As many of us alluded to earlier this month at SMX Social Media, viral content is king. Viral content is what people look for. Viral content is what people bookmark. Viral content is what people talk about. Viral content can spark memes. Viral content is the foundation for linkbait. Indeed, viral content is a wonderful concept and especially important when you’re looking for traffic or attention. But if you’ve never traversed along the road to viral content, where can you get started? What is makes good viral content? I’ve talked briefly about great lists. I’ve talked about videos. I’ve talked about pictures. Now I’m going to talk a bit more about six solid foundations upon which you can build viral content and I’ll illustrate how they’re used in today’s social media.

The Motherload of Lists

Let’s face it. People like lists. Lists win for a variety of reasons: they’re easily digestible, they’re typically short, and they contain a lot of good information in one single article. Lists also take a great deal of research, and the return is typically a resource that people will turn to time and time again.

Here are some example lists that totally rock:

This is a difficult post to write because I feel that people will already take offense to it before reading what I want to offer. First, the full disclosure: I am a moderator at Sphinn.

Many of you, whether close friends online or folks I’ve met at conferences, ask me to Sphinn your stories. Sometimes you’ll be very discreet and throw in a subtle request every so often. Others are a little more forceful and excessive. With all due respect to my friends in the industry, compared to the amount of Digg requests I get (and you’d think I get a lot of those) and the amount of stories submitted to Sphinn in a given day, Sphinn has spiraled out of control.

Let me say that I don’t like rejecting Sphinn requests. But we all may have to start doing that sometime. After all, if stories that hit the front page are not voted because people like them but rather because people want to do favors for their friends in the industry, Sphinn becomes a popularity contest, but not for reasons previously stated. It’s no longer a “the familiar faces dominate the front page” mentality. Instead, it’s the “please Sphinn me” requests that are overflowing on other communication mediums, particularly Facebook and StumbleUpon, that is causing this to happen. You ask me on IM/Facebook, I appear to be active, and I am not the type of person to ignore your request so I feel obligated to comply. However, it’s not fair to other people who may not know me or other community members so well and don’t solicit votes like you do.

As many of you know, my grandfather has been ill for awhile. Yesterday, on October 24, he succumbed to complications from lung cancer (though he never smoked). He was 84.

If I could talk about the wonderful man he was, even the paragraphs that follow would not capture the essence that was Grandpa David. He was, quite simply, a beautiful man inside and out. He was incredibly giving and made huge sacrifices for his community, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and even his great-granddaughter who was born the week after he was admitted to the hospital for the last time. Here are just some of those contributions:

Last month, I wrote a piece saying that BlogRush was a waste of time and that nobody should invest in the service. I signed up (to see what it was all about) and never bothered installing the widget given that I’ve had experience with “traffic generating widgets” before, and they’ve been anything but positive.

Today, much to my surprise, I received an email from the BlogRush team stating that “We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account has been made INACTIVE because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria.” Their “strict quality guidelines” are outlined below:

- The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

- The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

As many of you know, I spoke for the first time at SMX Social Media. It was an exhilarating and nerve-wracking experience all the same. In the end, however, I’m glad that I did it.

My presentation was about the infamous Digg and how it can be used to bring your message to the attention of the public. I alluded to some of my 11 Digg tricks and referred to my 29 Digg API tools to improve the Digging experience. Andy Greenberg at Forbes ran an educational piece on what we presented. The most important thing that I should stress is that we like viral content and all you may need is just to give it to us properly by engaging us with content that we clearly enjoy. Eric Enge summarized many of my points and thoughts in his SMX takeaways. I suggest that you take his advice to heart.

The event kicked off with a super Internet Marketers of New York charity party which was sponsored by the nice guys at Best of the Web. The party raised thousands of dollars for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. A lot of the attendees showed up for the charity party, and it was great to see them (again or for the first time!)