What is Viral Marketing?
Simply put, Viral marketing is typically an online marketing strategy. It’s a strategy that focuses on spreading information and positive opinions about a product or service from person to person. This strategy is especially effective by means of social networks on the Internet or by email sharing.
Viral marketing is a technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users. Hopefully to create a potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and planned effect.
Viral marketing is one of the biggest keys to attracting new customers. Most businesses don’t take advantage of this like they should.
What does viral mean?
For a business, it’s basically where other people recommend your product or website to others. It’s another word for referral advertising or word of mouth.
The great thing about it is that it doesn’t require any additional expense on your part. And if a prospect or customer passes on word of mouth advertising, this will give you more credibility. This is because what others say about you matters more than what you have to say.
So how can you make your marketing viral?
Here are six great ways:
1) Offer incentives
One way to instantly get more opt-ins for your newsletter is to offer a reward for anyone who gives you friends’ emails. For instance, you could offer them a free eBook. Or you could give them 20% off the purchase price if they recommend others to you. Just be sure to follow through.
2) Freebies
Another strategy is to give away free eBooks with distribution rights. Make sure you allow it and actively encourage others to pass on the book to friends. Or that they can offer it as a freebie, bonus or give-away. Just let them know they cannot alter any the contents.
You can give away the eBook on your site, on Amazon as a free Kindle book, or sell it for 25 cents on eBay. Just make sure to include a link to your site’s lead-page in it.
3) Give away valuable free information
The best way to generate referrals is to give away valuable information for free. Many times marketers don’t give away great content, because they’re trying to save the best information for the product.
The problem is, if your free content isn’t good, people will assume your paid content isn’t going to be worth it either. The key is free information is supposed to wet their appetite. This gets them thinking, “If the free information is this good, just imagine how good the paid stuff will be.”
4) Site content
Another way to go viral is to simply have great blog content, and post to it consistently. Include social network share buttons and encourage your readers to share it.
This will give you additional traffic without having to do any more work. However, you’ll need to stand out from other like sites for this to happen.
How can you stand out?
The best way is to integrate your story or experience into the niche. Most people writing about a particular topic have no personal experience with it. So if you do, it will help make you stand out!
5) Create an interesting or controversial title
If the title is dull, people aren’t going to read it. One way to make it interesting is to include lists. For instance, if you have an eBook about golf, you could title it the “10 most common mistakes beginning golfers make”.
6) Create and submit videos to directories
Putting interesting videos on YouTube and other popular video directories will encourage people to pass them around. Again, just make sure the content is good.
Final Thoughts…
The bottom line is, making your marketing efforts viral is how to skyrocket your success. The best way to do this is to give away a lot of great free information.
