Viral Marketing Tips
How To Make A Website > More Website Traffic > Viral Marketing Tips
Viral marketing is the concept of passing
a marketing message to other people through methods that can create
a 'buzz'. The reason for the name 'viral marketing' is that the
concept is based on the similarity to passing a virus around. Once
it gets started it is passed among people at an astounding rate.
Below I'll cover some great
options to create your own viral marketing campaigns.
Some are simple to implement while others require some
work. You'll find that I've included a link to a few
methods to a detailed page.
Viral Marketing At Work
When I think of viral marketing I think of Yahoo.
When Yahoo started their web mail service it was competing with the
likes of Hotmail. In order to build a base of new customers they
would include a link at the bottom of each email sent that linked to
their email service.The point was to
market to a group of people through a means in which they normally
wouldn't have had easy access to. The result was people would
sign-up for a free Yahoo email account and eventually they became
the worlds largest free email provider.
Email Signature
Following the lead of Yahoo, the easiest method
of viral marketing is including a link to your website or maybe a
link to a couple of your websites in your email signatures. This
works in a couple of ways, if a person is unable to remember your
site they can find a deleted email and your website is right there
on the email.Another great thing about
email signatures is that it's free. I don't know of any email
provider that doesn't allow signatures in their emails. There is
also the fact that if you're email gets forwarded to another person
your website has just been exposed that recipient as well.
It's important to include your contact
information as well as link to your website. You can also include
some clever tag line just to make the signature memorable.
Online Video
These days the ultimate viral concept is video. If you can produce
some sort of video that people with find informational or amusing
it's possible that millions of people will view it using a website
such as YouTube.com.If you know
anything about video editing you can include your website address on
the video which creates awareness for your website and can drive
substantial traffic.
It's important to have something that is worth
viewing though. Posting a video of your dog sleeping isn't going to
have a viral effect but a video of valuable information, an amazing
feat or exclusive footage of a major event will certainly bring
exposure to your website.
Write A Valuable Unique Article
If you have expertise on a specific subject
matter you can write an article on it and submit it to a website
such as
ArticleCity.com or
GoArticles.com.
These are directories of articles on about any subject matter you
can imagine.The viral effect of this is
that you are giving users permission to place your article on their
website. In exchange they must leave the credits in tact which
contains a link to your website as well as a snippet of information
about yourself.
Social Networks
The latest internet trend are social networks.
It's likely that you've heard of
MySpace.com,
FaceBook.com and
possibly LinkedIn.com. They are social network sites that allow you
to create personal profiles with information about yourself or your
business.LinkedIn.com is more of a
business to business, B2B, type of website where you can network
with other people or businesses. MySpace.com and FaceBook.com are
more along the lines of connecting with friends, classmates or
family.
A recommendation would be to setup an account
with each of these websites, they're free, and take some time to
create a profile that introduces your website and certainly includes
links to it.
If you do it right you can see a large amount
of traffic from these sources because each of these sites publicize
that their subscriber base is in the millions. Just spending a
couple hours a week on social networking sites can really realize
some increased exposure.
I found an article on
how to market on social networks that you may find interesting.
Community Based Popularity Websites
This area may be new to you but websites like
StumbleUpon.com,
Digg.com,
Del.Icio.us are new breed of news websites. Articles are
submitted by users and they receive 'votes'. The number of votes a
story, image or video receives the higher it'll appear in the
website's rankings.They use terms like
'stumble' and 'digg' to place a vote for a particular topic. For
instance, you read a story on a blog that you find extremely
beneficial. You can click on the 'Digg' icon and this is, for a lack
of a better term, voting for the article.
This is a great way to get exposure because
it's based on a community of people voting rather than a news source
feeding you information that they feel is important. If you can
write interesting articles with headlines that draw peoples
attention you can get thousands of visitors from just one article.
SummaryAs you
can see there are many different methods of viral marketing. I by no
means covered every method but hopefully this will get you thinking
about viral marketing and the value of dedicating time to it.
It's a very affordable method of driving more
traffic to your website and as the internet grows it's only going to
become more popular.
Webmaster ForumI invite you to visit my
webmaster forum,
it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow
webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on. |
