November 26th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
The practicality of traditional marketing methods are gone. Generating viral traffic to increase the number of visitors to a site is upwardly gaining popularity. The game has changed, and striving to be different to stand out to eventual visitors is becoming more complex. The web population are no longer impressed by marketing smoke and lights and gadgets.
It’s time to set yourself up for using video in your niche empire! New sites for video content are showing up on a daily basis on the Internet.
People are in competition to surpass eachother in the creation of enchanting, artistic videos that will enthrall an audience who will pass their creative content along. Your venture can be helped in a bundle of powerful techniques with viral marketing. Albeit, there are companies with huge performance budgets, you don’t require a fortune of moolah or material to go viral. This really can level the playing field so that even pocket size operations will benefit from this. You may be able to do a a ton of things with just a web cam. It is thinkable to have the equal impression with a complete home made video as the larger players do with their large budgets and top of the line gear.
To be understood, there is an acquired profession to creating videos. Even small budget videos can take a lot of time to pull off. Many people choose to build a meticulous script. Others favor improvisation and naturalness.
Whichever ways you might look at it, viral videos are getting huge in ingenuity and popularity, thus meaning success for the one’s who who are utilizing them. This shouldn’t continue to be ignored any longer, this is important business. If your intention is to be a major competitor in the future, your best bet should be to get into it now, before it takes off like crazy.
It can be very time consuming to have your videos entered and placed over a wide scope of viewers. Without having a network of distributors, you may find it very hard to get your videos noticed. There are numerous free services you can try out for your own use. However, and this is very important, you most likely won’t be as successful as you would if you used a hired service. If you seriously want to have people see your videos, these are most certainly the people to work with. You will be blown away at the quantity of time you save.
Yes, to have the greatest cutting-edge methods of getting your your message to the world, in my definite opinion, is through viral marketing. You should generate noticeable results if you put honest effort into your viral strategies for your sites and services.
As with being able to get results with any new skill, success creating viral videos will take time and practice. The more you work at it, the better you will become. Some of your attempts will be hugely successful, others won’t. But in any case, you need to establish viral avenues as a marketing technique!
June 27th, 2009 at 6:14 am
Viral marketing. It sounds like something you want to avoid like the plague. But it’s really something you and your business need to catch now.
If you’re not yet familiar with the term “viral marketing” let me give you a basic definition. Viral marketing is simply a strategy that encourages individuals to “willingly” pass on a marketing message to others. It takes advantage of rapid multiplication to explode your marketing message to thousands or millions of people.
A viral marketing virus acts similar to a biological virus. But, the big difference between a viral marketing virus and a cold or flu virus is that people willingly pass the marketing message on. Not too many people really want to share their cold with others, but they’ll be more than happy to spread your “digital virus”. And when they spread it, they can spread it much farther than a biological virus. Your message can spread around the world in a matter of hours.
To summarize the benefits of viral marketing:
1. It’s cheap. You can create your own viral marketing message in the form of an e-book or video and then it costs you little or nothing to get the message out.
2. You can reach a huge audience. There is no other way your message can spread so quickly to a large audience for so little cost than with viral marketing. And the best part is that people are passing your message to their friends and associates so you get an implied endorsement from them.
3. You can build your reputation. If you create good, quality information that’s being passed around, you can quickly be recognized as an expert. And when you have the reputation as being an expert in your field, you sell more products. You “build your brand” faster with viral marketing.
4. You can combine it with other marketing methods. This is a method you absolutely should be using with your email marketing and affiliate programs. Email is still the most effective way of spreading your virus. You can also use it with off-line advertising such as direct mail, classified advertising, or display advertising to drive people online.
5. You can sell products other than your original target product. You may create a viral message to sell one product but find out that your potential customer is interested in another of your products instead.
6. Viral marketing tools are easy to develop. There are easy ways to create e-books even if can’t write (or think you can’t). There are also easy tools to create viral marketing videos. It doesn’t take a big budget or a lot of talent to create a viral marketing virus.
These are the major benefits of viral marketing. When you use it you may find others that are unique to your business.
The concept of viral marketing really isn’t new. Off the Internet it is essentially any form of “word-of-mouth” advertising. It also works similar to “network marketing.” However, just like all things Internet, it can’t have a normal name. Before the Internet who would have imagined naming a company something like Yahoo! or Google? Or how about using words like “spam” other than for an unidentifiable meat product. Regardless of how it sounds, the term viral marketing is the perfect descriptor of this Internet marketing method.
Just exactly how viral marketing on the Internet started could be somewhat of a debate. Where it became the most effective moneymaker is probably not so debatable.
Likely the first effective use of viral marketing was with the free e-mail service Hotmail, which is now owned by Microsoft. Hotmail was started by two guys named Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, who were upset that they couldn’t use their employer’s email system to send email to their friends.
After they started the e-mail service, word of the e-mail service spread like wildfire and they had over 22 million subscribers within 24 months. Microsoft later bought Hotmail for around $400 million dollars.
Why did the news of Hotmail spread so fast? Simply because they gave away free e-mail addresses and services and at the bottom of every email sent was a tag that said: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”.
Everyone who opened an email saw it. And when they passed on the email to their friends or associates they saw it too. So a single email could multiply and spread just like a virus. It turned into a “Viral Marketing Pyramid.”
When your viral message gets passed to someone, they become a “Host” for your virus. Then they become a “sneezer.” When they “sneeze” (send out your message), they spread the virus. For viral marketing sneezing is a good thing. The more people you have spreading your virus the better.
Of course we can’t all hope for the same success as experienced by Hotmail. But you can still be wildly successful even if your marketing message spreads to only a tiny fraction of the number of people Hotmail’s did. To be successful, however, your viral marketing campaign should contain the following elements.
Viral Marketing Example
Let’s looks at an example of how you can put viral marketing into practice. Say you have a sales letter-type web site that is selling a single product (sales letter web sites are the best way to sell a single product).
The web site at www.viral-video.com is a perfect example of using this technique.
1. First you bring targeted traffic to your new web site through pay-per-clicks or other search engine techniques. Or you can send an email to your distribution list if you have one. You can either advertise your site directly in your email or use a graphic display ad at the end of the email similar to the way Yahoo! does it with their free email.
2. Place a link to a webpage on your site that has a video people can view. The video needs to be something related to your product. Perhaps it’s a demo or just something really entertaining that relates to your product.
3. You’ll place a link at the end of the video pointing to a Tell-A-Friend page on your web site. You’ll create the video so at the end of the video a webpage with a Tell-A-Friend script pops up that easily enables people to send the link to the video they just watched to five or more of their friends. After they send the email to their friends then you’ll have the Tell-A-Friend script pop up your home page again.
4. Now when the friends get the email they are taken directly to your video (not your home page). Once they watch the video they can send the web address of the video to their friends. Of course the Tell-A-Friend script sends them to your home page.
5. In case someone doesn’t want to send an email to their friends, you’ll place a button on your Tell-A-Friend script that says “Click to Close This Page.” This button takes them directly to your web site. You could also create a pop-up on exit page that takes them to your web site if they don’t click the “Click to Close This Page” button or send an email to a friend. So regardless they would be taken to your home page.
6. You’ll also set up an affiliate program so others can sell your product for you. You need to set up an affiliate web page that lets your affiliates download your video to place on their web sites. Of course, at the end of the video it redirects the viewer to your web site. You’ll need a way that your affiliate can change the “redirect” web address in the video so it contains their affiliate identification number. Then when the video sends traffic to your home page they get credit for any sales that result. You’ll want to make sure they can’t change the entire address since you want the traffic sent to your site. A product like ViralVideo at www.viral-video.com will enable you to set this up.
Once you implement viral marketing in your business, you’ll wonder how you got along without it. It’s a marketing method that most marketers really don’t understand or use very well yet. You now have a better understanding than most of your competition so you have an edge. With that edge you can propel your business to greater heights than you ever imagined possible.
June 16th, 2009 at 7:07 am
No doubt it is a super feeling to see money coming in from your internet business. That is, as long as the income is greater than your expenses. With PPC advertising campaigns having become in many cases quite expensive, as the cost of keywords are bid up, using low cost viral marketing techniques is an excellent way to efficiently market products. That is if you know how.
You may ask what is viral marketing anyhow? And why can it be so effective?
The term “Viral” is used to describe the use of marketing methods that once underway tend to multiply and spread themselves very quickly; like an infectious virus of the unwanted kind, say the flu.
The most common technique used by viral marketers is to create a product that has great perceived value and then give it away for free or at very low cost. Those who receive the product are only too happy to recommend it to their friends and Internet associates, who in turn recommend it to their friends, who pass it along to their friends. On the Internet this process can repeat itself extremely quickly with an ever more powerful effect as the number of folks making recommendations increases rapidity.
Thus the creator of the product only has to make the initial marketing effort and with the right product the product becomes self promoting. The key is that the product value has to be great enough, and the benefit to the referrer great enough, so that folks want to use and pass along information about the product right away.
The referrers recommendation may well be only the use of the product. Nothing else need be said. A good viral product has built in features for promotion.
If you want to really kick up the rate of “infection” with a viral advertising campaign make the product promote itself by the act of the users of the product only going about their normal daily Internet routines, like sending email.
One of the great viral marketing products of all time was Hotmail. The days of Hotmails explosive growth was back in the late 1990s when email was just taking off as a killer application for Internet use. Hotmail promoted itself only by automaticially inserting a link to Hotmail at the end of each email send out by its clients. All the client had to do to promote was to use the product.
As the number of clients grew so did the number of emails sent, each containing a little ad at the end promoting the free Hotmail email service. Hotmail went viral almost immediately and went from zero to a membership in excess of 30,000,000 within two years.
Another viral marketing technique often used to good effect is the use of “refer a friend” forms on website pages. Generally there will be room to refer from five to ten friends on one form. As friends are referred and they in turn refer their friends, and so on, the number of visitors to the website content that is being refered will grow exponentially.
Of course, this technique will fail unless the majority of the referred friends feel that there is value in whatever it is that they are recommending.
Which brings us the the key point about viral marketing. Unless the product is good enought to sell itself the promotion will likely fail.
What type of products meet that test today? Judging from the way video is taking off (Youtube for example) a funny or interesting video has amazing viral marketing qualities. A smart marketer using video can add a link at the end of the presentation and drive high amounts of traffic to his/her website.
Video seems to be the biggest “killer” application to hit the net since email.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Nothing has changed the advertising industry more than the popular usage of the internet. If you start a business now, your marketing methods will be vastly different than if you had started a business 15 years ago. One way you can take advantage of modern technology to promote your business is to use video marketing. There are many ways that you can do so. Most of the time it only takes a cheap camera and a PC, and maybe a little bit of video editing skills. Read on to find out some options, and you can start marketing your company through video.
An introductory video is a great way to give people information about your company. You can create a concise video outlining the key services or products you offer, and why your company is the best one to choose. You can place this video on your site, so that new visitors can simply hit the “play” button and become acquainted with your business. If you decide to do this, you should have at least semi-professional quality, and a dense flow of information so that you don’t deter viewers from watching the entire thing.
One trend in video marketing is the creation of “viral” videos – videos that are so entertaining, bizarre, or funny that people will show their friends. If done correctly, the video will spread like wildfire across the internet, reaching hundreds of thousands of people, without costing you a cent in advertising or hosting costs. In many viral marketing campaigns, the sheer strangeness of the video compels people to spread it, such as game publisher Ubisoft’s “screaming rabbit” videos which reached massive popularity on the internet.
One important lesson in viral marketing is to acknowledge that your company is responsible for the video. Wal-Mart and Sony learned this the hard way – both of them attempted to create seemingly independent viral campaigns, only to have their plot quickly foiled by internet sleuths. So come up with a good, viral idea, and let your company take full responsibility for it. It’s sure to save you a lot of embarrassment.
If you don’t have the resources to make a video on your own, then you could hire a video marketing company to produce one for you. Usually they’ll offer professional quality videos with skilled editors working behind the scenes. You can submit a script or narrative and have it read. If this type of thing is within your budget, then it is highly recommended since your video will be in the hands of people who produce marketing videos for a living.
Technology has given us a wealth of new opportunities, and the businesses that take advantage of this are the ones that will succeed. So if you’ve got a company that you would like to promote on the internet, look into using video marketing. If used properly, you can produce clever videos for your company that will capture the attention of customers, and bring people in from all corners of the internet.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
One of the most vital aspects of this recent marketing concept which every business owner should be aware of is that it’s completely free. With the right idea, intuition and planning; viral marketing on social networking websites can return thousands of client prospects to any business website.
Social networking website, as the name suggests, are networks of people and friends who use the Internet to communicate, socialise and share, all through one website. Common websites of this nature are Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and many others.
These websites can be utilized through viral marketing methods; that is the concept of providing marketing material which propagates itself to many other people by giving an incentive for this to occur. For today’s Internet audience this incentive is usually interesting, entertaining and more commonly, not related to the business involved.
This may sound confusing but it’s the system of these networking websites which allows this technique to become effective. For example if a business finds a video which could become popular. If this video is interesting, entertaining or both, it will entice viewers to pass it onto their friends to share it. By adding your website link or marketing message into that video as a footer, or maybe adding your URL to the video description, your business details are being passed wherever the video is sent. This is what makes viral marketing on social networking websites so powerful for businesses of any size.
One important factor must always be taken into account for successful viral marketing and that’s to not flood the media with your material. Journalists, the media and members of the public will value your contributions much more if every one of them has a sense of strong content and a good angle. Distributing viral releases or PR as much as you can will result in people devaluing your presence if the content isn’t worthwhile.
Some websites such as Myspace also offer profiles which can be used to the same effect. Making a profile for your business allows you to add people all over the world as friends, who can see your profile and therefore any marketing message you choose to present. However an interesting, unique angle is often required to make the most effective use of this method. For example using an interesting, make-believe character as the profile owner or offering another, more attention-grabbing incentive for visiting your website.
Should you get professional assistance with social networking campaigns? That’s the question many businesses will ask. Managing director of SCD Marketing Scott Chapman explains:
“One of the great benefits of viral marketing on social networks and anywhere else is that it’s 100% free and can provide fantastic results. Good marketing agencies do have the Public Relations and marketing knowledge to get the right angle for your material, which will result in the most publicity. Whether a person chooses management for their viral campaigns depends on the situation they are in but if the budget is there then I’d certainly recommend looking into it.”
