November 27th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Why do people often think video when they talk of viral web marketing? Could it be because multimedia has done an excellent job of capitalizing on the viral marketing process? Yes, that could be it, but that simply leaves a world for you to reach using other viral approaches.
Let’s look at several ways of creating excellent viral marketing messages.
* Viral Videos
* Ebooks
* Cartoons
* Jokes
* Text messages
*** Viral Videos ***
Our first stop is to the creation of viral videos. I would imagine most everyone has gotten a link to a cool video in his or her inbox at one time or another. While the video may have taken some work to put together, creation of the multimedia was not the major focus of the creator. Rather getting you to consider that the work was done with enough…
* Emotion
* Charisma
* Uniqueness
* Or what have you
So that you will send the video to your friends and they in turn will watch it is the absolute key of the makes of a viral video marketing project.
*** Ebooks ***
Another excellent way of creating a viral product is through Ebooks. Electronic material is best made viral by creating high quality rich information that your target audience will find valuable enough to give to those who would be within the same focused industry. While it may take some time to put together such writings, once it is done it can be worth its weight in gold especially if you distribute it for free. While it’s true your not going to become wealthy giving away your hard work, it will create brand awareness and you can include income producing links within your free Ebook.
*** Cartoons & Jokes ***
If you haven’t yet received a viral video in your inbox, then surely you’ve seen text or graphical cartoons or jokes. Many people send these to one another just because. Imagine the results available if the picture included your URL in a visible but non-evasive position. Or perhaps your written joke referenced your website within the joke itself. The point here is that without much difficulty you can add a marketing message that everyone everywhere will be more than pleased to send throughout the web.
*** Text messages ***
As technology changes and builds upon itself the methods of distributing viral web marketing will morph accordingly. One of the best examples of this is using text messages through free services like Twitter.com where you are allowed to send text messages to other peoples cell phone devices.
*** Conclusion ***
No matter which process you use for your viral campaigns, be sure to use such processes, as they will help your Internet marketing endeavors in a large variety of ways. The more viral marketing you have on the web the higher the chances of massive traffic being driven to your web creatives.
September 25th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
In the b.i. days (before the internet), the success of a mom and pop store depended, among other things, on the big boys of industry. Once they came to town and set up shop, there was no more mom and pop. They were driven out of business by the sheer volume of the mega companies’ advertising and capital. Not a pretty site.
The internet has gone a long way to reviving the mom and pop industry. It affords many small businesses the opportunity to compete by using simple cost effective techniques repeated on a continuous basis. One of the techniques is viral marketing commonly referred to as word of mouth.
In the old days viral marketing for small business owners had limited appeal. Yes they could be successful in that particular city, town or even region but it’s still nothing compared to the global word of mouth that business owners can tap into right now thanks to the internet. Once you launch your viral marketing campaign, it requires very little follow up on your part and even this has been taken a step further with the emergence of Web 2.0.
Here are some new ways to get the best out of your viral marketing:
1. The Small Report.
There have been some excellent ebooks on the internet chock full of good information but let’s face it: many people are not going to read them due to the length. Enter the small report. Putting together a five to ten page report can be done in no time. The same goes for reading it. We suffer from information overload in this day and age so giving people useful information in smaller quantities makes sense.
Find a hot topic and write several articles on it. Place the articles in a pdf file with your name and contact information branded on the report. Tell readers they are free to distribute your report as long as they do not alter it in any way. Then advertise your report in forums on your website and anywhere else you can think of. People want information fast and utilizing small reports is a good way to give them exactly that. It’s also a good start to making money from your viral campaign.
2. Video
In 2005, Kevin McCarthy one of the pioneers of online marketing predicted that within a year there would be an explosion of online video. Prediction accomplished. The internet is at the dawning of the video revolution. It is becoming easier and easier to make a video and upload it to places like You Tube or Google Video. In fact Google bought You Tube late last year for 1.65 billion dollars. That’s a good indicator of how things are going.
Like the small report, try to keep your video brief and to the point. While people would rather watch than read, you still don’t want to overload them. The point of a using a viral video (like reports) for your business is to give visitors useful information but just enough. In the end you want them to get more information by going to your website
3. Folksonomies
Wikipedia defines folksonomy as “a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links”. In plain english what they are referring to is tagging; a way to not only retrieve information you want but more importantly to share that information with others. Tagging is nothing more than keywords specifically related to bookmarking social sites like Digg, Technorati or Delicious.
As an example let’s say you join Technorati. You then make a video, tag it with the keyword phrase “funny online video” and upload it to your account. Now all individuals within the Technorati community will be able to access your video when they type in that particular keyword. This is very powerful. Tag viral and bookmarking social can put you in front of a large audience immediately.
No matter how new the strategies keep in mind if you want your viral marketing to truly take off then make sure its free. Charging money for your report or video will guarantee you a limited appeal. Free is a powerful psychological trigger for many of us so use it. Also make sure you are providing quality. No one is going to be in a hurry to pass around below average information.
The internet has in many ways leveled the playing field. Just stay alert to any new innovations and be ready to incorporate them into your internet web site marketing strategy. A smart viral marketing campaign can make any small business successful.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Many internet marketing gurus will push the idea of “viral marketing” in order to bring traffic and increased sales to your marketing ventures. Viral marketing is simply a form of marketing that
“facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.” In other words, it is establishing a marketing campaign that simply spreads on its own, and the internet has become the perfect venue for marketing campaigns to spread like a virus.
Every time an email is forwarded something, every time someone sends a YouTube video to a friend, and every friend request that is sent on a social network, individuals are participating in the idea of viral marketing. Because the overall success of a viral marketing campaign is determined by the interest of the recipient, any successful venture is built around the hope that those who find it will pass it on to others. If the recipient, reader, or viewer appeals to what is being said in the email, video, or other form of presentation, there is a strong chance of passing it along to others.
This forum of marketing can progress at an incredibly fast rate. As more people forward the information, the message is distributed to more people who then have the opportunity to pass it along to others as well.
Viral marketing, when implemented correctly, can be an excellent way to facilitate the branding of a name or product. In the internet marketing community, providing a good piece of information in the form of an ebook can spread very quickly and earn credibility for the creator. This idea is increased when resell rights are provided for the given ebook.
The most important ingredient to a success viral marketing campaign is to arouse curiosity and/or humor to a piece of information. Curiosity will cause a reader to dig deeper into a topic and be more receptive to the marketing message. Humor and/entertainment help one to establish a good rapport with the reader and, more importantly, causes others to pass the message onto others.
While the concept of viral marketing is nothing new, the internet opens up new opportunities for people to tap into its power. On the internet information highway, quality pieces of information, funny videos, and any thing popular will spread like wildfire. By creating something of value and distributing it correctly, the internet can work in your favor to make your marketing campaigns absolutely viral.
