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Posts Tagged ‘viral marketing’

What is Viral Marketing?

Use this thinking exercise: Which is better?

(1) $25,000 a day for 30 days or (2) 1 cent that doubles every day for 30 days

If you chose option 1 you might want to reconsider; the first option gives you $750,000 at the end of the month, the second gives you over 5 Million Dollars! (You do the math)

Viral marketing is a lot like gossip; it starts with one person and multiplies like wildfire throughout the whole neighborhood.

How does this happen? One person tells another person, that person, promising not to tell anyone, tells 5 more. Those 5 people each tell 5 other people, and this process continues until finally, everybody knows the rumour.

Viral marketing works exactly the same way. If you tell just 5 people about your website, and those 5 each tell 5 more, 5 becomes 25, becomes 125, becomes 625, becomes 3125, becomes 15625…

…and it keeps multipliying. Just like one cent will eventually turn into $5,000,000 if you double it for 30 days.

How to get Viral Marketing Working for you in 5 Minutes or Less for FREE!

With the Ultimate Traffic System, you can plug into a proven viral marketing system and generate thousands of guaranteed hits for free!

How it Works!

When a new member joins the Ultimate Traffic System they are first instructed to enter their name, email address, desired password and website.

Then they are automatically taken to a rotating page. The first page in the rotation will be the sponsor’s website. After a short period of time you will be asked to click a next button. The next page will belong to the next person in your sponsor’s upline. The page after that will be your sponsor’s sponsor’s upline, and so on. Each new page is another website in your sponsor’s upline until it reaches seven levels.

When you’re finished viewing all the pages, (this only takes a few minutes), you will be asked to click a button to confirm your membership. You will then be emailed your self-replicated website to promote to your visitors, with your memberID. (so we know that you’re the sponsor)

Your website will start appearing on other member’s websites as soon as someone is on your second level. It will continue to multiply throughout hundreds of other member’s uplines as long as they keep referring new members themselves. You’ll soon see a steady rise in your traffic which will increase every day.

Keep in mind, there is no way for people to cheat. Your position is 100% secure through our automated system.

Just like a rumour, your website will spread throughout the virtual neighborhood.

And, if you decide to change your URL at any time, new members will see it. This way you can promote hot new products to your well established UTS network!

Thank you,

Arlan Medicine

simurl.com/uts

I use them and I am sure you have read them as well. I am talking about ebooks and there is one to cover just about any subject you can think of.

How can ebooks help market your business and website?

Using Ebooks as a FREE give away, bonus offer, or even to give other webmasters the writes to give them away can cause a viral marketing affect that can be a powerful part of your SEO Internet Marketing campaign.

There are many places online to list your ebooks for free like ebook distribution websites as well as giving them away as a free bonus gift for a email subscription on your own website.

Now the first thing you may want to do in the ebook development process is to include your website address, live link to your website and even list a small ad on every ebook page. Leave contact information like an email address, business phone number or whatever other information you want to supply in order to receive leads from your ebooks.

I allow others, who receive my ebooks to sell them for a profit, include them in a bundle of other ebooks or give them away as a bonus on their websites. Let other webmasters do your Internet Marketing for you by providing your ebooks to their visitors.

One simple 7 to ten-page ebook can generate a viral marketing affect that has a long lasting return in traffic to your website. As the ebook spreads across the internet it creates valued buzz marketing that can get your brand tremendous visibility.

Going back to Ebook distribution sites, you can submit your ebook to hundreds of FREE ebook sites once again creating Viral Marketing. Imagine the impact to your traffic by using these distribution sites to promote and pass on your ebooks in their directories.

Build your brand through ebooks and build a professional label for your business. Go one step further and sell your ebooks yourself for another income stream and at the same time producing Internet Marketing for your website that could spread like wild fire.

Note: Be sure to include reselling rights clearly in your ebooks so the recipient can start the Buzz Marketing, Viral Marketing process with out any miss understandings and delays.

Most ebooks can be created very easily either in PDF or some other Ebook writing software, some are FREE.

Start writing your instruction books, tutorials, how to, stories, or what ever and open up a new Internet Marketing avenue.

Do you have a website but having a hard time generating traffic? Don’t you wish you could just sit back and let someone else do the promoting for you? Well you can! And they’ll do it for you for FREE. That’s right, we’re not talking about paid advertising here. What we’re talking about works better than paid advertising and doesn’t cost you a thing! We’re talking about article submissions.

Submitting an article to an article directory is a great way of generating traffic for your website, whether you’re just starting out or just trying to increase the traffic to your site. All you have to do is write an article that would be useful to your prospects, and put a resource box at the end of the article with a link to your website. A resource box is just a small statement about yourself with a link to your site for them to find out more information. Then you submit it to a few article directories. That’s it. Other people take over from this point.

So what exactly happens when you post articles on an article directory? Well your article gets posted on their website. A lot of other website owners check these article directories for articles they can use as content for their website or newsletter. But when they use your article, they agree to not change the article and to leave YOUR resource box on it. They advertise your website for you! You don’t have to do anything.

I can hear you now, this all sounds great but I’m not that great at writing. Well you don’t have to be! You’re not trying to sell a novel here. All you are doing is writing something that you think would be useful for someone else to know. As long as it is helpful I’m sure there will be plenty of people who WANT to read it. And the more you write, the better your writing is going to get. So don’t sit around procrastinating because you don’t feel you can write good enough. Just do it. You’ll get better.

This looks good but is it really better than paid advertising? I would say yes and there are several reasons for this. First of all it is FREE. Second, it’s viral. Take a look at this scenario. If you post an article on a couple article directories and only 10 people decide to use it in their newsletter. Each of these people has 2,000 people on their list. This advertises your site to 20,000 people. Now imagine if 100 people used your article or if they had 20,000 people each on their list. This stuff is powerful. Third, it establishes you as an expert in that field. People will trust you more and will be more willing to by your product if you’ve already given them useful information. Forth, after you’ve written a lot of article you can compile them into your own ebook and give it away for free (with links to your site of course) or sell it. Paid advertising doesn’t even compare to this. Don’t waste any more time. Start writing articles now!

More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

Tell A Friend Script Availability

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.

1. Failing to understand how to make a marketing piece “viral”

Often people create what they call a viral marketing piece when it is nothing more than a brochure and an advertisement. It is way too self serving. It has no possibility of creating buzz. While there is no guaranteed formula for creating a viral marketing piece, there are many things you can do to increase its effectiveness and its viral nature.

2. Failing to make it interesting enough to pass along

Whether or not there are external incentives to encourage the viral spread, if you failed to make the article or e-book interesting enough with high quality content that is useful or entertaining, you couldn’t pay them enough to pass it along. If on the other hand it is very useful, high quality or entertaining, it will get passed along with or without any other incentives.

3. Failing to provide incentives to encourage people to pass your message along

While there are many successes where the sender was not rewarded for passing on viral information, it works better if you can provide an incentive. Provide an incentive that you don’t have to pay up front. Instead provide a success incentive. If the desired outcome is met then you give them money, commissions, discounts, extended memberships, additional MP3 recordings, more articles, more eBooks, etc. Whatever incentive you decide to use, make sure it is easy to sign up for and easy to collect.

4. Failing to provide an incentive for people to respond to your call to action

The way to sell with a viral marketing piece is to do so at the very end, in the conclusion, in the summary or in the resource box. It doesn’t need to be a hard pitch, just an offer for an ethical bribe that will move them to visit your website, call your 800 number or send an email to get whatever you are offering.

Experience has shown that the incentive should be related to your product or service. If you are a law firm, don’t offer a chance to win a Corvette or an iPod. Too many unqualified people will sign up and waste your time following up with them. Instead if you are a law firm specializing in Intellectual Property, offer a free e-book on “How you can increase the value of your company with patents and trademarks.”

5. Failing to effectively promote their viral campaigns

Because we’ve heard of some success stories where no promotion was needed, it is easy to fall into the trap that yours too will be one of those. I’m not sure what the statistics are but the vast majority of viral marketing requires promotion to make them successful.

6. Failing to encourage others to pass it along

There is a wonderful piece of wisdom you should apply to viral marketing &ndash “you have not because you ask not.” Does your viral marketing ask the reader to pass this along to others? This can be done in the resource box with something very simple like, “If you found this useful, please pass it onto others that might be helped by it too.”

If it is a viral article and you have also it published on your website, have a button or link on the page that says “Send to your friends.” While it is true the “Send to your friends” button won’t make it viral all by itself you never know which “friend” that gets it might decide to promote it to their list of 100,000.

7. Failing to send out anything less than a blockbuster success

While it would be nice to repeat viral marketing successes like Blair Witch, Hotmail, Purple Cow or ICQ those are rare occurrences. Just because your idea falls a bit short of phenomenal doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Let’s say you shoot for exponential viral results and only obtain a moderate success, it is still a success. The fact you got free visitors to come to your site is great.

I love Michael Jordan’s quote when he attempted to go into baseball after his wildly successful basketball career. “I can accept failure, but I can’t accept not trying.” Even if you think it won’t blow away Blair Witch’s success, try it anyway.

8. Focusing on a single viral piece rather than a viral process

One thing I’ve noticed in my business career is that we tend to adopt the John Wayne syndrome, go big or go home. We give it ONE try and if it fails we go home. I don’t know of successful business people or successful marketing campaigns that take that approach. Instead of giving it this one shot and then not doing anything after that, create a process for creating, promoting, testing and measuring continual viral marketing efforts.

9. Failing to test and track the results

To be successful you need to experiment with different titles for the article or e-book; test different ethical bribes; try different promotional methods; approach different list owners. Find all of the elements that can be tested in your project, test various combinations and measure the results.

10. Not recognizing it is different from word-of-mouth marketing

I fell in love with word-of-mouth marketing early in my consulting career. After 10 years of consulting I analyzed every project I’d worked on, every client I’d worked for and wrote down the source. To my shock, 95% of all of them came from word-of-mouth. The good news was it was cheap (free). The bad news it was unpredictable and couldn’t be controlled on-demand like I needed.

Viral marketing is like word-of-mouth in that one person passes it on to another but typical word-of-mouth comes from one person asking the other if they know how to solve a problem. It is much more reactive than proactive. Viral marketing is proactive. A person who reads a viral article or e-book immediately thinks of 5, 10, 500 or even 1,000 people that should know about this and they send it via email or put it up on their website or post in on their blog. Viral isn’t one person coughing in another person’s face, it is one person coughing in a crowded room causing it to spread like wildfire.

Viral Marketing is all about giving away your own free product or service along with your ad copy (contact information, link, email, etc.). In turn, recipients of your free product are allowed to pass it along to their own clients, prospects, visitors and others as a freebie. This is a quick way to multiple your marketing at no extra expense and without extra effort on your part.

Here are some popular viral marketing techniques to follow:

1. Ebooks &ndash Share your no cost ebook with your website visitors. Include a nice full-color ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email. Tell recipients to share copies of the ebook with their own site visitors and other contacts.

2. Software – Share a trial or “lite” version of your software with your website visitors as a freebie. Don’t forget to include that ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email. And tell recipients to share copies of the software with their own site visitors and other contacts. For help creating software, hire help from online bid sites like Elance.com.

3. Web Host &ndash Offer to host small business web sites on your server at no charge. In exchange, place your own banner ad at the top of the site for viral marketing. You can setup a fold for their site and they can choose their own domain name and have it redirected to that folder.

4. Templates &ndash Design your own website or other templates, include your own marketing information on them and give them away as free downloads or as an electronic package. Grant permission for recipients to pass them along.

5. Articles &ndash Write articles about your industry. Include your website and contact information in the byline and grant permission for others to publish as long as they keep the byline in tact. Then people can use your contact on websites, in ezines, newsletters and other places where once again, viral marketing will speed the spread of information about your business.

6. Discussion Board – Set up a Discussion Board on your website with your banner ad attached at the top. And invite others to link to it and use it for their own sites.

In summary, by using viral marketing strategies, you can reach out all over the Internet with much less effort. See which methods work best for you and repeat them as often as needed.

As I mentioned in the last entry, I’ve been speaking with people who are making $5000 – $10,000 or more a month online, and I’m beginning to see some common factors.

You have to understand how difficult it is to get people to talk to you about their successes. They remind me of the inventors I’ve spoken to about financing their products &ndash they are deathly afraid that someone will steal their ideas, not realizing that their talent is part of the success of that idea. Sometimes it took several emails, an IM and a lot of promises, but I got people to talk.

One of the factors that struck me very early is the fact that most of the successful people I spoke with use some form of viral marketing in their advertising and marketing plan.

Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy that encourages other people to spread your marketing message, which grows your exposure exponentially. Link exchanges are a good example of viral marketing, because people take the link to your site and put it on theirs. When people link to their sites, they see yours. Then they may take your link and add it to their site. Just for fun I ran the SEOElite backlink checker on a successful web entrepreneur’s site. There were 1498 different sites that had his URL in them. Not bad. Affiiate programs are also viral in nature.

The guru of viral marketing has to be Dr. Ralph Wilson. You should definitely visit his WilsonWeb site. There are many terrific articles there.

These are Dr. Wilson’s six elements of a viral marketing strategy:

1. Give away products or services

2. Provide for effortless transfer to others

3. Scale easily from small to very large

4. Exploit common motivations and behaviors

5. Utilize existing communication networks

6. Leverage the resources of others

Viral Marketing seems to be an integral part of making a lot of money online. It could be as simple as trading a small banner or button for a directory listing (Income: $8000 a month), or offering webmasters a cut of your earnings to get them to your website to view your content and then buy (Income: $4000 a month). In fact, doesn’t that second business model describe Chitika, the ill-fated PPC network?

Multiple tier affiliate programs, where you get a cut of the income from people you get to sign up, are other examples of viral marketing.

You don’t have to do anything quite as dramatic, but I think it would be a smart idea to come up with some viral marketing elements for your own web site. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Write articles and get them posted on free article sites. Make the content compelling and the title provocative and interesting. Make sure at least one link appears in the article.

2. Install a ‘email this page to a friend’ script or plugin. There are plenty of them out there on the Internet.

3. Come up with a free product, utility or service that will promote your business, and encourage people to distribute it. Even if you have to pay for one to be made, it will be worth it.

4. Write for free on a well-known site in your area of expertise, especially one with a newsletter or free article distribution. This is a terrific way to perpetuate your site virally.

5. Put together an affiliate program that gets your banner on websites. If you have a unique utility, service or information source, you can get webmasters to put up a small box, banner or chicklet that has a link to your site.

Viral marketing can make you rich…I’ve seen the examples. The reason is simple…you are giving people something for free that they perceive as valuable, and they are telling other people how smart they are for getting something for free. In order to tell other people they have to mention you. It’s brilliant.

The key components of an Internet marketing program include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Placement, Affiliate Marketing and Viral/Social Marketing. The goal of all of these is to increase a website’s traffic (number of people who visit) however each uses a different tactic to meet this goal. An effective Internet marketing program leverages a mix of these components to maximize their value at a particular point in the overall program.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an attempt to increase your website’s ranking in ‘organic’ (non-paid) search results in Google

When most people think of Internet marketing, they think solely of websites. Are they right or wrong? Well both. While websites are a key component of Internet marketing and in many cases are the only Internet marketing tool businesses use, they are not the “be all, end all”. They are not required for Internet marketing. However, I do highly recommend them as they are best suited to sit at the core of your Internet marketing plan, the hub so to speak, but that’s a topic for another conversation.

So here are 7 killer Internet marketing tools that you can implement on a shoestring budget without having to have a website of your own:

1. Email Marketing &ndash When properly implemented, there probably isn’t a quicker, better, and less expensive way to stay in front of your prospects and clients than to leverage the power of email. You can literally touch an unlimited amount of prospects and clients with a single click &ndash how’s that for power?!

2. Blogs &ndash Blogging is a great tool when you would like to step it up a notch and stay in constant contact with your prospects and clients. Some ideas on how to use it might be to post what’s new with you or your business, post informative content as a value-add to your clients, or hold and interactive forum with your clients geared towards understanding how to better serve them.

There are a handful of free or low cost blog hosts out there that really make this process simple (e.g. Blogger and TypePad).

3. Article Marketing &ndash This is a phenomenal approach to bringing notoriety, interest and ultimately leads for many types of businesses. It can be used as a major differentiator or value-add on why someone should buy from you instead of your competitors. Whether your clients are local, regional, national or global — articles are portable and usable in all situations — that’s part of their charm.

4. eZines &ndash Much like blogs and article marketing, eZines are great way to stay in touch with your prospects on a more scheduled basis. Additionally, they are probably the forerunner in helping you develop a list of prospects to market and sell your wares.

5. Affiliate Programs — Get others promoting and selling for you. This tool can become the equivalent of having both a full blown marketing and sales staff that gets paid on performance. They don’t promote and directly lead to a sale for you, they don’t get paid. For the do-it-yourselfers, there are plenty of tools out there to help you set up this type of program. For everyone else, there are excellent service providers out there who can coordinate and manage this process for you (e.g. Clickbank and Commission Junction).

6. Viral Marketing &ndash Again, a great approach for getting others to promote and help create a buzz about you, your business, your products and/or your services. The best, most genuine way to get this started is by creating raving fans out of your existing clients and then helping them help you spread the word.

7. Public Relations &ndash If I tell you I’m the best at what I do, you’ll take it with a grain of salt. Maybe you’ll believe me, maybe you won’t. However, people tend to believe what they read. So if a respected publication tells you that I’m the best at what I do, that usually holds more weight and adds instant credibility to me.

Spend some effort here. Become a resource for the press. You help them and they can significantly help you.

I highly recommend you spend some time with these. Explore how you can implement one, some, or all of these Internet marketing tools to help explode your business.