Viral Video Marketing

Viral Videos

December 27th, 2009 at 7:23 pm

Benefiting From Viral Traffic

Of all of the different forms of traffic that you can get on your website, viral traffic has the potential of sending you the most amount of people in the shortest period of time. This traffic can come from a number of different locations and through a variety of methods but if it is truly viral in nature, you will be surprised at the explosion of traffic that comes to your website. What exactly is viral traffic and how can you successfully set up a viral traffic campaign in order to send your hit counter spinning?

Viral traffic is basically just website visitors that come from a variety of viral marketing campaigns. These can include anything from online videos to freely downloadable products. The main thing that you need to remember about viral traffic, however, is that it needs to be something that people are willing to pass on to other individuals. You can create the greatest product that is available but if it does not have a viral nature to it then it will do little more than attract some attention on the side.

Have you ever seen some of the videos that have attracted millions of viewers? There are several things that these videos may have in common which include such things as comedy, controversy and creativity. For the most part, however, many of these viral videos were not put up with the intent of attracting this much attention. It happened naturally, as a result of those videos being passed on again and again and the traffic multiplying naturally. The good news is, you can also create the same effect to a video that you make with the intent of producing this kind of traffic. All you really need to do is to create controversy, comedy or creativity that will be enough to encourage others to pass on your work.

If you are on the verge of a viral marketing campaign but just can’t seem to get it rolling to the extent that you want, perhaps you’re not asking hard enough. Many viral campaigns that were started naturally did so simply because people wanted to pass the information on. Perhaps your video or other viral marketing techniques are interesting but they are just not quite interesting enough for people to pass them on naturally. If you ask people to pass them on, however, enough people may take you up on your offer and you could start the ball rolling in that way.

As they say, all good things must eventually come to an end. Your viral marketing campaign will typically have a lifespan and you may notice that the traffic you are receiving will eventually begin to die out to a certain extent. If you continue to put up other campaigns in order to create a viral effect and subsequent traffic to your website, however, you can not only see the traffic coming on a regular basis, you may actually see it grow on a regular basis as well.

December 17th, 2009 at 7:37 pm

A Guide to Internet Viral Marketing

Companies have long desired to create a buzz about themselves and develop ways to spread their message around in a quick and inexpensive way. Enter, Viral marketing. The Internet answer to creating product or company buzz.

Viral marketing is aptly named because when employed successfully promotional content for a company is spread about the Internet like a virus. People hear this term tossed around often on the news, on the Internet and in everyday conversation but many have little to no knowledge of what it actually means. Viral marketing campaigns use existing social networking sites like, You Tube and Myspace to increase their brand awareness. Companies create a discreetly promotional marketing medium such as, a video, a game, a brandable software program, an image or occasionally even a text message and they encourage users to pass it on.

Initially, viral marketing was practiced by free web based e-mail companies. Hotmail was the first company to use a viral marketing campaign. They placed a link at the bottom of all the outgoing messages from their users to encourage the recipients of those e-mails to create their own account. This tactic did not originally have a name, but it was quite effective and many other companies began using similar methods for getting the word out about their business.

There are many keys strategies to creating an effective viral marketing promotion. However, there are six principle elements that any viral marketing promotion should have if it has any chance at success. Companies that wish to succeed in viral marketing must start by creating a product or service they are giving away, such as the aforementioned items. The viral marketing campaign also needs to be easily transferable so that users can easily pass it on. Companies that wish to start a viral marketing campaign must be prepared for that campaign to scale from very small to very large. For instance, if you set up a website that users will ultimately join after the viral marketing campaign that website must be able to handle the traffic created. It is pointless to increase your traffic or user base if you cannot properly serve or accommodate a large volume of people.

A successful viral marketing campaign must also capitalize on common behaviors and desires. People want to be cool, funny, rich and loved. Many successful viral marketing campaigns have been successful as direct result of giving people the perception or ability to achieve one of these things. For instance, if you create a hilarious viral video as a marketing tool people may pass it around, in the hope of being the one who introduced it to others.

Finally, a viral marketing campaign should always take advantage of others’ resources. Many companies accomplish this by affiliating themselves with another company to gain the ability to place a graphic, link or text on that companies website. Not only does this create exposure, but when done properly it saves your resources for other purposes.

October 25th, 2009 at 11:16 am

Catch the Viral Marketing Bug

With advertisers constantly on the lookout for new ways to spread their message, the new social networking phenomena of the late 1990′s became a perfect venue. Viral marketing is a form of advertising that relies on the enthusiasm of the end user to actually pass on the message to others.

Using easily self replicated processes like individualized affiliate squeeze pages and interactive games or flash movies, the viral marketing ad can spread from the original ad to the friends of people who liked the ad or program. It is through this beyond-the-advertisement spread of interest in a product or service that gives it the name “viral”, like a virus spreading a disease.

Viral marketing techniques include researching who among the social networking websites has a high user potential. Then advertisements are formulated to appeal to this particular segment of the population.

It is hoped that with targeted marketing, the message will garner enough interest for the user to pass it on to his friends who might also be interested in it. While sample giveaways can be useful, one must make sure their viral marketing campaign is not in fact viewed as merely a publicity stunt.

There is a dark side to viral marketing that needs to be avoided. “Undercover” or “stealth” marketing involves having someone in the guise of a regular user promote and recommend the product or service to everyone he can.

If this tactic is discovered then the backlash from people feeling they have been unfairly manipulated can have lasting ill effects on future advertisements from the company.

As an added benefit beyond just creating good search engine optimization, the social potential on the Web2.0 makes it easier to target a specific niche and customize more precise and effective ad campaigns.

People are readily affected by sound and pictures so Viral Video Optimization has come into being used with the quantitative marketing algorithms to determine who has the highest Social Networking Potential, ads that entertain as well as inform stand the greatest chance of being passed on to others.

On a smaller scale viral marketing can be used in even simple places like the signature lines in forum posts. Provided you can add helpful information when you post, you will give the appearance of being savvy about the topic at hand and thus make your recommendations seem to be of greater value.

An effective e-mail signature line can also help keep the potential word-of-mouth advertising information passing around the web.

Whichever approach you take to fitting your advertising to a specific market, be careful not to disenfranchise other potential customers. Even though one niche may accept the risqu

September 25th, 2009 at 5:28 pm

The 3 New Strategies for Marketing Viral Success

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.

September 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 am

Is Anyone Immune From The Viral Marketing Bug?

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.

April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am

The ins and outs of viral marketing

Companies have long desired to create a buzz about themselves and develop ways to spread their message around in a quick and inexpensive way. Enter, Viral marketing the Internet answer to creating product or company buzz. Viral marketing is aptly named because when employed successfully promotional content for a company is spread about the Internet like a virus. People hear this term tossed around often on the news, on the Internet and in everyday conversation but many have little to no knowledge of what it actually means.

Viral marketing campaigns use existing social networking sites like, You Tube and Myspace to increase their brand awareness. Companies create a discreetly promotional marketing medium such as, a video, a game, a brandable software program, an image or occasionally even a text message and they encourage users to pass it on.

Initially, viral marketing was practiced by free web based e-mail companies. Hotmail was the first company to use a viral marketing campaign. They placed a link at the bottom of all the outgoing messages from their users to encourage the recipients of those e-mails to create their own account. This tactic did not originally have a name, but it was quite effective and many other companies began using similar methods for getting the word out about their business.

There are many keys strategies to creating an effective viral marketing promotion. However, there are six principle elements that any viral marketing promotion should have if it has any chance at success. Companies that wish to succeed in viral marketing must start by creating a product or service they are giving away, such as the aforementioned items. The viral marketing campaign also needs to be easily transferable so that users can easily pass it on.

Companies that wish to start a viral marketing campaign must be prepared for that campaign to scale from very small to very large. For instances, if you set up a website that users will ultimately join after the viral marketing campaign that website must be able to handle the traffic created. It is pointless to increase your traffic or user base if you cannot properly serve or accommodate a large volume of people.

A successful viral marketing campaign must also capitalize on common behaviors and desires. People want to be cool, funny, rich and loved. Many successful viral marketing campaigns have been successful as direct result of giving people the perception or ability to achieve one of these things. For instance, if you create a hilarious viral video as a marketing tool people may pass it around, in the hope at being the one who introduced it to others.

Finally, a viral marketing campaign should always take advantage of others’ resources. Many companies accomplish this by affiliating themselves with another company to gain the ability to place a graphic, link or text on that companies website. Not only does this create exposure, but when done properly it saves your resources for other purposes.

April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am

Viral Marketing Campaigns Drive Targeted Traffic

Viral marketing is a great way to use the power and nature of the Internet to reach a large number of people quickly and drive a continually growing flood of targeted web traffic to your website. With a successful viral marketing campaign, your website traffic could go from almost nothing to thousands of hits or even hundreds of thousands of hits per day almost overnight.

Viral marketing is a term used for marketing campaigns that grow and spread like a human or computer virus. In a successful viral campaign, people pass the marketing material on socially so that the marketing campaign grows like a snowball rolling down hill.

The basic idea of viral marketing is that you can increase your sales by increasing your targeted website traffic and you can increase your targeted web traffic by giving away or spreading something for free that people will pass on to their friends, family, or business associates like a virus.

Viral campaigns may spread through emails or eBooks that people pass on or through articles or viral videos that people pass on.

Microsoft’s Hotmail service was probably one of the biggest early successes of viral marketing. Free web-based email is common today, but it was a new concept in 1996 when Microsoft first promoted Hotmail by adding a short advertising teaser at the end of its users’ email messages. Who would have ever expected how big the results of this marketing campaign could be?

But as huge as the success of Microsoft’s viral marketing campaign was for Hotmail, it only set the stage for what was to come during the 2004 American presidential campaign. Who can forget JibJab’s flash animation political parody of George Bush and John Kerry singing, “This Land Is Your Land?”

By marrying the concept of flash video on the Web to viral marketing, JibJab took the Internet by storm. According to Internet statistician ComScore Media Metrix, the viral video received over 10.4 million unique hits in July 2004 – more than three times as many visitors as the official campaign websites of the two presidential candidates!

Now you may never experience the phenomenal success that JibJab did with one of your viral marketing campaigns, but the concept is simple and easily implemented. It works on the idea that if people like something or can profit from something, they will pass it on to their friends, family, and associates.

Viral marketing can be as simple as writing an article and having it published in article directories where newsletter publishers and webmasters may pick it up and republish it. Be sure to include an author bio or resource box at the bottom of every article that includes your name, your website link, and a call to action that entices people to click on your link. Webmasters and publishers are always looking for great content, so be sure to provide value.

Alternatively, you could send a funny, informative, or controversial newsletter to your subscriber list. Be sure to encourage people to pass your newsletter on with a short note at the bottom of your newsletter.

When people click through to your website, you would like to capture their email address and get their permission to contact them. Otherwise, they will often surf away, never to be seen again on your website.

Squeeze pages (pages primarily designed to get subscribers) are one proven way to do this, and offering people a free eBook or free report is a great way to get people to subscribe to your newsletter.

Want to kick your viral marketing campaign into even higher gear? Grant people the rights to give away the free eBook or report to their own customers or contacts. Be sure to brand the eBook or report with links to your website, so that anyone who receives it from others will find their way back to your website. Also, if you let your customers rebrand some of the links with their affiliate links or other links, they will really be motivated to pass the eBook or report on!

The Internet is perfect for viral marketing. This is one of the most powerful marketing techniques you can use on the Internet. Because many distribution channels are free (e.g., email and article directories) or relatively low cost (web hosting), viral marketing can be an incredibly cost-effective marketing technique. Once you have launched your marketing campaign, it can potentially grow and spread for years all by itself, making viral marketing possibly the most effective Internet marketing technique of all.

April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am

Viral Marketing On The Internet

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.

April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am

The Many Methods of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing used to rely heavily on email but it has grown substantially in recent years to take in many other forms and strategies. A successful viral marketing campaign can be created in many different ways including:

Email
The most traditional and simple method of viral marketing was email and it is still a
viable method today. There can be restrictions on email and spam filters can sometimes get the better of you, but the results can still be outstanding often resulting in viral emails being sent all over the world with little being done by you.

Newsletters
Newsletters build upon email viral marketing but they allow you to provide even more information to prospective customers. Newsletter are generally sent to an audience interested in a particular topic, the information you send will be based on that topic therefore capturing their attention A fantastic newsletter can also assist with website traffic.

Blogging
Possibly the most powerful of all methods in recent years, blogging allows website visitors to interact with your site and you can also interact with other bloggers so cross promoting is easy and effective. Blogging also allows easy customer feedback through comments, leading to increased word of mouth sales.

Chat Rooms
Having a chat room on your site means customers can chat to each other and hopefully recommend your products. You can also conduct tele-seminars which can attract prospective buyers. Cat rooms are a great way to build up a relationship with our customers and something they can tell their friends about and spred the word about your site.

Tell-a-friend Scripts
As long as you include a privacy policy, tell-a-friend scripts are a powerful way for people to quickly and easily pass on information to their friends as a recommendation for your products or services.

Video clips
Posting videos on sites like YouTube or even on your own site can get the viral machine pumping. People love video as they can digest information easier. If you create a good video, it is likely that people will pass this on to others interested in the same topic.

Flash games
Flash games get passed around through email and if you can include a small unobtrusive message in the game about your site, you can literally get thousands of visitors. You can also submit flash games to big game sites or social sites like Facebook where they can be accessed by millions of people.

Viral marketing has so many possible methods and implementations that it is impossible to ever run out of ideas. By combining several methods together, your word of mouth marketing campaign is sure to bring results.

April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am

And the Buzz Goes On – How to Use Viral Marketing

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 hate – 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.