When I started my Christian parenting blog, Christian Mom Thoughts, three years ago, I didn’t have any specific objectives in mind. But over time my readership and interest in writing steadily grew. Like many bloggers, I started dreaming of writing books.

I began to research the publishing world and immediately ran into the word “platform” everywhere I went. One agent’s blog said publishers didn’t start getting interested until a blogger was receiving 15,000+ page views each month.

What?! There’s no way that will happen, I thought. Time to give up on getting published.

My blog had been growing nicely, but I certainly wasn’t pulling in 15,000+ page views each month. Hitting numbers like that seemed impossible.

Then, out of nowhere, I had three blog posts go viral in ten months.

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Those three posts alone brought over 140,000 visitors to my blog, resulting in thousands of new Facebook fans and email subscribers.

Yes, just three posts took my platform to a whole new level. [Tweet that!]

I learned three main things that can help you grow your own platform more quickly.

1. A viral post can be worth hundreds of non-viral posts for your platform.

My first viral post was 65 Apologetics Questions Every Christian Parent Needs to Learn to Answer. To date, it has reached 42,000 people and has been shared 3,600 times.

That post struck a chord with people because they realized they couldn’t answer many of the questions I listed. When I saw the traffic coming my way, I quickly added to the post that I would be blogging the answers to those questions over the next year.

“So if you’d like to learn how to answer them,” I wrote on my blog, “sign up for my emails!” I started receiving a new email subscriber every five minutes. Within a week that one post resulted in more email subscribers than I had gained from two years of blogging.

2. A viral post may be worth nothing for your platform if your blog doesn’t give people a reason to stick with you.

If you’re a blogger struggling to build a platform, getting 42,000 unique visitors to your site with one post may sound like the Holy Grail. (And it can be – see my prior point.) But it could be worth next to nothing for your platform, as I learned from my second viral post.

That post – The Number One Sign Your Kids Are Just Borrowing Your Faith and Not Developing Their Own – was read by more than 72,000 people and was shared over 12,000 times. At first I jumped up and down because I thought it automatically meant a boat load of new fans and subscribers again. I soon noticed, however, that although the post was getting shared rapidly, I wasn’t capturing fans and subscribers at a comparable rate.

My revelation: Having thousands of people visit your site and like one post doesn’t mean they’ll automatically want to hear more from you.

About halfway through that day, I edited the post to include a link to the 65 Questions list that had been so effective for getting new subscribers. The email subscriptions poured in once more as I directed people to that page.

3. You can’t plan to build your platform through viral posts, but you can move the needle in your favor.

I wish this post could have been titled something like “5 Steps to Writing Your First Viral Blog Post.” But the truth is you can’t force it to happen. I wrote many blog posts before going viral that in my opinion were worth more attention – after all, that first viral post was just a list of questions!

I was shocked my second viral post was so popular. My husband and I read it repeatedly to try to figure out what was so special about that one. (No answer so far.)

The third viral post, 7 Things Christian Parents Can Learn from the Tim Lambesis Story, was the closest I came to planning for a post to go big. I had posted a link on my blog’s Facebook page to a news article about Tim Lambesis’s murder conviction and noted that it got the strongest reaction I had ever see from my Facebook fans (most shares and comments). I wrote about the story on my blog soon after, hoping to get a similar reaction, and it worked.

In August, I signed a contract with Harvest House Publishers to write my first book, Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side: 40 Conversations to Help Them Build a Lasting Faith – a concept based on (you guessed it) that first viral post.

Question: Which one of these three tips do you think could help your blog the most? Please share in the comments! You can leave a comment by clicking here.