How to profit from viral marketing

In today’s Marketing Monday, I take a look at viral marketing. It's a marketing method that is often distorted as to what it is, what it can do, and why it is important. Some things to consider as an affiliate marketer or any marketer for that matter. And cover how you can profit from viral marketing the easy way. It sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? I mean “viral”, not marketing of course. Just the mention of viral and images of infection, illness and disease pop-up. Or for those who are geeks among us, it conjures up electronic devices that are infected. However, even though viral marketing sounds like a disease, it is not negative or unpleasant, viral marketing is actually good!

What is Viral Marketing?

As the viral name suggests, it’s a way of spreading your marketing message from one person to another, very similar to how a flu virus is passed on. You start by infecting, say a half dozen of your friends, colleagues, and family members with your message, who in turn each pass on the “germ” to 6 more people (6×6=36), who then continue to spread it to another 6 (36×6=216) and so on until after just 8 rounds, will reach a staggering figure of 10,077,696 exposures. One of the first Internet businesses to become extremely successful utilizing the viral marketing technique was Hotmail. The strategy was simple:

1. Give away free e-mail accounts and services.
2. Insert a simple tagline “Get your free email at Hotmail” with a link at the bottom of every email sent out by each user.
3. Whenever those people sent email to their network of friends and associates, they saw the message.
4. Then would sign up for their own free email service at Hotmail.
5. In turn, this propelled the message out to a still a wider crowd of ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

With this viral method, Hotmail was able to sign-up a whopping 12 million users within 18 months!

What makes it ‘Viral’?

A viral marketing campaign usually has some or all of the following basic elements:

1. Offer a product or (trial) service for free
2. The message has an easy transfer path to others
3. Opportunity to easy grow from a small number to very large quickly
4. Employ common motivation and human behavior techniques
5. Use existing communication networks
6. Utilize the resources of others

Let’s take a look at each of these elements in order. Offer a product or (trial) service for free “Free” is one of the two most persuasive words in marketing. An effective viral marketing campaign will give away a product or service to grab peoples attention. Free email service, free software, free report, etc. Once you get their attention, and you have gained their trust, you can then sell them something. If you hit them with a sales pitch first, chances are they won’t be interested and will be never heard from again. Message has an easy transfer path to others The reason viral marketing works so well on the Internet is because rapid communication is so easy and cheap. You have opportunities on all kinds of online media including social networks, forums, contests, etc. it is almost endless! Just make sure that your marketing message is simple and memorable so that it can easily be passed on without loosing its effectiveness. The simpler and shorter it is, the better! Remember the Hotmail example: “Get your free email at Hotmail” with a link Opportunity to easy grow from a small number to very large quickly To grow fast, the necessary components must be available. The best viral marketing strategy makes maximum use of the resources of others. The only drawback in the Hotmail example, is the service required its own mail servers. It was not a problem for Hotmail with the resources of Microsoft behind them. But for small business marketers like you and I, it’s best to plan on spreading the message using the available resources of others (see # 6). Employ common motivation and human behavior techniques What motivates people to use certain products or services online and then excited enough to recommend these to their family and friends? The value of a product is important, but it’s more than that – it is the desire to be popular, to be the first to know, to be cool, and so on. Greed is also a strong motivator, hence the power of the word “free”! Use existing communication networks Most people usually have around 5 to 12 people in their close circle of friends, family and co-workers. When it comes to the Internet, just about everyone has email addresses in their contacts list, and favorite websites bookmarked in their web browser. Take advantage of this fact in your viral marketing campaign. For example, when you give away a valuable free product, in exchange for their email, ask that person to contact two others who may be interested. Utilize the resources of others The idea here is to get your message into the emails, social network posts and on the sites of others, that way their resources and efforts are being used, not yours. Once your campaign has gained enough momentum, you can start planning your next goal while your customers continue to do the marketing for you. In closing, when done right, viral marketing is very effective and costs very little to do. Just imagine the huge potential benefits you get when your marketing campaign catches the viral marketing bug! Let me know what you think in the comment section below, was there anything I left out? Is this something you would use or do? What ideas to you have to share? :)