Creativity. It doesn't hurt to be a little creative to help your site or online business gain a foot hold in the Internet based business. With so muc...
Creativity.
It doesn't hurt to be a little creative to help your site or online business gain a foot hold in the Internet based business. With so much competition and rivalry going on,
every method of marketing should be considered and at some stage be employed and utilized.
You may of heard this before, but It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or an award winning website, if people don’t know you exist, you are not going to make it. your ideas and aspirations of being successful and running a successful online business will die.
There are many methods and schemes used by many e-commerce sites today, and there are those that can help you with boosting your popularity ratings or traffic generation program. One of these is called Viral Marketing.
When we think viral, we think of a virus spreading like wildfire. It starts small but then quickly gathers speed and spreads. This is no different to a computer virus being spread by unsuspecting users but we are not talking about a computer virus, we are talking about spreading your name or business.
Viral Marketing Overview
Viral Marketing, also known as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build public awareness of one’s product or company. Many forms of media can be used to reach out to the public without actually promoting a product. One could write an e-book, add in your links and offer as a free product and ask people to give it away. It's like when one hears a rumour, one naturally tells people about it and then those who were told also tell other people. same with the e-book, being in digital form it can be easily copied and passout. Tom Hua did this in a very successful way when he wrote a book called 'Working with Clickbank' and it simply layed out how to use Clickbank. It became very successful through by using the principles of Viral Marketing, that it won a Clickbank contest.
Companies use the principle that if people like the content of a product, (ebook, free video or audio) they will pass it on to their friends and family. The product will have the brand or logo and as people pass on the product the brand or logo of the company also gets passed on, this helps to promote the company or its product.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because there is a relatively low cost involved. To avoid being classed as spam mail, viral marketing uses the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and the free product within the email gets open.
Using Viral Marketing to your advantage
The main advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company very quickly and very cheaply. It helps to generate a flow of traffic that is potentially very lucrative to you and your site, but more importantly, it helps to creative a presence in the online world.
Viral Marketing is very effective. It is one tool that should be researched and then used in conjunction with other advertising tools in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization, PPC and article writing. It can and does help in getting people to know about you and your company.
All it takes is a little time, a plan and patience, as well as constant analyzing of data so one can tweak the idea to gain more traffic and build a bigger list. Remember the movie 'The Blair Witch Project?' That was famous for using viral marketing to spread the word.
A brilliant classic example is Hotmail. Before Microsoft bought it, Hotmail used Viral marketing to spread the word and increase its customer base dramatically.
Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. used this very simple strategy.
1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: 'Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com' and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Tiny waves spreading farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.
Six Elements
There are six basic elements you should include in your viral marketing strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:
1. Give away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources
It's not difficult, just takes time to create an effective strategy. It’s your turn to use viral marketing. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing.
