January 25th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Video marketing stands virtually alone as being one of the more popular of recent marketing trends. Yet, to many, there is little science behind the act. Some webmasters create a video ad or viral video feed, submit it to a few video submission sites, and then hope it proves popular enough to go viral. However, as with any form of guerrilla marketing, the greatest results will undoubtedly be offered to those willing to put in some serious time and energy in ensuring that the video gets good exposure and from the right channels.
Seeding
When we look at viral marketing, we need to concentrate more on creating an effective seeding campaign. Seeding is the first step a viral marketer takes. Planting the seed well means that others will propagate that seed for you. They will pass on your message by word of mouth and through links, tags, and bookmarks. When this happens your marketing has officially gone viral.
Planting The Right Seed In The Right Soil
Planting a positive seed within the right community and geared heavily towards your target market can help you to achieve your viral marketing goals. Again, though, this typically needs to be more in-depth than picking a video sharing site and just submitting the video ad. Using multiple networks, including the like of YouTube as well as smaller networks, is vital to help ensure that you get the right blend of propagators and viewers. It also enables you to track results and determine the best networks for your marketing needs.
Organic Seeding
Organic seeding is the natural process of others promoting your viral video for you. While it is free to publish a video to the main feed sites, it will take creativity, knowledge, and energy to get the best results. Paid seeding possibilities also exist and complementing or kick starting an organic campaign with some paid seeding is not an inherently bad thing.
Integration With Paid Placement
Initially, your video ad is unlikely to attract the kind of audience that it needs. There’s simply too much competition and way too many variables that dictate the effectiveness of a video marketing campaign. As such, it is often the most prudent approach to use paid seeding in order to give your video that initial push.
Considering The Alternatives
Paid placement videos get the most prominent positions on most networks and while the more popular, better established of the networks demand large amounts for a good placement, this isn’t necessarily the case with the smaller networks. Find several that fit your needs and enquire about prices to determine the best ones.
The Effectiveness Of Video Advertising
Surfers have evolved and, on the whole, are looking for less static and more dynamic content. As such, video has become a major draw for a lot of people that regularly use the Internet. While we have become blind to static and animated banner advertisements, it is widely contested that this isn’t yet the case with video banners. They are hard to ignore and the better ones can generate exceptional results for any website.
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.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Viral Video Marketing is all about creating videos that induce people to pass them on to others or encourage them to tell others about the video or videos, and is the next phenomenon in internet marketing.
Viral video marketing is a marketing event that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a video marketing message voluntarily.
It is dependent on the word-of-mouth creation system, which lets other people cut through the information, sort it, process it, and then pass on the benefit of their experience.
Viral video marketing is a science because there are ways to scientifically increase your chances of making your video go viral. Viral video marketing is the process of getting instant and immediate popularity and is a super way to build your online brand visibility.
It is often used as a way to promote a site because it’s fairly simple to accomplish when compared to other methods such as direct mail, pay per click ads, or search engine marketing.
The goal of the home based business person is to create viral marketing videos that spread over the web like a virus and create massive amounts of traffic to your website. This is why it’s sometimes compared to a virus.
Viral Video Marketing is a great way to put your face with your product and is a great strategy to get the word out about your product or service. It is the next stage in interactive word of mouth advertising and has the potential to drive a massive amount of targeted traffic to your website.
Viral video marketing is a growing trend in the online marketing industry and is less expensive than the traditional media. The most complicated part of viral video marketing is the creation of the video itself.
Once the viral video is finished and ready to be launched it should be placed on several websites which specialize in online video marketing.
Viral Video Marketing is changing the way we do business because with nearly 70% of home Internet users now surfing using a broadband connection online video viewing has exploded.
There are several factors which determine the success of your viral video with two of the most important being your distribution or placement of the finished product and having an innovative idea for your video to become viral in the first place. Without the innovative idea, of course, distribution becomes a moot point.
Your video can be combined with several other Social Media Marketing techniques to help it go Viral. For example you can share your video on Facebook with your entire list. You can also embed the video on MySpace in the comments section of different pages.
Email the video to your friends to make sure as many people as possible know about it. You can also promote the video on your Blog and perhaps create a build up to it in terms of being a coming attraction.
These techniques in addition to having a unique idea for the video to help it along its viral path and having it distributed by a website specializing in online video marketing should help establish it as Viral in no time at all.
Video Marketing is a relatively unexplored form of Internet Marketing that can be used to rank in the top 10 results for almost any term. Now, video marketing is a driving force within the Social Media online marketing industry.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
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
With mass communication being achievable with just the click of a mouse, the internet has become the world’s biggest marketplace. That is why most advertisers believe that viral marketing is the most effective way to get customers to buy your product. As Tom Kinnear, executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan tells Forbes.com, “It [viral marketing] can be referred to as word-of-mouth on steroids.”
The movie “Snakes on a Plane’ is a good example. While the film didn’t do so hot at the box office it got a huge amount of buzz when people started writing songs and creating videos based on the title. When the media picked up on it, word of mouth for Snakes on a Plane took off like wildfire. This required no effort from the filmmakers after their initial advertising push. That’s the essence of good viral marketing.
You may not have a movie studio or Samuel L. Jackson to help you out but there are ways you can adapt viral marketing to your internet business.
The Fun Page
If you are a serious marketer, and you don’t have enough funding for a major advertisement, this is one of the best techniques that you can use. Make a page on your site with funny or interesting videos or images, or even create a mini-game that is focused on your product. Be sure to include a ‘tell a friend’ link to ensure that your ‘fun page’ gets circulated. Creativity is the key. If your ‘fun’ page is cool enough, you can be sure that you’ll get more hits for to your website.
Kind of Weird
Remember the Subservient Chicken? Burger King created a webpage that contained a ‘video camera’ with a command line below it. On the site, you just typed what you wanted the subservient chicken to do, and voila, the chicken did it. People were born curious. If you have some idea in your head, do it. The Subservient Chicken became so popular that people forwarded the links to their friends, and all Burger King had to do was to maintain the website. The downside is this strategy might create ‘bad’ publicity but as the old saying goes, bad publicity is still publicity.
Email Forward
Create a message with funny pictures or a video, and then send it to your friends or list of subscribers. If it is funny enough, you can be sure that this little message will reach a lot of people. Remember that the images or video should contain at least a brand logo or a website address. The best thing that you can do here is to include your ‘name’ on the video itself, like for example a guy wearing a t-shirt with your brand name on it, or a bunch of funny pictures dealing with your products. Most forwarded e-mails are viral marketing strategies. In this technique, you can always be sure that your e-mails are going to be opened, because they came from the friends of the e-mail owner.
Free is Good
Most people search the internet with ‘free’ as one of their keywords. Free stuff can boost your website’s popularity. There are a lot of items out there that you can give out for free. Creating a downloadable Flash game is one of the most used today. But of course, you should make it interesting, and make the people think that without this free stuff on their desktop, they’re missing out a lot.
Viral marketing may not answer all of your promotional needs, but it will surely help you in creating a buzz. It’s cheap, easy and very effective. What viral marketing does so brilliantly is fuel our irresistible urge to tell somebody about a good experience. It’s hard to find any advertising better than that.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
With mass communication being achievable with just the click of a mouse, the internet has become the worldwide marketplace. That is why most advertisers believe that viral marketing is the most effective way to get customers to buy your product. As Tom Kinnear, executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan tells Forbes.com, “It [viral marketing] can be referred to as word-of-mouth on steroids.”
The movie Snakes on a Plane is a good example. While the film did not do so hot at the box office it got a huge amount of buzz when people started writing songs and creating videos based on the title. When the media picked up on it, word of mouth for Snakes on a Plane took off like wildfire. This required no effort from the filmmakers after their initial advertising push. That is the essence of good viral marketing.
You may not have a movie studio or Samuel L. Jackson to help you out but there are ways you can adapt viral marketing to your internet business.
The Fun Page
If you are a serious marketer, and you do not have enough funding for a major advertisement, this is one of the best techniques that you can use. Make a page on your site with funny or interesting videos or images, or even create a mini game that is focused on your product. Be sure to include a tell a friend link to ensure that your fun page gets circulated. Creativity is the key. If your fun page is cool enough, you can be sure that you will get more hits for to your website.
Kind of Weird
Remember the Subservient Chicken? Burger King created a webpage that contained a video camera with a command line below it. On the site, you just typed what you wanted the subservient chicken to do, and voila, the chicken did it. People were born curious. If you have some idea in your head, do it. The Subservient Chicken became so popular that people forwarded the links to their friends, and all Burger King had to do was to maintain the website. The downside is this strategy might create bad publicity but as the old saying goes, bad publicity is still publicity.
Email Forward
Create a message with funny pictures or a video, and then send it to your friends or list of subscribers. If it is funny enough, you can be sure that this little message will reach a lot of people. Remember that the images or video should contain at least a brand logo or a website address. The best thing that you can do here is to include your name on the video itself, like for example a guy wearing a t-shirt with your brand name on it, or a bunch of funny pictures dealing with your products. Most forwarded e-mails are viral marketing strategies. In this technique, you can always be sure that your e-mails are going to be opened, because they came from the friends of the e-mail owner.
Free is Good
Most people search the internet with free as one of their keywords. Free stuff can boost the popularity of your website. There are a lot of items out there that you can give out for free. Creating a downloadable Flash game is one of the most used today. But of course, you should make it interesting, and make the people think that without this free stuff on their desktop, they’re missing out a lot.
Viral marketing may not answer all of your promotional needs, but it will surely help you in creating a buzz. It is cheap, easy and very effective. What viral marketing does so brilliantly is fuel our irresistible urge to tell somebody about a good experience. It is hard to find any advertising better than that.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
The one virtue that helps sites overcome the competition online is creativity. With so many competing, you must employ every method of marketing you can to stay ahead.
Do you have a killer product? A really cool website? If people don’t know you are there, none of it matters and you won’t make a dime. Worst of all, your business could die a slow, anonymous death.
There are a lot of methods used by e-commerce sites to advertise and drive traffic. Some of them will really give you a boost in the rankings. One of these methods is Viral Marketing.
While we normally think of the term ‘viral’ with ‘virus’ a term that all computer owners dread Viral Marketing isn’t what it may appear. You’re not using a virus to market your business; in reality, this is just a way to utilize the best aspects of word of mouth advertising. It is much more effective than pop up ads and spyware.
Viral Marketing Overview
Viral Marketing is also known as Viral Advertising. This is a technique of marketing that is very effective in building awareness for a company. By using media to reach out to the public, Viral Marketing uses entertaining or informational media to promote the product without directly using it. These media are forwarded from person to person, who then enjoy the entertainment, and have exposure to your website link and product line.
Briefly, the concept is that if people like the media content, they will continue to keep passing it on to friends and family. The company (you) sponsor a specific media like a funny video, a cool game or an amusing story. It is passed around along with your company logo or brand which may contain product descriptions or other material to promote your company or product.
This is a pretty low cost method of advertising that is extremely effective. It avoids being logged as spam mail because each email is sent individually by a friend of the person who receives it. The person who receives it won’t block the email address of someone they know.
Some companies offer discounts, rebates and other incentives to help spread their viral marketing. Companies track the number of recipients that get the viral marketing from a single person to determine the incentive they earn.
Using Viral Marketing to your advantage
The big advantage to viral marketing is you get a lot of publicity and public awareness for your business. Your traffic will increase with potential customers. All it takes is a little creativity and maybe a few incentives to reach out to a large number of people in a very personal manner and introduce them to your existence.
Many sites are catching on to the effectiveness of viral marketing and advertising. Use it to keep your business healthy and growing. Along with search engine optimization and other methods, viral marketing can easily put you in the lead when it comes to rankings.
Some say viral marketing is a bit sneaky. Maybe. But it is nevertheless effective. People come across your media entertainment and pass them along to a friend, who passes it to another friend, and so on. This is a low cost method of advertising that can keep your bottom line healthy and happy. All it takes is a good idea, a gripping video or a fun game. Make a buzz about it create gossip it is an effective way to market movies. Remember “The Blair Witch Project”? Use the same method for your company.
Several large companies have successfully used viral marketing. An example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first big company to use this marketing method and it worked wonderfully for them.
Let viral marketing work its magic for you. Act now and see where this unique method of marketing takes you and your sales.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
This article will give you eight hot ideas for your new viral marketing campaign. Viral marketing, or word of mouth marketing, is the most inexpensive form yet potentially the most powerful form of marketing you can use.
Rebrand a Viral eBook
You can buy ebooks which include rebrand rights that allow you to pass on the book for free with your name as the author. This is a great way to get autoresponder sign ups and a nice way for people to spread your book around the internet.It is a simple process that can be done over and over again.
Set up a Forum
A popular forum will get great search engine rankings and will attract many people in your niche to ask questions, comment and review products. Forums are a powerful viral marketing medium.
Use Facebook
Facebook has grown into a mega social network with over 70 million users. If you can tap into just a tiny percentage of these users then you have hit a
goldmine. Methods of marketing on Facebook include creating free applications, games and creating Groups with information about your website.
Create Templates
Creating free website and blog templates with your website link in the footer is an easy way to virally market your site. Most people will leave the footer intact, instantly giving you backlinks and ecognition.
Create a Video
Posting a video to YouTube can bring in millions of viewers and visitors. You can post some subtle marketing messages, some tutorials or any other
content you believe your readers would be interested in. Make sure you include a link to your site in the video.
Write an eBook
Writing your own ebook (or paying someone to write it) is an instant way to gain credibility. You can give it away for free, thus creating a completely
viral stream as more and more people pass the book on to friends. You can include some one time offers of upsells in the free ebook.
Write some Articles
You can write articles and give them to webmasters within your niche to publish on their sites. As long as you have a link back to your site, you’ll always receive credit for the articles.
Use Social Bookmarking Sites
Sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Technorati, Twitter, Myspace and others give you the chance to create a brand, give away free ebooks and generally provide people with a way to talk about your site. This is powerful word of mouth marketing.
These eight viral marketing ideas can help your website take off in no time.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Arguably, the best way for you to market your business is to have someone else do it for you for free, over and over and over again!
To many marketers this may sound like just a ‘dream’ but it happens everyday via ‘word of mouth marketing.’ You know the kind I’m taking about. That’s when you’re chatting with a friend and they start to tell you all about this new ‘gizmo’ that they are using and how much they like it.
And because they like it so much they personally recommend you buy it too. In fact, they may even encourage you by telling you “you have to get it!”
This of course is every marketers dream because the referral comes with a built-in testimonial (product endorsement) from one personal friend to another and it doesn’t cost you a dime!
Often times, friends have a powerful influence over how we act, and even what we buy. Just think of how many things you have bought in the past simply because a friend recommended it. Have you ever gone to see a movie at the recommendation of a friend? How about that restaurant they recommended?
We are naturally more inclined to do something if a friend tells us to because we know, like and trust their opinion. This is the power of word of mouth marketing.
Understanding this, the trick then becomes figuring out how to get one friend to virally pass your message along to their friends, who pass it along to their friends, and so on.
But before we discuss how to do this, first let’s take a look at what I like to call the ‘Goo-Tube’ phenomena.
Chances are, by now, you have heard about Google Video and Youtube. Well there is good reason for that. You see, Youtube.com is the 8th most visited site on the net today while Google is the 3rd.
This is good to know because both of these websites offer free video sharing services allowing you to tap into their massively trafficked sites virally!
If you have been on the net for a few years you’ll remember how expensive it can be to host large files such as audio and video on your server. Even if your site got just a small amount of traffic to it that watched your video or listened to your audios you could expect a hefty bill in the mail from your web hosting company for “exceeding bandwidth”. I don’t know about you but the term ‘bandwidth’ quickly became a bad word in my office.
But like always, especially on the Internet, times are quickly changing. When it comes to hosting video on or web sites, we no longer have to be concerned about that awful thing called bandwidth. Nope, no more.
Both Google Video and Youtube have graciously provided a central location for people like you and I to upload and host our videos for free for other people to view and PASS ALONG!
That’s right — pass along. Ah, I love those words. Why? Because they equate to free, word-of-mouth marketing!
Do not underestimate the power behind this marketing strategy. Google certainly didn’t. In fact, in November 2006, Google bought Youtube (TIME magazine’s 2006 Invention of the Year) for 1.65 Billion in Google Stock!
Presently, both Google Video and Youtube.com remain separate web properties. But who knows what the future will bring. Only time will tell if the two get married and give birth to a big beautiful baby named “Goo-tube”!
As marketers though, what this all really means is a huge opportunity to tap into these incredible resources and drive targeted traffic to your website for free!
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Viral marketing is a technique that uses social networking to spread the word about their brand. There are several ways viral marketing works, often times companies send out an interactive game, text messages or video clips and hope that these are passed along.
How many times have you gotten a forwarded email with a long chain of recipients with a funny video in it? I’m sure you get several a day. With online social networks it’s becoming easier for the newcomer, myspace.com, youtube.com are just a couple of networks that get millions of hits each day and there’s no shortage of users.
I recall a phone call I got a couple of months ago, it was coming from a friend, but when I picked up, it was a marketing message for a book, it was entertaining informed me of where to go online if I also (like my friend) wanted to surprise other friends with the same phone call. I of course wanted all my friends to hear it, so I’m sure word spread fast about the book that is now released.
One of the most interesting viral marketing campaigns was for a Portuguese Football club. While at their website a user was required to put provide their name and phone number, which then took you to a video of the coach in the locker room, he makes a call (to you) while on video and lets you know that they can’t start the season until you bought a season ticket. The synchronization of this campaign had roughly 200,000 phone calls going out in a 24 hour period.
Even in the age of the internet, people will always talk and tell others about something, so don’t underestimate the power of word-of-mouth advertising.
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