More and more businesses are adopting some basic viral marketing principals to gain their fair share in the market.
The Hotmail business model approach is a classic example of viral marketing.
This is how they accomplished it.
Hotmail’s marketing approach, was to just give away free web based email addresses, along with some of their other services.
Every message sent using a free Hotmail email address, was suffixed with a simple advertisement that reads: ‘ Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.’
Following some basic viral marketing principals; the Hotmail subscribers used their service to send messages to their friends and associates, tagged with the advertisement and HTML link at the bottom of the message.
When their subscriber’s friends and associates read the message; they usually clicked on the Hotmail link at the bottom of the message and often subscribed to their service.
A continuous cycle is set up where the new subscribers to Hotmail, send messages to their associates, who in turn also sign up to Hotmail, and send messages to their friends and associates, who also sign up, and on it goes.
This is how one message has the potential to translate into thousands or millions of subscribers in a relatively short time, with little to no effort.
Here are some basic viral marketing principals to follow.
- The most basic principle of viral marketing is to give away products or services.
Everyone wants something for free, even if they don’t need it. Just using the word FREE, generates interest in even the most casual listener.
Selling cheap or inexpensive products also works, but giving away something for FREE will give you much faster results. Giving away products for free, requires some patience before you actually see the results of your efforts but over time, it will generate income.
- The transfer medium used to carry your marketing message to others must be easy to use.
The ease of communication the Internet provides is the reason viral marketing is so successful. Using websites, emails, and software downloads are a few examples of how you can easily communicate your viral marketing message.
Use Hotmail’s viral marketing example and use short, straight to the point messages, that are easy to remember, copy, and transmit to your audience.
- One of the basic viral marketing principals that is often overlooked, is to be prepared for phenomenal growth.
The viral marketing model creates rapid growth; and in the case of generating web traffic to your website, make sure your server is capable of handling an immediate surge in traffic.
If you take this for granted, you could lose potential customers to your website. Visitors will leave your website if it takes a long time to load and if your host server crashes, they will never even get to visit your website.
- Viral marketing strategies that exploit the motivation and behaviors of people for their transmission, usually work the best.
People love to be popular. This motivates them to communicate with more and more other people. When you exploit this behavior by including your viral message in people’s communications, your message is spread farther and faster.
- Exploiting existing networks in viral marketing, will yield you much better results.
An average person has between 7 to 14 members in their network of friends, family, and associates. People using the Internet create an even larger network of friends, family or associates.
When you learn how to exploit all of these networks; your viral marketing will explode!
- Viral marketing doesn’t have to consume all your resources.
Use other websites or blogs to get your articles posted for free. Use hosted sites like Ezine articles, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Blogger or WordPress, along with social sites like Twitter or Facebook to creatively transmit your viral marketing message.
When you adopt some basic viral marketing principals and apply them to your business and your products, you will see exactly how powerful viral marketing can be for yourself.
Facebook marketing is one of the best ways to begin marketing on the Internet, especially if you are new to online marketing.
For most people, Internet marketing is totally foreign from the conventional marketing practices used in the real world. However, because Internet marketing is essential to growing your business and getting more clients, it is important to learn how to do it effectively.
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites on the Internet, and for Internet marketers, it is loaded with features that can be used to market your business products or services. You might want to consider Facebook marketing to promote your products and business website, if you are new to the Internet marketing world.
Facebook marketing is all aobut communication, and Facebook has all the communication tools you will ever need to market your products or services.
Facebook has a feature they call Facebook Ads, where you can officially market or advertise your brand,your business, your product, and your website or blog.
One advantage of Facebook marketing, is a great marketing tool at Facebook Ads, called the Advanced Targeting feature.
This feature allows you to target your niche market by their interests, location, age, gender, etc. It gives you the ability to target and quickly locate people that are interested in purchasing your products or services.
The Trusted Referral feature in Facebook Ads, allows you to attach friend to friend interactions to your ads about your business. Facebook marketing is all about word of mouth. People will generally buy a product more readily, when the product is referred to them by someone they know. This is the beauty of Facebook marketing.
It’s easy to start with Facebook Ads. First you paste in the URL of your website and then choose your audience.
Pick which age group, location, education level, political affiliation, and relationship category that you want, and include some keywords targeted to what normally shows up on interests.
Next, you create the title and body of your advertising content. It’s a good idea to use keywords front loaded in your title and content. Insert a picture if you want to finish off your advertisement.
The last thing you need to do, is set up your advertising budget and you’re ready to promote.
These Facebook marketing tips will enable you to grow your business and get your moneys worth from advertising in Facebook Ads.
DO FOLLOW Social Bookmarking sites can generate thousands of visitors to your website when you know how to properly use them.
The key to really explode the number of visitors coming in to your website, is to use DO FOLLOW social bookmarking sites.
Before we go there, let me explain a little bit about social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to organize, store, search for, and manage their web page bookmarks on the Internet, instead of in their web browsers.
With the help of tags and keywords, also known as metadata, the user’s bookmarks are stored on social bookmarking sites, where they are indexed and ranked according to their importance, by other users of the site.
Many social bookmarking sites now provide bookmark lists, or web feeds that are organized by tags, for their users that allow other visitors to the site, to find new bookmarks as they are posted in real time.
Because the search engines quickly index social bookmarking sites, social bookmarking is a great way to get your keywords to the top of the search engine results page FAST!
There are two types of Social bookmarking sites that will generate traffic to your website. Most use the NO FOLLOW tag; which links back to your website, but stops the search engines from indexing the rest of your site after your bookmarked article is reached.
The search engines don’t particularly care for NO FOLLOW tags, because they prevent the full indexing of your website and limit the amount of content they can gather. The NO FOLLOW tag also affects the amount of traffic that social bookmarking sites can generate to your site.
DO FOLLOW social bookmarking sites, encourage the search engines to index the rest of the content on your website, after they reach it. All DO FOLLOW social bookmarking sites are loved by the search engines for their additional content.
You should love them because all of the content in your website is being indexed in the search engines.
Below is a select group of DO FOLLOW social bookmarking sites you should consider using to funnel more visitors to your website. They are listed in no special order except for Google Page Rank.
Yattle – PR2
ez4u – PR3
MyPIP – PR3
SyncOne – PR3
A1 Webmarks – PR4
Bookmark Tracker – PR4
Connectedy – PR4
Diigo – PR4
OYAX – PR4
MyVmarks – PR4
TeDigo – PR4
Buddy Marks – PR5
Jumptags – PR5
MyJeeves / Ask – PR5
MyLinkVault – PR5
Xilnus – PR5
Bibsonomy – PR6
LinkaGoGo – PR6
Mister-Wong – PR6
Raw Sugar – PR6
Spurl – PR6
Backflip – PR7
Furl – PR8
You get high page rank links from DO FOLLOW social bookmarking sites and back links to your site, by simply bookmarking your article content.
Don’t forget to bookmark other sites along with yours, so you don’t get yourself into any hot water with the social bookmarking sites.
Social Bookmarking can generate thousands of visitors to your website daily, so why not start using the DO FOLLOW Social Bookmarking sites today?
