Viral Marketing Tips
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Viral marketing is the concept of passing a marketing message to other people through methods that can create a 'buzz'. The reason for the name 'viral marketing' is that the concept is based on the similarity to passing a virus around. Once it gets started it is passed among people at an astounding rate.
Below I'll cover some great options to create your own viral marketing campaigns. Some are simple to implement while others require some work. You'll find that I've included a link to a few methods to a detailed page.
Viral Marketing At Work
When I think of viral marketing I think of Yahoo. When Yahoo started their web mail service it was competing with the likes of Hotmail. In order to build a base of new customers they would include a link at the bottom of each email sent that linked to their email service.
The point was to market to a group of people through a means in which they normally wouldn't have had easy access to. The result was people would sign-up for a free Yahoo email account and eventually they became the worlds largest free email provider.
Email Signature
Following the lead of Yahoo, the easiest method of viral marketing is including a link to your website or maybe a link to a couple of your websites in your email signatures. This works in a couple of ways, if a person is unable to remember your site they can find a deleted email and your website is right there on the email.
Another great thing about email signatures is that it's free. I don't know of any email provider that doesn't allow signatures in their emails. There is also the fact that if you're email gets forwarded to another person your website has just been exposed that recipient as well.
It's important to include your contact information as well as link to your website. You can also include some clever tag line just to make the signature memorable.
Online Video
These days the ultimate viral concept is video. If you can produce some sort of video that people with find informational or amusing it's possible that millions of people will view it using a website such as YouTube.com.
If you know anything about video editing you can include your website address on the video which creates awareness for your website and can drive substantial traffic.
It's important to have something that is worth viewing though. Posting a video of your dog sleeping isn't going to have a viral effect but a video of valuable information, an amazing feat or exclusive footage of a major event will certainly bring exposure to your website.
Write A Valuable Unique Article
If you have expertise on a specific subject matter you can write an article on it and submit it to a website such as Reddit.com or Digg.com. These are directories of articles on about any subject matter you can imagine.
The viral effect of this is that you are giving users permission to place your article on their website. In exchange they must leave the credits in tact which contains a link to your website as well as a snippet of information about yourself.
Social Networks
The latest internet trend are social networks. It's likely that you've heard of Google+, FaceBook.com and possibly LinkedIn.com. They are social network sites that allow you to create personal profiles with information about yourself or your business.
LinkedIn.com is more of a business to business, B2B, type of website where you can network with other people or businesses. Google+.com and FaceBook are more along the lines of connecting with friends, classmates or family.
A recommendation would be to setup an account with each of these websites, they're free, and take some time to create a profile that introduces your website and certainly includes links to it.
If you do it right you can see a large amount of traffic from these sources because each of these sites publicize that their subscriber base is in the millions. Just spending a couple hours a week on social networking sites can really realize some increased exposure.
I found an article on how to market on social networks that you may find interesting.
Community Based Popularity Websites
This area may be new to you but websites like StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.Icio.usare a new breed of news website. Articles are submitted by users and they receive 'votes'. The number of votes a story, image or video receives the higher it'll appear in the website's rankings.
They use terms like 'stumble' and 'digg' to place a vote for a particular topic. For instance, you read a story on a blog that you find extremely beneficial. You can click on the 'Digg' icon and this is, for a lack of a better term, voting for the article.
This is a great way to get exposure because it's based on a community of people voting rather than a news source feeding you information that they feel is important. If you can write interesting articles with headlines that draw peoples attention you can get thousands of visitors from just one article.
Summary
As you can see there are many different methods of viral marketing. I by no means covered every method but hopefully this will get you thinking about viral marketing and the value of dedicating time to it.
It's a very affordable method of driving more traffic to your website and as the internet grows it's only going to become more popular.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.