“Viral Marketing – The Inside Story!”
By James Nsien2
http://james-nsien2.com
Definition:
Viral Marketing is any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence.
What makes us to shift form traditional marketing?
If we engaged in traditional marketing, following results are real headache to promote our business. The problem in doing traditional marketing is surveyed and released. The results are as follows,
• Traditional marketing is only 1/3rd as effective as in 10 years
• 37 % of the advertisements are wasted
• Most of the in information are redundant
• Traditional marketing pushes more people away than it attracts
More people are getting attracted by other marketing strategies which they can earn more or get more. Our society has changed dramatically.
Today consumers are savvier, cynical & more selective than before.
Why do we need viral marketing?
Before knowing that answer to the question, do we need “Traffic” to our site?
Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Every marketer craves for exposure to their sites. Without traffic, your business will NEVER survive. You can see some of the social networking sites being sold for unimaginable cheap amount. Why are they selling at that price? Is it because they convert their visitors into buyers well? Of course not!
The true value lies in their ability to produce high amount of traffic. And when your site is able to generate a massive amount of traffic, you can easily find ways to monetize and convert the traffic into profits.
We can drive huge amount of traffic to our sites by viral marketing. First we should know how to generate traffic.
Three basic method of generating traffic are,
Traffic buying:
Methods include pay-per-click advertising, ezine advertising and mainly other paid forms of advertising.
Traffic creation:
Methods like search engine optimization, social bookmarking, article marketing, blogging, etc.
Traffic borrowing:
The most powerful method as you simply borrow the traffic by leveraging on other people’s efforts. This includes leveraging on your affiliates’ efforts, striking joint venture etc.
Viral marking is mixture of creating the traffic and borrowing the traffic of others. Simply, it gives you massive amount of leverage and has the best prospective of driving a massive amount of free traffic without requiring much effort from your part. And, you should know that the more people you can pass your viral message to, then the quicker it will spread, especially when you are starting from a larger base number of people. Another major attraction of many viral marketing’s traffic generation strategy is that you don’t need exclusive advertising campaigns or to spend huge amounts of money on your efforts. Adding to that, most of the viral marketing techniques are free and cost effective.
Advantages of viral marketing:
1. It’s fast and highly efficient:
Basically this is a mixture of different type of traffic generation method. So this strategy has more advantage than traditional types. It will grab you more traffic than any other you applied.
In other hand, the effectiveness will be higher than traditional methods. Just imagine, you told 5 friends about your website and the next day, your 5 friends each goes to another 5 friends and tell about your site and the cycle continues for each day.
Here’s the amount of exposure you will get in just 10 days. (Taken from Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing Manuscript)
You – 1
Your Friends – 5
Their Friends – 25
And so on… – 125
625
3,125
15,625
78,125
390,625
1,953,125
9,765,625
48,828,125
Now you can understand what “effectiveness” means!
2. Builds credibility:
This is obvious as people tend to trust their friends/relatives more than the best dealer in the world. So, nothing beats a recommendation from someone you trust. Not even the best sales copy. Hence, viral marketing will help build your credibility greatly.
3. High targeted traffic.
What is the difference between targeted and non-targeted traffic?
Non-targeted traffic generally refers to visitors who are not exactly interested in what your site has to offer. On the other hand, targeted traffic refers to visitors who are generally interested in your sites’ offering.
Viral marketing brings you targeted traffic because the people who visit your website via their friends/acquaintances would be generally interested in what you have to offer before they decide to visit your website.
4. Leverage:
It allows you to leverage on others’ efforts – You are depending on others to spread the word for you. You are simply leveraging on other people’s efforts to gain publicity for your website. For instance, you can create an Article and allow others to freely distribute it at no cost at all.
Your website links will still be intact in the article. So if your article spreads or reach to the hands of thousands of even millions of users, your website will be advertised to millions just through other people’s efforts.
5. Stretch out to new and untapped customers:
No matter how effective your own advertising or promotional campaigns are, there will always be people that slip under your sight. Nevertheless, once you have an group of people (many of whom you have never met or even heard of) pushing your message to the people that they know, then you will inevitably have your message put in front of people who would otherwise never have seen it.
6. It is inexpensive and safe:
As mentioned earlier, the techniques involved in viral marketing are generally free or low-cost as most of it relies on other people’s efforts. Hence, you definitely do not need to diverge out much money or can even make without any capital.
Delivery Strategies:
These are some of the tacky materials you can use to hang up your killer message to easily infect your viewers using an credulous medium. These are like tools to make our strategy to deliver.
Tell-a-friend
This method is used everywhere as the way to spread the drone, and keep it perpetuating. Usually placed alongside a media (both video and audio) or page of interest – all the visitor has to do is place their friends name and email into a form to share your message. So make it buzz worthy.
Blogs
You are putting aggregation out there to the people that is prosperous to pick up and book; it has the latent to contaminating. This is especially echt when you begin the highly opinionated domain of blogs. The viral power of blogging is that the knowledge to annotate and tie aft is so promiscuous that before you cognize it you blog is engaged to several different sites adding to the monolithic web of cognition expanding daily.
Emails
This is a great one especially if you are mailing out to a list on a regular basis. When you send out an email – make it interesting, make it buzz worthy, and include a short text link at the bottom. “Forward this message to your friends,” or “pass the word”
Viral videos
You Tube and ifilm.com your way is paved with honor. This is an extraordinary way to get your message out there. I’m certain you’re pretty fit acquainted with this method thusly far with all the examples given. The traffic that can be generated using this method is ridiculous. Not only does this method love an instantaneous response from your visitors, but they distribute to get the sickness. The more interesting or entertaining, the quicker the infection. There are also tons of free directories you can submit your video to that will bring your immediate exposure.
Viral audios / podcasts
The archean red bicephalous step-child of Internet media exposure – podcasting preceded Cyberspace video with its widespread viral exposure. It’s repose of use and unremarkably small files made this a fast viral bleach for some causes. Audio had the knowledge to quick scatter and be instantly heard travel you message and directing listeners stake to your tract.
Articles
This viral agent is the slow but steady killer. Using this method takes a lot longer than others these days, but it has real staying power. Writing and submitting articles is a great way to get readership and traffic back to your site. In most cases when you submit your articles to an article directory you are also giving away the rights to reproduce your articles in their entirety. For you this means you Bio and any links to your site have to be included.
Web site
A website is essentially the root or host of your viral infection efforts. This is your hub, your center, the fruit of your efforts. Whatever your message or story, video or audio, it all leads back here. The center of your web of exposure, you want your core infectious material and message to lie dormant to pull visitors in like quick sand.
James Nsien2
NCN Internet Marketing Services
http://james-nsien2.com
Originally posted 2009-03-22 20:55:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
