What? The term viral marketing sounds a bit ominous?
You don’t want your blog to catch a cold?
While you might be able to catch a bad flu bug, viral marketing for your blog is a very good thing.
What viral marketing means is getting other people to help market your blog for you. If you provide your blog evangelists with the right idea, it will spread all over the internet, faster than the common cold.
It's letting good old fashioned word of mouth advertising share the good news about your blog with others.
Because interesting and fun ideas enjoy a high probability of being sent from one person to another, you should catch the viral marketing fever. The great thing is along with the low cost, which may in fact be zero cost, is the fact that other people are sharing your marketing workload.
You are, in fact, utilizing other peoples’ internet resources, including their websites, blogs, and e-mails, to do your marketing for you.
By creating reader evangelists for your blog, you are having the word spread on your blog's behalf.
Talk about word of mouth advertising. (All puns intended, of course.)
What is viral marketing anyway?
Viral marketing seeks to spread the message of your website or product, from person to person, in the same way as cold or flu virus. One person catches the viral marketing concept, and then passes it along to one or many other people. In fact, viral marketing messages have been known to spread around the entire world, in less than a day.
Many companies, both large and small, have used viral marketing, which is simply good old fashioned word of mouth, in many new and creative ways.
Perhaps the single most famous case of viral marketing is that of Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail system. By simply placing a link, at the bottom of the Hotmail based e-mail, many people signed up for the free service.
Since e-mail is such a ubiquitous use of the internet, the idea literally flew around the world. As a viral marketing campaign, Hotmail was a tremendous success.
Bloggers, as usual, are also on the cutting edge of viral marketing campaigns. By means of highly mimicked ideas, referred to as “memes”, bloggers are able to use viral marketing techniques to enlarge their readership.
People will happily relay your marketing message for you, if you satisfy their basic human needs. Those personal motivations may include being popular, being part of the in group, or simply wanting to get things that are offered free of charge. A strong viral marketing tool will tap into those human emotions.
How do I start my own viral marketing program?
To start your own viral marketing campaign, you need to reach out to your readers. You must provide them with an idea they will want to share with everyone they know. That desire on their part, to spread the word even without asking them, is at the heart of viral marketing.
Viral marketing is based on word of mouth. To achieve that favorable and much sought after free advertising, it is essential to provide a reason for it. Give them a good reason to send your word to their personal networks.
The viral message must be simple and have widespread appeal. It must also be easy to send, to many other potential viral senders, without complicated instructions. If it is too hard to forward, it will stall out on you.
Other ways to utilize a viral market campaign
If you write internet articles, for other websites or e-mail newsletters, offering the free reprint rights to everyone will help spread the word.
Freely available articles with a link back to your website, may be picked up by hundreds of websites, and will result in an enormous increase in visitor traffic. People who read the article will often refer it to their friends, either by forwarding the newsletter or recommending the website.
Bloggers are heavy users of viral marketing devices. In blog terminology, they are called “memes”. Usually appearing in the form of online quizzes and questionnaires, the blog memes spread rapidly from blog to blog. Because of the powerful and generous linking practices of bloggers, the viral marketing tools send traffic back to the referring blog.
Most people have a close network of ten to twelve people, to whom they regularly forward website URLs, and e-mails. Many other people have much larger personal networks than that, of course.
Those powerful numbers can cause your viral campaign to multiply exponentially; and in a hurry. The use of other peoples’ internet resources, along with your own website, blog, blog comments, blog trackbacks, and e-mail, can create an explosion of visitor traffic.
Beginning a viral marketing program, by offering a free item or service may not pay off immediately. In viral marketing, which is what offline marketers might consider word of mouth or online marketers call creating a buzz, a longer term view is the best position to take.
The idea is to develop a relationship with your viral marketers so they become your volunteer marketing force. That relationship won’t happen overnight, but will have powerful long term benefits, for everyone involved.
Catch the viral marketing bug today.
And then spread it around everywhere!
