the single best way to overcome this laziness. Read on to find out how simple it is with the TweetMeme Button Wordpress plugin.

You Write Great Content – Don’t let it go to Waste

If you are serious about pro blogging and making money from your website, you will be taking the time to write great content. It’s not a race, and quality wins every time.

However, you need to make the most of your blog posts if you are going to succeed.

The Goal – Sharing for Success

To enable your visitors to help you in your marketing efforts, you need to provide them with simple methods of sharing it with their friends and networks. Not everyone is willing to exhibit the altruistic tendencies that will make your post go viral, but for the ones that are willing, try to follow these simple guidelines:

1. Don’t overwhelm your audience – focus on providing one or two key actions in the primary header area of your post.
2. Leverage the sheep effect - use techniques that show a count of how many others have shared this page to encourage others to join in.
3. Secondary options – people use different methods for sharing via social media, so while you should always follow Rule #1 first, stick the extra options at the end of your post where readers can take part if they want. If they’ve reached the end of your post then they have shown a level of interest where they may be willing to explore a larger set of options.
4. Focus on Twitter – it’s undeniably the most popular social networking tool of the moment, so use this to your advantage.

The Solution – The TweetMeme Button

The TweetMeme Button is a brilliant Twitter tool. It allows readers (that have Twitter accounts) to re-tweet your post with the lick of a button. To see it in action, just look at the top of this page, it’s what we’ve been using for a while now and it’s very effective.

As an example, check out our earlier post, 11 Epic Twitter Wordpress Plugins, and you’ll see that it’s been re-tweeted a bunch of times. Every time someone does this, you are extending your potential reach massively.

Good Twitter Karma

Re-tweeting is a nice thing to do – it’s like tipping, without the cost. It’s sort of like the ‘pay it forward’ concept.

So the next time you read an article you like, re-tweet it to show your appreciation. And if you add the TweetMeme Button Wordpress plugin to you blog, don’t be afraid to place a small message at the bottom of your post politely asking (or reminding) your readers to show you some Twitter love.

– Oli Gardner