One of the most time consuming aspects of online marketing is
finding the most effective strategies to attract visitors to
your web site. If you set up a viral marketing campaign
correctly, you have the opportunity of gaining 1000s of visitors
for years to come.
Definition of viral marketing
This is the online term for word-of-mouth advertising. You
provide something that encourages others to spread the word
about your product, quickly and inexpensively with little effort
on your part. This potentially creates exponential growth in the
message's visibility and effect. The message spreads in a viral
form in a manner similar to the spreading of a common cold virus
from person to person.
One example of successful viral marketing is Hotmail, which
began offering free e-mail accounts, with a link back to Hot
Mail at the end of every e-mail message sent by one of its
customers. That spread the word about the service like a virus,
with every customer a virtual "carrier" of the message.
Benefits of Viral Marketing
1. Free advertising
2. Short term gains - gain immediate visitors.
3. Long term gains - attracts visitors for years to come.
4. Causes exponential growth - reaches a large audience.
5. Automate your marketing methods - set it up once and forget
about it.
6. Inexpensive to set-up - it primarily involves some investment
of time.
7. Viral marketing tools are easy to develop i.e. you can create
an e-book without knowing how to write.
8. Quickly build your reputation.
9. Easy to combine with other marketing methods - i.e. include
as a bonus with other products.
10. Increase targeted traffic to your web site.
Viral Marketing Strategies
1. Write articles - allow people to reprint your articles on
their web site, in their ezine, newsletter, magazine or e-books.
Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at
the bottom of each article. Make sure that the link in your
resource box is live so that all people that use your article
will link back to your site.
2. Create a free e-Book - give your e-book away to your visitors
and other editors or webmasters within your target market.
Encourage them to pass it on. Insert ezine subscription links or
affiliate links to the products throughout your e-book.
Subscriptions to your newsletter will increase in proportion to
the number of places your e-book is placed.
3. Set up an affiliate program - affiliate programs provide a
financial incentive for other sites to link to yours. Make sure
your commission is enough to make this attractive to web site
owners. As the number of affiliates increases, so do your
visitors and sales.
4. Getting sites to link to your site - you can receive ongoing
traffic from other sites by asking them to link to yours. If
it's a site that already has lots of traffic, you will see an
immediate increase in traffic to your own site. Only contact
site owners who have products that compliment the products on
your site.
5. Send out news releases - create a free service or product
that is available on your site. The most important aspect is to
have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free service, or digital
download. If your news release is carried by just 5% of the
media you send it to, you could have your URL in front of tens
of thousands of readers quite inexpensively.
6. Viral software - offering a free download of a script,
e-book, calendar, etc is an effective method for gaining new
subscribers to your ezine. You can also market your product by
including your logo or marketing message with your download.
7. Create an e-course - give your visitor numerous chances to
respond to your offer by creating an email course or courses.
You accomplish this by writing a series of small articles
outlining the benefits of your product, then distribute them
automatically over several days or weeks with an auto responder.
This can be set up automatically for the product or ezine you
are promoting.
8. RSS Feeds - this is a relatively new viral marketing method.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It was originally
used by news organizations to syndicate their news stories. RSS
Feeds are now used to automatically distribute content to blogs.
They can also be used to distribute articles to web site owners
and ezine publishers throughout the web.
Conclusion
Using these viral marketing strategies will help boost your web
presence, by rapidly increasing web traffic, gaining more links
and building your reputation as an expert in your field.
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