How I got my blog post retweeted by @problogger, @GuyKawasaki and 250 more

My 18 best WordPress plugins post went viral. It got to the front page of Delicious and broke my previous record of number of unique visitors per day with 3602 uniques total.

More importantly the post was retweeted more than 250 times, including retweets by high-profile users like Darren Rowse and Guy Kawasaki, showcasing the value of going viral on Twitter.

Why should I care about retweets?

Retweeting is the most powerful factor in something going viral on Twitter. It helps spread your message from one community to the next and has the ability to spread messages much faster than any other viral marketing tool.

It is free advertising and you should do anything you can to encourage readers to retweet your content. Following are the steps I take to make my blog posts go viral.

Main point – you must have an interesting article

• Have a great and a catchy headline

People are busy. They subscribe to many blogs and they follow many Twitter users. There are a lot of things on their minds and many bloggers are competing for their attention and a share of their valuable time.

If the headline doesn’t grab their attention they will not click to read your great content, and they will not retweet it. See more on how to write blog headlines that make people click.

• Write a practical how-to or top-list article

List a step-by-step process towards creating something or achieving something or create a list of most popular things about something. These posts are easy to put together compared to a very long and detailed blog post.

You basically just aggregate and filter information from different sources and you make it concise, to-the-point and easy-to-understand. People love the practical advice and it has great viral potential.

• Make it easy-to-digest

People rarely read blog posts word by word. Instead, they scan the blog post picking out individual words and sentences.

So make your blog post very easy-to-read, easy-to-scan with lots of white space, paragraphs, sub-headings, bullet points and a picture.

Optimize the article for retweeting

• Keep it short

Some people prefer to retweet the manual way. When you send a tweet about your post, as you have a limit of 140 characters, you basically only have space for the title and the URL. You must make your title short to keep your tweet short.

Tweets must be less than 140 characters, but when a tweet is to be retweeted the old fashioned way, you need to allow space for:

• An ‘@’ symbol
• Your username
• The letters ‘RT’
• 2 spaces (one after RT and one after your username)

Looking at my own username (MarkoSaric) that is 15 extra characters for someone to retweet my tweet. Which means my tweet now actually must not take more than 125characters in the first place. Keep this in mind and make it short!

Be proactive – Go get those tweets

• Make it easy to share

Include a Tweet-this, TweetMeme or similar buttons on your article. WordPress has several easy-to-install plugins to do this.

• Tweet your article yourself

Experiment with repeating the same tweet several times a day with some 8 hours in between. Twitter is so big and noisy and from my experience people do not mind that you repeat tweets.

Your repeat will attract attention and a new wave of retweets, as many new people have logged on since your original tweet.

• Ask for a tweet

Don’t be passive, ask people for a retweet. Either include a “please RT” call to action in your tweet or direct message people you have a good relationship with and that might be interested in the topic of the post.

You don’t have to spam everyone. In my case I only direct messaged 5 people that I know have influence and have interest in what I wrote about. 4 of them tweeted my article. A simple direct message will do. See my example:

Hi! I thought you might like my new post: Top 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins ever -http://twurl.nl/ja1d8f

• Target the influentials

Don’t be afraid to target Twitter power users. They have a lot of followers and influence and in most cases they are looking for good and relevant articles to read and tweet.

Each of the influential users that tweeted my article, brought another wave of retweets. These are the 10 influentials that brought most retweets in my case:

• @problogger
• @guykawasaki
• @mayhemstudios
• @zaibatsu
• @JesseNewhart
• @cheth
• @theDukeOfSEO
• @Jason_Pollock
• @Arbenting
• @phaoloo

• Monitor the Twittersphere

Monitor, respond and thank the people that are talking / tweeting about your article.

Prepare to take off

Doing all these steps will create a buzz around your article and the message will become contagious as more users tweet it.

You will get many clicks over to your site which will hopefully result in new subscribers to your blog and will add to the growth of your blog.

Image by Noel Zia Lee.