Want your creative work to go viral?

I just found out about a pretty controversial plugin available that could help.

Viral Lock requires visitors to take social action, such as liking your page, tweeting a link to their followers, or giving it a +1, before it can be viewed.

There’s been some negative backlash surrounding the idea, but I think the plugin offers great potential … and there’s definitely a right and wrong approach to using Viral Lock in my opinion, which I’ll get to near the end of this post.

Viral – An image, video, advertisement, etc. that is circulated rapidly on the Internet.

The controversy

By the looks of the comments under Guy Kawasaki’s post on Facebook (about moving his blog to WordPress because of the potential the Viral Lock plugin offers), there’s a bit of an uproar about it.

Makes sense … I wouldn’t want to click a compelling link only to find I’d have to share it with my friends before I could view it. But again, I think there’s definitely a right and wrong way to use Viral Lock … and hiding your content before the visitor knows it’s worthy is wrong.

The potential Viral Lock offers

Some bloggers might feel some hesitation to use it due to the controversial aspects of it, but I assure you that using the plugin correctly holds no controversy at all.

This plugin is especially useful now, as people are becoming more decisive about the content they share with their friends. This plugin can effectively help you boost the social action around your content, which in turn could go as far as helping your search engine optimization. No joke. This is all in addition to the additional traffic you’ll experience the more social action you receive.

I’ve never liked the term viral marketing, because it’s often the only thing conservative, uninformed companies know they want from any type of social marketing. I’ve always felt the term “viral” referred to a dynamic measurement unique to what ever you were measuring. To many, “going viral” means doing the same thing Old Spice did.

Seriously?

To me, going viral could mean doubling your traffic with one post or seeing a 300% increase in your following on Twitter because you were mentioned.

It comes down to the definition … whether or not your content was circulated rapidly on the Internet, and what impact it made.

Viral Lock gives you the tools needed to effectively increase social action around your content once you’ve earned it, because unlike the tools we have now, Viral Lock asks viewers to share the content once they’ve realized it’s wroth it, but before they’ve experienced everything it has to offer.

If you use the plugin effectively, you could extract the same social action a restaurant might see if they offered free dessert once guests provide social action.

Don’t lock all your content and expect to go viral

It’s easy to use this plugin, but it’s not going to be easy using it effectively … it requires creative thought. Installing the plugin and requiring social action before any of your content is viewable won’t work for most people publishing content online.

Your followers aren’t going to take social action unless they know the content they’re sharing is worth not only their time and energy, but their friends’ attention as well.

You need to earn social action

Like WordPress itself, there are countless ways to use Viral Unlock, and how you use it should be based on your individual blog, content, and followers.

But there’s one thing that’s certain no matter how you use it …

You need to earn it.

No matter how you use it, you know visitors aren’t going to share something unless they know it’s worth their time, worth their energy, and likely to make some kind of impression on their friends, so you’ll need to find a way to earn your social action.

How can you earn it?

Two ways I plan on using this plugin for CreativeBlogger

To show you how rad this plugin can be, I’ve locked this portion of the post, which I hope will be enticing enough to earn your social action.

I’m buying it

Viral Lock is only $16 from CodeCanyon, so I’ll be buying it and implementing it into my work. Tag along and give it a whirl with me — I’ll be posting how things are going on my end once I begin using it, and I’d love to see how it’s working for you as well.

Cheers!

It’s easy to suck at multi-tasking.

Sure, you can do it … but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it effectively.

For me, the past couple of months have been a bit of blur. There was a pretty serious accident in the family, I’ve moved away from the yellow pages company and now work for a marketing agency, and my partner at wearabl has moved on to another project. All of this on top of multiple projects I’m trying to grow. Things just haven’t been going smoothly for me.

It wasn’t until recently I realized I’d been working without what I consider one of the most important tools in my creative process … my notebook.

Without my notebook, there’s no where to work when I’m in between places … there’s no where to organize my thoughts into actionable tasks, and there’s no where I can look when lost.

To me, the notebook isn’t just a tool … it’s a place.

If you find yourself struggling to produce your creative work, try jotting down a quick to do list. Whether or not you use a notebook doesn’t matter, just create a list of things you want to complete and then strive to complete them.

When you’ve completed your list, make another.

As the co-founder of wearabl, I’ve been using Shopify for a while and find it incredible helpful in terms of selling t-shirts online, but I wanted to try another approach with my paintings because, one, it can seem expensive when you’re not making money (and selling art takes time), and two, because I want a better understanding of what works.

So I went back to the drawing board and thought, tinkered, and procrastinated.

A new approach

It hit me.

I was reading a post Christopher Jackson of FuelYourWriting wrote about the power of the first lady’s ability to level and connect with people during her Democratic Convention speech, and it got me thinking.

We enjoy story time a lot more throughout the day than we realize.

As my mate pointed out, it can be used in politics, but It can also be used in religion, business, news, and sports … so why shouldn’t it be used in art?

It is.

Lifestyle storytelling

Aside from their creative work, what does the world know about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Picasso, Pollack, Warhol … ?

The world knows their story.

It’s what set them apart from others and clash with, and entertain in some cases, society.

This isn’t always the case if you think about certain artists, like Bansky, who’s lack of story is his story. But most artists will provide the world with two things categorized by society as two different things even though they’re very much connected:

• Their creative work
• Their perspective of life

The latter is what sets artists apart, resonates with people, and what your customers will be trying to capture when buying your work. Because while something might look pretty or stunning, it’s the perspective of life behind it — and your different lifestyle – that really matters. This is especially important in the abstract world, but can apply to representational works of art as well.

You need lots and lots of pages to tell a story

Because Lifestyle storytelling inherently involves a heavy focus on publishing, I’ll be working with WordPress to create a new home for my work.

Without getting into the details of why WordPress is awesome and perfect for lifestyle storytelling, let me just say it gives you the capability to create a beautiful portfolio for your work, create an unlimited amount of pages, implement video, photos, contact forms, and so so so much more I can’t even tell you!

Did I mention it was free and awesome?

Moving forward from the drawing board

I’m already a few steps into the process, but I’ll be sure to post what I’ve done so far so you can tag along and create a similar home for your own creative work if you feel it might work for you.

If you’d like to follow along … you can do so using the following four links:

Subscribe via email | add this blog to your reader | follow on twitter | connect on facebook

Image by Gaelic’s Art

It’s not about a formula. It’s about the approach.

My first approach revolved around the idea that streamlining the sale would help me sell more. I employed the leading ecommerce solution in the world, Shopify, to help me achieve this … and they did with flying colors — if this is what you think might work for you, I highly recommend their software, as it’s a great experience, extensive, and helps you manage your activity even on the go with their awesome mobile app.

Again, this approach wasn’t helping me the way I thought it would with my painting (it works wonders with my startup, wearabl), but that’s a different niche all together.

So it’s back to the drawing board for me … and I’m already onto something I think is huge!

Image by Aleksandar Urošević

I recently co-founded a company called wearabl, which sells awesome independent t-shirts from around the world. One of the things I do there is oversee the editorial calendar and traffic.

So the other day, I was researching a few social outposts I noticed some friends in the community using a few familiar services, including StumbleUpon, so I began investigating how we could use the service too.

What I found blew my mind.

Rewinding for a moment, remember a while back when everyone was crying about the death of Digg, Delicious, and maybe even social bookmarking as a whole? Well, the services themselves may have gone under the knife and switched hands, but they never really died. Stumble Upon is a service I’d like to look at in particular because of a unique solution they offer publishers.

The su.pr URL shortener by StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is in the business of sharing content and content discovery, so it’s in their best interest to incentive publishers to use their service when sharing content because then they have more content for their users to stumble.

What seems to unfold is simple.

You use their su.pr URL shortener to shorten the link you’d like to share around the web — they’ve even made it simple to share it with Facebook and Twitter right there under the text field.

The Stumble Frame

Once you post, the link is saved in their database and your new link not only directed people to your original URL using the nifty su.pr structure, but it also includes the Stumble frame, which enables people to give you a thumbs up and thus tell Stumble your content rocks.

Because you’ve selected the StumbleUpon su.pr URL service and allow Stumble to place their frame at the top of your content, they help push more traffic your direction when their users start Stumbling … a little kickback in a sense.

Give it a whirl!

To start getting more traffic to your blog posts, hop over to su.pr and sign up to use the service. Once you do, you’re free to start shortening and sharing content as much as you’d like. Watch your numbers grow and remember to use the shortnend link whenever sharing your content … it’ll help drive traffic from Stumble.

It’s called Social Reader … it’s all about sharing what article you’re reading online. This app was rolled out by The Washington Post and TrOVE, which will use Facebook’s social graph to help people share what they’re reading automagically.

Just like Spotify … only for articles, not music.

What this means for artists is incredibly important. Just as Spotify has blown up the music world with their new model, Social Reader will help blow up the publishing and marketing world, because people will be automagically sharing content their reading from the Washington Post.

I’m sure it’ll roll out to you shortly if you don’t have it yet. If you already have it, what do you think so far.

Stay tuned for more!