How to Trigger the Power of Viral Marketing With A Bang in Your Online Business
Viral marketing, viral marketing, viral marketing! What the heck is this damn little viral marketing thing about?
Viral marketing is undoubtedly one of the biggest buzz words in recent times.
Also known as word-of-mouth marketing, viral marketing is one of the most effective forms of online marketing.
Viral marketing works on the premises of giving the visitors to your website a reason to tell their friends about your site, who also tell their friends about it and so on.
In other words, for viral marketing to work for you and your online business, you have to make your website buzz worthy.
In most cases, the buzz worthy bit is something that the referral to your website will find interesting or benefit from or something that justifies the referrer’s effort in getting the word out about your website.
Below are some of the ways in which you make your website buzz worth and extremely viral:
a) Inject some humor
One thing that cannot be disputed is that humor sells. A living proof is Dr. Joe Vitale who created a buzz around his Amazon best seller using humor alone.
That’s what I call free publicity and is an example of what viral marketing can do for your online business if you know how to tap into it.
People love humor and it would be safe enough to say that every one craves for entertainment in their lives.
Thus if you can inject some humor in your marketing messages, it’s very likely to elicit positive feelings among others who might then pass it over and over again without any further effort on your part. That’s viral marketing at its best, right?
b) Dare to be controversial
People love controversy and the most controversial topics receive the most attention. Making some thought-provoking comments is a nice way to generate discussion and interest.
However, you’ll want to avoid offending others by making off-color or too personal comments. Used correctly and sparingly, controversy alone can spur a viral effect on your website.
A nice example is Jason Calacanis who used his celebrity status as the founder of weblogs inc. to say some pretty ignorant stuff about SEO.
We can’t say for sure how much punch this little controversy unleashed on his blog but we’d be safe to assume it was tangible (it just had to)
Such controversy, causing a large group of people (in this case the SEO industry experts) to feel insulted, and feel the need to respond, can trigger a viral effect on your blog.
c) Be unique and innovative
Focus on coming up with new and innovative concepts and ideas and providing fresh look at old ideas.
You see, people get tired of talking about the same tired, old stuff over and over again.
It should thus come as no surprise that some technology and product review blogs are very popular. If you prove to be innovative and provide people with new stuff and ideas to try out, people are likely to feel the urge to get the word out about your website and/or products. That’s viral marketing at its best.
d) Give incentives
There are generally three types of incentives that you can give on your website to trigger a viral effect.
Viral marketing incentive #1-affiliate programs
The most common way to trigger a viral effect on your website is starting an affiliate program. By dividing the income from your products with your affiliates, you provide them with a reason to get the word about your website out.
Now, this is not the most sustainable viral marketing technique (in my own opinion). Why do I say so?
Affiliate programs as a way to trigger viral effect on your website relies on tapping into the human nature of greed (let’s face it, we all want to be rich some day) and if one day you cannot give out monetary incentives or the sales ceases (every product has a life cycle, right?), all the viral marketing effort might simply come to an abrupt break.
However, don’t get me wrong. I don’t intend to mean that an affiliate program is worthless as a viral marketing tool. In fact, by the time it ceases working or by the time the product life cycle ends, you could well have generated a six-figure or seven-figure online business.
What I simply mean is that affiliate programs are not a sustainable viral marketing tool but it’s nevertheless very powerful website promotion strategy.
Viral marketing incentive #2-JV contests
I know I might sound as if I am repeating myself here. I could or I couldn’t, depending on how you look at it, but JV contests are not exactly the same as affiliate programs.
JV contests simply involve running a contest among your affiliates where the top referrer(s) wins a prize. They are also very powerful as viral marketing tools.
Viral marketing incentive #3-free gifts
I personally use and like this viral marketing incentive.
This shameless technique involves asking your website visitors to refer their friends in return for a certain gift. You’d normally tell them something like if you tell only three friends about our website, this $197 product is yours free
Summing up
Viral marketing is one of the fastest ways to generate website traffic and there are many viral marketing techniques you can tap into.
Just get creative and you could easily come up with strong viral marketing mechanisms on your website for free.
Regards,
Kevin Njoroge
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Hi Kevin,
You are right about free gifts. It still is the most used word in marketing…for small business or fortune 500 companies.
I use free gifts all the time–for marketing, as well as teaching my clients to do the same.
There’s plenty of ways to make free info products. Try google books/public domain.
Good luck
Yes viral marketing is what i looking for. We have been done lot of contest and give away but yet not all traffic we get are quality. Until we doing something crazy which we sold something cost thousand and sell it with one dollar. With this we success in our viral marketing in a short time.
We maybe loss in the moment of one dollar but we can very fast to earn it back on long run after get those customer by keep follow up them and sell something to them.