Why does that happen only occasionally?

Elements of Viral Content

[ARTICLES]

• How to Make Your Content Go Viral (by Jonah Berger)
• 7 Key Elements for Viral Content (by Susie Brown)
• Creating Viral Content? The Secret Is Get Contagious... (by Derek Halpern)
• Why Content Goes Viral: What Analyzing 100 Million Articles Taught Us (by Noah Kagan)
• The Secret to Online Success: What Makes Content Go Viral (by Liz Rees-Jones, Katherine L. Milkman and Jonah Berger )
• Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof (by Carson Ward)
• Viral Marketing Cheat Sheet: 7 Tips To Give Your Marketing Strategy A Boost (by Megan O'Neill)
• Lessons from Blog Posts that Went Viral (by Jessica Davis)
• Viral Marketing Case Study: How a Brand New Blog Generated 17,584 Visitors In One Day (by Brian Dean)
• A Data-Driven Guide to Creating Viral Content [New Infographic] (by Brian Dean)
• How to Create Viral Content That Generates 2,500 Visitors Per Day (by Neil Patel)
• How to Make Viral Content: 9 Tips from the Greatest Viral Content Genius on the Planet (by Dan Lyons)
• Viral Link Building: How To Create A Link Explosion (With A Can Of Coke) (by David McSweeney).

[Books]

• Contagious: Why Things Catch On (by Jonah Berger)
• Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck (by Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

What happens when you see a spike in traffic?

Metrics & Benefits

[ARTICLES]

• 10+ Content Performance Metrics You Have to Measure (by Tamas Torok)
• Stop neglecting your viral metrics (by Jay Kulkarni)
• Metrics for Viral Content and the ROI of Social Media [Slideshare] (by Alex Nelson)
• Content Marketing: How To Measure Content Performance Holistically (by Benjamin Spiegel)
• The Content Marketing Expert Guide to Analytics & Metrics (by Larry Kim)
• How to Measure the Success of Content Marketing (by Jodi Harris)
• Content Marketing Metrics: How to Drive Action Instead of Reaction (by Rob Yoegel)
• A Checklist for Measuring Your Content Marketing Success (by Roger C. Parker)
• The 4 Types of Content Metrics That Matter (by Jay Baer)
• The Linkbait Bump: How Viral Content Creates Long-Term Lift in Organic Traffic (by Rand Fishkin)

[TOOLS]

• Maya by Brandvee - Chrome bot to help decide which stories to post to social media
• The Top 5 Free Content Analytics Tools (by Amanda Walgrove)