Web Marketing Today, Issue 71, February 8, 2000
German
If you're creative, you may be able to come up with a brilliant viral marketing business plan based on my "Six Simple Principlies of Viral Marketing." http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm In the meantime, here are some viral marketing techniques you can deploy immediately that will do some good:
Encourage Links to Your Site
You can do a number of things to encourage links to your site. Register with search engines, of course, and seek reciprocal links. Here are some approaches designed to set up an exponential response to your efforts.
Write articles and encourage other to post them free as content for their site. If you're an expert in a particular area, write an article about an aspect of it. Then offer it to complementary sites to post on their site as free content, so long as the article contains links to your site. Your article could go far and wide, especially if it is carried on the wings of e-mail to others who will distribute the same article to their network of contacts.
Set up an affiliate program to encourage links to your products. Affiliate programs are a form of network marketing that provides financial incentive for other sites to link to yours. Make sure you pay enough to make this attractive to already-saturated siteowners.
Send out news releases concerning a free service or product available on your site. The key here is to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free service, or digital download. If your news release is carried by just 5% of the media you send it to, you could have your URL in front of tens of thousands of readers quite inexpensively.
Encourage Word-of-Mouth Recommendations
Word-of-mouth (on the Web it's "word-of-mouse") is considered the very best advertising, because it is unsolicited. Here are some ways to encourage friends to share with friends, and use their network to promote your site.
Install a Recommend-It.com referral system. Recommend-It won't save a dismal site, but it will help your visitors promote your site to their network of friends. Read our review at http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/recommend-it.htm
Make it easy to e-mail or fax your webpage to a friend. Encourage readers to e-mail your webpage to a friend. (If you know of some good CGI or JavaScript programs to do this, please e-mail me at mailto:rfwilson@wilsonweb.com) This is similar to recommend your site, but allows your visitor to send specific content as well. This is easier to accomplish without a database-driven site.
Encourage people to forward your newsletter to friends. Always encourage readers to forward your e-mail newsletter to their friends. Do this at the end of a newsletter, and you may jog some readers to do it immediately. It's easy to do.
Offer Desirable Products or Services that Spread Your Message
Finally, you can provide free services or products on your site that help spread your message to an increasing number of people who hear about it. Several companies offer free e-mail addresses using your domain name. But it's too late to repeat Hotmail's phenomenal success, and the free services will likely tack their own ads onto the free e-mail messages. Here are some more likely possibilities. See sources on our Viral Marketing Resources page http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/viral.htm
Enable visitors to e-mail post cards or greeting cards from your website. Such scripts are not very expensive. Though you can't compete with the Web's top card sites, if you have a unique spin on your product or service, you may carve out some real interest and traffic.
Offer a digital game or utility for free download that carries your marketing message. Games carrying your ad or screen savers are just a couple of the possibilities. Others are games or graphic demos that people can e-mail to their friends.
Most important of all, think of unique ways your can build viral marketing techniques into your future marketing programs. Programs that carry a strong viral marketing component get you much more traffic for your investment than straight advertising.
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