Term of the week: Viral Marketing
By Derek Gehl
Viral marketing is any type of advertising that is “self-perpetuating.”
In other words, it compels people to share it with others so that it spreads through a community like a virus — but a good one!
One of the earliest examples of successful viral online marketing was done by Hotmail, one of the first free e-mail services on the Web. In its first one and a half years, Hotmail used viral marketing to sign up 12 million subscribers.
How did it accomplish this?
Simple: at the end of every e-mail, Hotmail included the following message: “Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com,” encouraging everyone who received an e-mail to sign up for the service as well.
Needless to say, it worked!
So, how can you get this highly effective traffic generation method work for you?
Probably the easiest way is to get your existing customer base to do it for you.
If you offer a free newsletter, be sure to include a “send to a friend” link that allows people to forward your newsletter to other people. Just make sure you also include a link that allows people who aren’t subscribed to your newsletter the chance to sign up for it, so you can continue to share your sales message with them.
You can also put free “tell-a-friend” widgets directly on your site. That’ll encourage your visitors to send e-mails to their friends telling them about your site.
You can find such widgets at:
- http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tell-a-friend.htm
- http://www.refdev.com/free_scripts/Perl/Recommendation/
- http://www.scriptsearch.com
You can also write interesting or informative articles and post them on article directory sites, then visit various blogs, forums, and chat groups encouraging people to read your content and share it with others.
(Just don’t be too pushy. Community site members hate it when people overtly try to market it to them. You have to provide them with content that’s really worth their while.)
Finally, if you’re really ambitious, you can create a compelling audio podcast and post it on sites like iTunes.com — or create a short video and post it on YouTube.com — and then encourage people to share the audio or video clip with their friends.
This strategy does take a bit of time and effort — but it can result in a huge payoff, so long as you offer content that’s so valuable people really want to share it.
(But that’s a subject for another newsletter… 🙂
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