Viral Marketing, also known as Viral Advertising, is a marketing technique used to build public awareness of your product or company. If done right, the Internet gives us the incredible power to reach vast amounts of potential customers very quickly. Reaching millions of people within a few days is seriously achievable with popular products and well thought out campaigns. At a basic level this is usually in the form of a free giveaway report mostly linked to an autoresponder system to build a list of interested prospects.
Perhaps the most vital concept to understand is that whatever the base product used for the viral marketing campaign is, it absolutely must be of the best quality you can deliver. It is worth noting that people on the Internet are becoming more and more selective in what they decide to take onboard. Not so long ago you could knock out some half baked information and people would run to sign up and download whatever you handed out. Now, as people become more Internet savvy standards will rise. This of course, is a great thing for the Industry as slowly but surely, and together with the search engines developing more complex algorithms and the article directories having tighter controls over published content, the deplorable spun content engineered to game the search engines and Adsense will slowly disappear.
So, be sure to give away quality "stuff" otherwise your whole viral marketing campaign will backfire. Don't even use, "OK" material. Make sure it's your best content depicting your product or company. Remember that Flash games, video, audio, amusing stories or creating "buzz" around a person or event all work well for viral products and will get your message out.
If you have hit the mark then people will have found value in your giveaway and the effect is for them to pass it on to their friends or subscribers. Always specifically tell people they can pass the item on freely or else they won't do anything. People generally have to be led into an action. It also helps, greatly, if there is a commission or some other positive benefit as an incentive to be part of your viral campaign.
So, like any well run business, you should know what to deliver to your prospective customers. Remember that within a particular niche people will always talk about their passion. With Web 2.0 applications like FaceBook, Twitter and FriendFeed just to name 3 of several thousand, groups are being set up daily on every topic imaginable. Spend time being part of groups and share your passion with like minded people. If you are giving great information then you will very quickly become established as an expert. There are thousands of groups just waiting for a "leader" to appear so keep your eyes and ears open.
Web 2.0 is the biggest viral marketing tool anybody can use online as long as they know the rules of the game. That is another article on it's own but briefly you never sell to people in the Web 2.0 space. They buy what you are using or writing about once they have come to trust you.
And they tell their friends.
And their friends tell their friends.
Did you really think those old Tell A Friend scripts were passed their sell by date?
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401
Date Published :
Apr 13 2009