Jeremy Long Chia Teik asked:


Viral Marketing is essentially a marketing strategy intended to help marketers generate huge traffic, exposure and massive bottom lines. Surely the word ‘viral’ bears close resemblance to ‘virus’, our most popular flu bug. Viral marketing will do wonders for marketers if only its power is drawn and used effectively.

How can viral marketing be of effective help to our online business? What sort of advantages and benefits can viral marketing give us?

In the world of marketing, as in mortar-and-brick marketing, we know one thing for sure that will definitely help us in gaining more customers and increasing our profits. It’s none other than word-of-mouth referral system. We can imagine the impact it will have upon our online business. Customer A is satisfied with your product or service, and he or she goes to inform another friend B about it. B trusts A and buys your product or service and goes on to inform another friend C who is inquiring into your product or service. If C expresses interest and buys, you will get the repetition of the cycle which will impact your referral system and bottom line positively. How powerful and effective can this word-of-mouth referral system gets, especially when you will get to increase your clicks and conversions in the long run! A good noticeable example would be Windows Live Hotmail, who tags a simple little advertisement indicating free email account with them to each and every email sent by its member user. This resulted in a huge explosion in the former Hotmail and is still garnering numbers in email user memberships for the new Windows Live Hotmail. This is how it’s being done effectively:

Express yourself with the latest Windows Live Messenger! Get it free today! Windows Live Messenger

Viral marketing helps to build up your credibility. Visitors and customers will trust you more as time passes. As word goes forth about your product or service, isn’t it wonderful and beneficial to your business that someone commends very well about your product or service. As Rome was not built in one day, so credibility has to be earned and built over a period of time. Much effort is required to present yourself as a credible and trustworthy marketer, therefore, the image projected must always be good.

Where there is viral marketing, there is the tendency to created buzz for your online marketing. When visitors come to know and express deep interest in your product or service, there’s this possibility of good ‘noise’ about what you have to offer. Questions will be asked about your offers. What views or comments can be expected from them? How will you be tackling reservations about your product or service? Importantly, you must know how this good ‘noise’ is going to affect your business when visitors take their vote on future purchases from you.

When there is creation of buzz, your marketing campaign will be made visible inevitably. Viral marketing does this effectively. Your online business goes prominent especially when your visitors and customers come flocking to you to find out more or for more purchases. It’s a win win situation. Needless to say, your business will experience exponential increase in sales if clicks are converted. Viral marketing makes closing of sales so much easier for marketers. A good example is Amazon.com, who attaches a flyer to every gift that you are recommended to send to your friend. The flyer is actually viral marketing in motion – it details the products of Amazon.com.

Viral marketing knows no boundaries. It can activate itself even in social bookmarking websites. YouTube for example is one site where you add a few links allowing users to bookmark your content. This amounts to opening opportunities for the promotion of your website, with the possibilities of massively increasing traffic. Understanding the demographics of the various social bookmarking websites will be of advantage to you. Application of different strategies such as free games, interesting articles and funny videos to your site will do wonders to your campaign. Viral marketing will take care of the results.

Viral marketing has the power to reduce your promotional costs besides marketing costs. The main part of the promotion is actually carried out by your subscribers and customers who interact with their friends, relatives and work colleagues. In effect, they are the ones who put viral marketing into action, bringing you its results.

Viral marketing is effective. It is also explosive. You will see exponential growth in your online business through vast increase in site traffic and demand for your product or service. Put simply, at all costs hold on to viral marketing power.



IRWIN

Laurie Lindsay asked:


Before we get into the meat and potatoes of how you can use viral marketing to help get a buzz going about your small business, let’s start with a definition of exactly what “viral marketing” means.

According to the Wikipedia, “Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even text messages.”

If you’ve ever had a hotmail, yahoo or G-mail account, you’ve participated in a viral marketing campaign every time you sent an email to someone – because the company inserted a small (and usually discreet advertisement) at the bottom of all of your outgoing emails – inviting the people you were communicating with to receive their own free email account.

So how can you put a viral marketing campaign together for your own business – and more importantly, do you even want to?

Let me answer that second question first, okay? YES! You definitely want to take the time to brainstorm your own viral marketing campaign – even if you don’t someday want to be as big as hotmail, yahoo or Gmail.

Why? Because according to a recent survey done by Forrester Research, people are almost 65% more likely to trust a review posted by a peer – or even a complete stranger – than they are to trust the marketing or sales information put out by the company.

Don’t believe me? Check out Amazon.com and I-tunes. Why is this the case? Because as consumers we tend to think that the average “Joe Blow” has less of a personal agenda when posting his review about the latest “Dixie Chicks” album and so we give it more weight.

And, by the way, this is a normal reaction – it’s one that’s kind of hard-wired into all of us. People have always shared the things they like – or **** – with their friends and family members. Back in the 50′s and 60′s, our grandparents used to talk to their neighbors over the “back fence,” call each other on the phone or tell their friends during lunch. The difference is, these days we use the Internet and cell phones.

What’s interesting though, is that with the popularity of the Internet, our trust – and believe in “social proof” – has become even stronger.

By creating your own viral marketing campaign, you’ll be doing more than getting the word out about your new affiliate product. You’ll be gathering social proof – and that will help your sales to go through the roof.

So how do you set up your own viral marketing campaign? The first thing to do is to get back to the basics.

Here’s the real “secret” to making a lot of money with affiliate products. Have the right product, with the right message to the right people in the right time.

So start with your affiliate product. Make sure that there’s a hungry audience for whatever you’re selling.

Then make sure that you’re sending out the right message – and in the right way. If you’re marketing a product to teens, you’ll want to make sure that it’s something they want – and you’ll have to reach them where they’re hanging out. That might be on MySpace, twitter or even Friendster.

What’s the right message? Maybe it’s a special report. But it could just as easily be a video. Or an audio mp3 file. Match your message to your audience. And finally, make sure that you’re getting your message out at the right time – when your audience is ready to buy it.

Make your viral marketing campaign stand out from the crowd – because that’s how it’s going to get passed around and become viral. By understanding the basics – who your audience is, what they want, how they want to get it and when they want it – all you have to do next is to create something that your audience loves – or hates – or finds interesting enough – to pass around to their friends. And because your product comes with an implied endorsement – social proof – those people will pass it around to other people – and the buzz goes on and on and on and you’ll start hearing the “ka-ching!” of your cash register going off a lot more often.



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Charles Petty asked:


An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your message by willing participants.

This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site.

Using viral E-books as a marketing method is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s even quicker if you use rebrandable E-books that have been written by others. Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search. You will find many rebrandable E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business. One method of distributing the E-book is to offer it to visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family it will promote your business for you.

E-books are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited only by the enthusiasm of the participants.

E-books are fairly easy to create. It’s possible to produce your own E-books by combining articles that you have written or have gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.

A common approach is to use material that has Private Label Rights, including articles and reports that have been written specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Using a portion of a larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters of a large E-book could also be used as a viral E-book.



new hotmail address

Gary Shaw asked:


The Internet has modernized man’s way of living. It has also affected how we do certain things including business tasks. Marketing has gone a long way and it is not being revolutionized by the Internet.

Internet viral marketing is a cost effective way to be able to reach a targeted audience and efficiently convey one’s marketing message. Viral marketing outside the context of the Internet is usually connected with spreading a message through word-of-mouth. In

the context of the Internet, the concept is the same, but the ways of doing it is diversified.

Internet viral marketing is similar to a virus. Viruses are notorious for being easily spread. This is the concept behind Internet viral marketing. Viruses, if not contained, can strike an epidemic. Internet viral marketing behaves like viruses, it aims at spreading a marketing message to people through other people.

The mere dynamism of the Internet makes it possible for viral marketing to do its job quite effectively. In the world of the Internet, viral marketing can be done in many ways. The whole structure of the Internet has been a tool which has been used by many to be able to make a statement or advertise a product.

We say that using Internet viral marketing, or viral marketing in general is one of the best, if not the best way of marketing a certain product or service. This article tries to lay down the reasons for the claim above.

Here are some reasons why viral marketing is the best way to market:

It’s free!

You may not consider everything you just read to be crucial information about viral. But don’t be surprised if you find yourself recalling and using this very information in the next few days.

This is probably the best reason why viral marketing is the best way to market. There are many ways to market a product or a service. One can utilize some of the old-school techniques such as the use of print media (banners, posters, flyers) or audio-visual tools. There is not much argument about the effectiveness of these methods, given the assumption that they are done with careful preparation and planning. However, these things cost money, a lot of money.

An actual example of the cost of these other marketing techniques can be seen in the pharmaceutical industry. Studies say that more than half of the cost that people are incurring for buying branded medicines is used to cover the expenses of marketing the products. This is a reality that reflects how marketing costs can take their toll on the product itself.

Viral marketing is a free way of spreading a marketing message. One can argue that it is not totally free (as claimed). However, the only costs for Internet viral marketing are the costs associated with Internet connection and some minor tools for getting on track. One can also do an economic valuation of the time spent for viral marketing, but every other marketing technique consumes time.

-Availability of techniques

There are many ways of doing viral marketing, especially through the Internet. Literally, there are hundred different ways of spreading a marketing message through the web. The most popular way is to use affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs gives incentives for webmasters to put up one’s banner. The webmasters earn some profit whenever the banner is clicked by the visitors. One can also look into the option of giving away free stuff to other people to get their attention and be agents of the viral marketing endeavor. One can give away free web space, free articles, free newsletters, free software, free graphics, free screensavers, etc. This is the concept which was employed the developers of hotmail. If one can remember, hotmail became a craze when it was launched. People who signed up for the free email literally became marketing agents for hotmail. They carried the marketing message which was simply embedded into their email addresses.

Impact of viral marketing

Viral marketing, if done properly, will not only convey a marketing message, it will let the message stick to people’s minds. Creativeness comes into play when using viral marketing as a strategy. Everything starts with a bright idea and this idea is then put into operation with careful planning and execution.

Viral marketing is the way to go in these modern times of marketing. It is a very cost effective and efficient way of conveying a marketing message towards a target audience.

If you’ve picked some pointers about viral that you can put into action, then by all means, do so. You won’t really be able to gain any benefits from your new knowledge if you don’t use it.



KEENAN

Gary Shaw asked:


Viral marketing has definitely gained its popularity over the global network. More and more businesses are adopting this marketing strategy to gain their fair share in the market. The approach developed by Hotmail in increasing its number of subscribers is one classic example of viral marketing.

How Hotmail Did It

Hotmail is one of the first web-based email provider that gives away email addresses for free. Their marketing approach starts by giving free web based email addresses and additional services. Each of the messages sent with a Hotmail address has an advertisement at the bottom that goes Get your private, free email at Hotmail.

Then, of course, Hotmail subscribers will use the service to send messages to their friends and colleagues. These friends and colleagues will get the message and read it, and then clicks on the link at the bottom. They will also sign up and be a subscriber like what the sender did. Then these new subscribers will also email their own set of friends. The cycle goes on and on.

This is why viral marketing has the power of reaching thousands, even millions, of people in such a short time and with little effort from the one who initiates it.

Elements of Viral Marketing

Dr. Ralph Wilson, an ecommerce consultant, named six elements or basic principles of viral marketing. A viral marketing technique need not have all of these, but the more principles it follows, the more powerful the strategy will be.

1. Give away products or services. This is the first and most basic principle of viral marketing. When a person hears the word free, it elicits the interest in him and will avail of that free product or service, for sure. Having cheap or inexpensive products may also do the trick, but free will give much faster results.

Patience is important in viral marketing. Giving away products for free may not earn profit today but if the business gets to develop customer base by giving something for free, it will soon generate income for them.

If you find yourself confused by what you have read to this point, do not despair. Everything should be crystal clear by the time you finish.

2. Easy transfer to others. The medium used to carry the marketing message to other people should relatively be easy. Viral marketing has been powerful over the internet because of the ease of communication the technology offers. Email, web sites, software downloads are just some examples that can be used in viral marketing.

Also, it is better that the message be short for easy copying and transmission. Simple and short but straight to the point is best, just like Hotmails advertisement at the bottom of each email sent out.

3. Scalability from small to very large. When viral marketing is used as a marketing style, it is best that the business is prepared for rapid growth. In cases of increasing web traffic thru viral advertising, the web owner should make sure that the host server is prepared enough to handle the expected increase in traffic within a short period of time.

This should not be taken for granted; else, it will defeat the purpose of doing viral marketing. Once people notice that the site takes a long time to load, they will just leave and forget about it. That means an automatic loss of potential customers.

4. Exploit motivation and behaviors. A marketing strategy that builds on motivation and behaviors of people for its transmission is a definite plus. People love to be popular. This motivation will drive them to communicate to more and more people to be known.

5. Utilize existing networks. According to social scientists, an average person has about 8 to 12 members in their close network of family, friends and colleagues. Moreover, internet gives way to creating a bigger network circle. Learning to use these existing networks in viral marketing will yield better results.

6. Take advantage of other resources. Viral marketing need not consume all your resources away. Using other web sites in posting your articles, for example, will get them read by a large number of people without the need of creating your own web page.

It is best to learn these basic elements or principles of viral marketing first before actually doing it. Being to aggressive without doing your homework may just lead to damage instead of success. Try to adopt those that may be applicable to your product. Use all of the principles, if possible, for a more successful output.

The day will come when you can use something you read about here to have a beneficial impact. Then you will be glad you took the time to learn more about viral.



ARNOLDO

Anthony Samuel asked:


Viral marketing refers to stealth marketing techniques that produce increase in brand awareness exponentially through a self replicating process, very similar to the spread of a computer virus. Through the Internet, it reaches a large number of people fast. Viral marketing has the ability to execute a low cost marketing campaign, and obtain response from a large number of interested people. A real marketers dream high and rapid response, at a low cost!

As a strategy, Viral marketing encourages people to pass on marketing messages to others, and create a potential for growth, exponentially. For many people, the term viral marketing is quite offensive, reminiscent of the virus that replicates over and over again, with no end. Viral marketing is the word-of-mouth equivalent of the off-Internet marketing strategy. Viral marketing, however offensive it may seem to some, has come to stay.

The start of Viral marketing is attributed to Hotmail one of the first free email services. At the bottom of each of the free email sent out was a small message ‘Get your private, free email at hotmail.com.’ All the recipients of the senders emails, their friends and associates, would see the message, sign up for the free email service, and help send the message further to their own list of friends and acquaintances. This carefully designed viral marketing strategy sent a small message rapidly across, all over the Internet.

The Elements Of Viral Marketing

If you are thinking of incorporating Viral marketing in your overall strategy, this is what you can do. Some may work and some may not, and not all will work as easy as the Hotmail strategy did. A look at some of the elements:

- Giving Away Products And Services: This is the primary element of Viral marketing, giving away free products and services. Free e-mail services, free information, free software programs that perform powerful functions (later, you can hit them with the pro version). Free generates more interest than cheap and inexpensive, and soon this will generate enough interest for the businesses to generate income. This is the basic strategy, you give away something first, and then sell later.

- Providing Effortless Transfer: To make the virus of viral marketing spread, you need a viable medium. A medium that will help transfer and spread your message with ease and comfort, something like an e-mail, website, graphic, software download, etc. Internet offers the best, instant, and a very inexpensive way to transfer and replicate your message. Make your Viral marketing message short, compact, and compelling so as to be able to transmit without degradation.

- Building Scalability: For your viral marketing strategy to work, it must have the ability to spread rapidly from small to large. As in the case of Hotmail, it was limited by the spread of the message only over its own servers. You need to plan ahead in your strategy, and build scalability in your model.

- Utilizing Existing Communication Networks: Humans are social animals, and every person has a network of 8 to 10 close friends, family, and associates, with whom he communicates. Some people, depending, have scores and hundreds with whom they may be communicating on a regular basis. Today, people have developed a network of relationships through the Internet. They have a network of emails and favorite website URLs. Your viral marketing strategy must include ways to place your message into these existing networks to multiply and spread rapidly.

- Using Others Resources: Your viral marketing strategy must include the use of others resources, such as placing your text or graphic links on others websites. This way, other peoples websites are relaying your messages, which can be seen by hundreds of visitors visiting those websites.



AUGUST

Joel Christopher asked:


Many people in the business of internet marketing ask: what is viral marketing? Well, what is a virus? Dictionary.com defined it to be an infection that can transfer from one place to another easily and multiply quickly. The same concept operates on viral marketing.

Viral marketing is just marketing that travels easily and multiplies quickly, and there are lots of different ways to do it. The key point is that it is great for your marketing message because it gets that out there very quickly, and it spreads very very rapidly, on the assumption that you do it the right way.

Viral marketing is both an old and a new practice. The reason that it is new and old is because it has been around for a long time, and it used to be called “word of mouth marketing.” Viral marketing now is mainly known because somebody or someone actually coined the term viral marketing.

The coining of that word “viral marketing” can be attributed to Hotmail. Initially, Hotmail was a free e-mail account and they wanted to get the word out, but they had a very little budget. They were not making any money. They were giving away the accounts for free, and so at the end of every message they put a little trailer on the bottom, and it basically says, “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail. Click here.” This tiny addition to all messages actually caused readers of email messages to wonder what hotmail is click on the link.

They have already developed the medium. It was already going out. All they did was leverage it, and because they were giving the accounts away for free, no one could really complain about the fact that they added this thing on the bottom. So, that is one mechanism, and that is where the term comes from.

These days, more sophisticated forms of viral marketing can be observed from mail accounts such as Yahoo. There are now variations to this original style that Hotmail concocted. The good thing is that as the technology and internet usage evolved, so did the style of employing viral marketing. While Hotmail’s technique used to be generic, it is now already tailored to be more personalized to their target market.

You can actually use something very similar to a resource box. In your e-mail, you can have a signature box at the bottom, and that is where you can put things like your name, your contact information, your USB if you are branding, and your websites. Lots of people click through on it.

To further monitor the prices, what some people to do is that they create tracking URLs that they put in their e-mail. With this, they can actually tell when people click on those tracking URLs at the bottom of the message. This is very effective and it almost costs you nothing to implement. You can do it in any email account with no worries whatsoever.



DOMENIC

Rich Lawson asked:


Viral marketing has proven to be an extremely low cost method of effective advertising for both large companies and imaginative internet marketers and it could be for you too!

With the ruthlessly competitive nature of the internet every ounce of extra traffic could mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful venture. Viral marketing, when done correctly, with some creativity and good timing, can send your traffic figures through the roof.

Viral means that your message is spread like a virus from one user to another – it doesn’t mean go ahead and create pop-up ads or spyware.

One of the best examples of viral marketing is that of hotmail. When Microsoft launched hotmail they gave away the service for free. At the bottom of every email sent by their users was a message offering a free hotmail account. You can see the results for yourself – there are now millions of hotmail users worldwide.

One of the more common types of viral marketing is a funny video clip or story. The reader or viewer almost feels compelled to pass it on, along with your advertising. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and will open it as well

Other forms of viral marketing include giving something valuable away for free or at a discount and encouraging people to recommend the product or service to friends.

Youtube and other social sites can be a great way to spread your message for free – how much traffic would you generate if your message was on the homepage for even just a few hours?

By using your imagination and flair you can easily generate a steady rush of traffic to your site. If you then capture the visitors’ names and emails you can quickly build a list of people who are interested in your site and monetize this list for a long time.

Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games and help you outperform your competition.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.



BOYCE

Patrick Omari asked:


Since its original creation and subsequent commercial introduction in the late 1980s, the internet has grown exponentially at an almost limitless speed. The internet, as its predecessors television and radio, is becoming the most dominant media for new marketing techniques. As video killed the radio star, will the internet kill the TV star as each new media consumes its predecessors.

Commercials have evolved. The clear, concise product messages of the past are often replaced with unusual, obscure short films, although some ads will still use the obvious approach when promoting a product. As the internet’s share of commercial sales grows, more companies are using its influence to introduce products to their intended market.

Due to the size and scale of the internet, web advertising needs to be more effective than ever before. At a time where adverts struggle to even reach their target market, viral marketing is quickly becoming cost-effective as the ‘virus’ concept spreads and more potential customers become ‘infected’. Viral Marketing is generally considered to be video clips, games, images, e-mails and recently text messages.

In the mid 1990s, Hotmail was offering free e-mail services, a revolutionary concept at the time. One of the first examples of viral marketing, Hotmail would offer free e-mail addresses with a simple promotional tagline. The message would spread through groups and communities rapidly and the campaign was a success. Hotmail had made its mark, the product had become well-known and popular and the brand had been established with just a small number of viral messages.

An early viral marketing campaign ensured the success of the film The Blair Witch Project (1999). The production team spent a tiny production budget of just 22,000 dollars and took 250 million dollars at the box office thanks to the viral. The marketing campaign relied heavily on word-of-mouth promotion, with internet chat rooms building anticipation and intrigue about the film’s content and time of release.

The Blair Witch Project was a movie with actors, however, prior to its release the film was rumoured to be a documentary by college kids that had gone terribly wrong. The rumours spread quickly and the infected would go on to infect more and more people. By the time the film was released, the buzz around it was at fever-pitch. The Blair Witch creators were pioneers of the viral ad, with viral marketing in its early stages – the standard had been set.

A great viral ad will gain attention and intrigue around a product, so consequently the product must be good, if not great. As the money spent on viral ads increases with the format’s popularity, the expectation on each viral will also increase. A viral ad’s success will be judged on the amount of views the clip achieves, not necessarily on the related sales.

Increasing sales is inevitably the main target for any company looking to use viral marketing, but the main objective of the ad will not be to promote a specific product. To prevent the viral being too similar to a conventional advert, the product or company name will not be a prevalent part or will be completely absent from the clip.

Recently, there have been many video clips that the viewer would not immediately associate with the product. A UK television advert for Dairy Milk chocolate emerged in September, 2007, featuring a gorilla playing drums to the Phil Collins song ‘In The Air Tonight’.

The advert, three times the length of a regular TV commercial, begins with a close-up of the gorilla’s face. As the camera begins to pan away, the song begins and the gorilla is seen to be seated behind a drum kit. He creaks his neck before launching into the emphatic drum solo. The final shot is the Dairy Milk logo with its slogan ‘A glass and a half full of joy’. The video currently has about two million views on youtube, a major success as a viral ad.

Companies of all sizes will be looking to benefit from the buzz surrounding viral marketing videos. One of the world’s biggest companies, Nike, launched the legendary video showing Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar four times in a row without the ball touching the floor. Viewed over 50 million times, the video is classed as possibly the best viral ever made. The confusion about how genuine the advert was, as seen in the case of The Blair Witch Project, only increased its popularity as communities shared the video and questioned how it was made.

A new viral ad launched by Holiday Extras, a UK-based company selling airport parking and hotels, features comedy actor Paul Kaye as a car-park proprietor. The clip, at 92 seconds, shows a hideous alternative to the service that the company aims to offer the customer. This inversion of a traditional television advertisement shows how far advertising has moved since it inception. Having only recently been launched, it will be interesting to see how many views the video receives.

A successful viral advert relies on viewing figures, not the popularity of the advert itself. The aim of the viral is to launch or reinforce a brand identity and to encourage word-of-mouth promotion. With little or no money involved, the viral can be seen by a massive audience who will then talk about it to non-internet users as well as fellow web-users. However, as the new media gains popularity and attention, the competition will become fierce, forcing viral ads to be more diverse and attention-grabbing than ever.

So, what will the future hold for viral marketing? As the internet becomes the dominant marketing tool for companies of all kinds, it will be used in different ways to promote products and services. As quickly as the viral marketing epidemic spread, a vaccine may appear in the form of new advertising techniques. It is the companies and advertisers that must stay ahead and attempt to infect the public with progressive, innovative campaigns.



DEE

Daegan Smith asked:


When Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith founded Hotmail.com they promoted it with a simple idea they called “Word of computer” advertising. Every message sent by a subscriber had a one-line promotional message attached….”Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com”. Within the first 18 months of business they claimed 12 million sign-ups to their service… more than what CNN and AOL could garner in the same time period. With a cost per acquisition of just 4 cents this was a resounding success and a brilliant use of Viral Marketing Technique.

Viral marketing describes 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. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.”

It is an extremely effective form of word-of – mouth online promotion strategy used for amazing success by web frontrunners like Hotmail and Bluemountain.com. For a home based or small business, viral marketing is a smart and cost effective way to promote business and generate new sales leads. It is easy and fun.

The biggest benefit of viral marketing is that it helps you maintain a cost effective level of brand awareness at all times. It can reach beyond your target audience and mine for new leads; it creates a buzz around your products and services and provides accountability when tracked. Also see: http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/viral-marketing.html

Here are some tips for you to get your viral marketing campaign on the right track:

Have a great idea: Unless you have a really remarkable idea, it is going to be hard to get people interested in it; much less share it with others. A boring idea doesn’t get passed on. If you have a regular consumer product to sell and still want to use viral marketing, put on your creative hat and craft a promotional message that will make people want to pass it on to others.

Identify your core group: your core group or “hive” is a group of people who share a common interest and talk to each other about it. The core group can also be called ‘agents’. These are the guys who will be responsible for sending your ‘virus’ ahead. If your product/idea/ service doesn’t move this group, it isn’t going to get any further.

Ease of use: have you ever received an email with a mile long URL in it, asking to be sent to “15 people for a free gift”? if your answer is ‘yes’ then you know what I am talking about. Make it easy for your agents to tell their friends about your company. if they have to download pages of text or heavy graphics, they are more likely to hit the “delete” button and get out of there, fast!

Make it persistent: When you have built a sizeable community of converts, keep them happy. It is harder to go out and get new agents than making the existing ones work for you.

Referrals: A good way of utilizing viral marketing for your site is through referrals. If you are offering content or service, you can put up a “Tell a Friend” button that lets customers recommend products or Web pages via email to friends. Recommend-It and BigNoseBird.com are some of the sites that offer these services for free. These services allow you to keep track of those who recommend your site and the people they recommend it to.

Once you have started off the process all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. For more information on viral marketing take a look at:

http://www.nmk.co.uk/article/2003/04/02/viral-marketin



GERALD