Tips for Successful Internet Marketing: Viral Campaigns

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Ups and Downs of Viral Marketing on the Web

Have you ever gone to a concert where the band began circulating beach-balls emblazoned with their logo on them? Or maybe the cover to their latest album? Have you ever gone outside to find that a couple of politicians have come by and left you a nifty little gift of a notepad and pencil with their names on them? There are countless examples of this sort of promotion these days, and it is all done to help spread a message by word of mouth and props. When you take that beach-ball home from the concert, you're going to tell your friends about it, and they are going to want to go to the concert the next time Billy and the Boneheads are in town. Likewise, your little pen/pad combo will no doubt spark up a conversation about the local political shenanigans. This is a powerful type of marketing that carries major pull in the online marketing world right now. We call it Viral Marketing.

Let's take a look at the ups and downs of viral marketing on the internet. Many people jump in front of a camera and shake their bellies to old club songs - long before the product or service they are promoting is really ready for that kind of exposure. A lot of marketers have built pretty low reputations around the web for jumping into the 'viral goldmine' just a tad too early for their own good.

Viral Marketing isn't just about generating a swarm of eager clickers - you really need to have a good product or service these days, else you will find your efforts almost always backfire. The days of setting your head on fire and attracting an untold ring-tone fortune are over. To put it bluntly, people just aren't as stupid as they used to be. What once worked wonders for those who used these techniques are now risky gambles for anyone who is looking to capitalize on viral traffic. If you are going to tap into the viral capacity of videos, podcast releases, and even forwarded/social-bulletin jokes, you need to make sure you have a solid foundation for your project. Basically, try to not show the whole world incomplete works or underdone offerings that could cost you your entire investment (time or money), literally overnight. Make sure your product or service is ready for prime-time.

If you have a solid or well thought out service or product, this writer says yes - all the way - yes - go with the crazy, zany, wacky-tell-all-my-friends type of marketing and go viral with it. It just works... If you do it right.

Let's take viral videos for example. In some cases, all you'll need is that one gem video and that's all it takes. All of the sudden people are coming to your website from all corners of the globe, clicking your links, and even getting some action in on your Adsense units. This is an extremely lucky example because in most cases you need to follow through with other less viral means of promotion to get the timing you are looking for. Things like blogging, social bookmarking, and even article writing are critical to get your campaign going. For viral marketing to work, you need the whole internet to be fighting over being the first of their friends to share that new buzz-worthy video.

Targeting your audience is less important with viral campaigns because everyone is sharing your message. There is absolute certainty that at least some of them are making up your target demographic. Since your traffic is so widely diverse, you get the best of both worlds because it leaves more time for you to work on your product or service and removes some of the hassles of studying a demographic for paid advertising or other non-viral means of promotion.

So, after these insights, here is a tip. Keep this in mind: You want your viral media to spread itself and to let the people you are really targeting find you on their own. Your viral campaigns are your chance to become a favorite. They are your chance to be shared. Videos are your chance to be syndicated by the people. There is no better way to be in the hearts of your audience than to become highly recommended. And no matter what you use to promote your offering, there is no Adwords budget that can go beyond the recommendation of a friend. Recommendations are the new life blood of internet marketing, and harnessing them for your benefit is just one bowling-ball-to-the-groin away - If your product is solid. If not, you may want to go back to the drawing board on that aspect of your project for a little while. You don't want to end up with the hottest video on the planet and sporting comments about the pointless site it promotes! Your viral implementations don't need to match your offering - that's the beauty of it all. If your product is good, your clientele will find you on its own. In this way, viral marketing cuts out a lot of guesswork.

As a final tip, use my own 3-V's: Virility is only Victory when backed by Value. I hope that this article has given you a better look into the world of viral marketing. Hopefully you have all of the starter information you need to get things rolling. Good luck!


makes money online, make money online, make money online
earn money online, work at home,

What is Viral Marketing and How Can it Help Your Online Business?

Viral Marketing is a traffic generating tool that allows you to multiply your visibility online by utilizing your existing customers and subscribers (free or paid) in a word of mouth type of referral machine that uses the properties of multiplication to snowball your marketing efforts. Viral Marketing is like a flu bug, it spreads from one person to the next spreading the word about your business and increasing the awareness of who you are and how to reach you.

Why Do You Need Viral Marketing?

1. Your business will increase exponentially. Your customers tell their friends and family and they become customers who tell their friends and family. The buzz on the internet is that every satisfied customer tells 12 other people about their great experiences shopping online. If your efforts persuade 10 people to tell 10 people and each of those 10 each tell 10 people...well you get the picture, right?
2. It establishes credibility and trust in you and in your Website because those people spreading the word are also spreading their recommendation about you and your business.
3. Viral Marketing is very compelling, it encourages people to interact with your marketing message. When people actually react and act upon your message they are more likely to remember it and repeat the message. An example is if your child tells you a funny joke and you laugh at it, you are likely to remember the moment and to repeat the joke to friends and other family members.
4. Viral Marketing is a low cost way of marketing your products or Website. There is no cost to word of mouth advertising
5. Unlike playing the game of telephone, viral marketing stays intact from one mouth to the next, from one recommendation to the next. An example would be if you write a terrific article explaining about the benefits of one of your products, or giving tips about how to experience a really wonderful event that your website promotes and at the end of this very informative article, you have a line of text that says, "If you found this information helpful, please pass this article along to a friend". The message (the article) stays the same for your subscriber and the friend that is passed the article to read and also the same for the friend that the friend passes the article to. Articles gets passes around the Internet by publishers of ezines who pick up the article from the article directory you put it on. Readers of those ezines like the article so much they pass it along via email to their friends who in turn pass it along to their friends. That's the power of Viral Marketing.

Viral Marketing Examples and Ideas

1. You write and article with a "pass this along" message at the bottom with your website address in your byline
2. Give away free trial or demo versions of your product. Have an ebook for sale, give away a free chapter on your website. Give away a trial # of days of your service and then ask for payment after the trial is over.
3. Hold a contest to win a prize by drawing from all those names entered in the contest. Everytime someone invites their friends to enter the contest they get another entry into the contest for every friend they encourage to enter. They get rewarded for passing along your contest by getting another entry.
4. Affiliate programs are just another way of applying viral marketing. People are spreading the word about your product or service and receiving an award for doing so (commission).
5. Make sure you give people a benefit or reward for passing along your article/demo/trial/affiliate program
6. Make an obvious point to ask people to share your marketing article/demo/trial/affiliate program

make money online, make money online, make money online
earn money online, work at home,

Multiply Your Website Traffic with Viral Marketing

When you mention viral marketing to the uninitiated, their minds instantly fill with disease or the dangerous computer viruses that are featured on news stories. While it might sound like a bad thing, viral marketing is actually the greatest way to multiply your website traffic. It is not the destructive power of a virus that gives this form of promotion its name, but the manner in which it spreads.

The greatest thing about viral marketing is that it takes such a small amount of effort from you to create a continuous stream of targeted traffic for your website. You will easily be able to see when your efforts are no longer working and you will have to create another marketing virus to unleash upon the internet.

So, how do you do this amazing thing?

The best way to multiply your website traffic through viral marketing is by writing and giving away ebooks. An ebook is simply a bunch of reports or articles that tell people about a certain topic. You can write an ebook about anything: small business, education, knitting, pet spiders, etc. All you have to do is write five to ten quality articles and then tie them together with filler text.

The most important thing about writing this viral ebook is branding it. After all, the whole idea is to get people to come to your website and buy your products, right? Well, they you have to let them know where to go.

Every so often in your ebook, you should interrupt the flow of good information with a blurb about you and a clickable link to your website.

Example: Not only did Bob Smith write this awesome article on pet spiders, he offers entire spider habitats on his website Pet Spider Haven (that last bit would be a clickable link).

Once you have your name and website peppered liberally throughout the ebook, you are ready to engage the viral marketing engine. Ready? All you have to do is stick the ebook offer with a big "FREE!" sign on your website and let nature take its course.

People like free stuff. They will click on the link to get your ebook, read it, see all your wonderful links and promotional messages, and then pass it on to their friends. Your ebook on pet spiders can scuttle from one spider enthusiast to the next faster than a tarantula can stalk its prey.

That's it. Your website traffic will explode without any further effort from you. Of course, one ebook will not last forever. It will be necessary to write another one after the traffic begins to die down from the first. You can even set up a free viral ebook schedule. If people know that a new ebook about pet spiders will come out every month, they will come back to your website again and again.

Multiplying your website traffic is really easy with viral marketing techniques. Offering free ebooks is the best way to get a lot of people interested in your website with minimal effort. It is great for everyone from full-time business promoters down to the lazy guy who would rather be out hunting spiders.


make money online, make money online, make money online
earn money online, work at home,

Viral Marketing - A Basic Training Manual

Viral marketing is one of the ever emerging variations of guerrilla marketing, a promotional strategy first made popular in 1984 by Jay Conrad Levinson in his best-selling book, Guerrilla Marketing.

Guerrilla marketing employs aggressive, non-traditional, low cost promotional activities to produce profits, rather than utilizing costly conventional media such as TV and magazine advertising. Like guerrilla warfare, it relies on timing, creativity, enthusiasm, energy, and of course, swift action.

These strategies and tactics make guerrilla marketing ideally suited for small start-up businesses and entrepreneurial ventures. Today, however, it's also used by mega-marketers, even Fortune 500 Companies, as part of their overall marketing plans.

Viral marketing is simply "word of mouth advertising" for the Internet Age. Although initially considered another guerrilla tool for small businesses, it has evolved to become an effective form of marketing for large companies too.

Like its traditional "word of mouth", counterpart, viral marketing encourages people to voluntarily pass on information about a product, service or company to their social and business contacts.

Conventional word of mouth advertising relies on telephone calls, snail mail, discussions at church socials or random conversations in the grocery store to spread testimonial endorsements. Customers become voluntary brand ambassadors and a free source of publicity. But that's pretty much where the similarity to traditional word of mouth advertising ends.

Viral marketing is designed for today's digital world and its diverse Internet-based social networks. Using today's high-speed technology to communicate with existing online communities, it has the power to reach a potential audience of millions with incredible speed. The effectiveness of viral marketing results from its ability to quickly and cleverly infiltrate these online social networks at little or no cost.

The viral campaign process is simple. A message with a strong, irresistible offer is developed and then passed along through the online community. It spreads the same way a human or computer virus does --- by ongoing contact. Once the message starts spreading, it's propagated and voluntarily passed along from person to person -often in a matter of just days.

One of the keys to success in any "word of mouth advertising" is the ability to identify "opinion leaders" to jump on the bandwagon and spread your message. Traditional "word of mouth" advertising identifies active members of the local community and have extensive "spheres of influence" they interact with frequently. These spheres are groups of social or business contacts that follow the trends the opinion leaders set and try products they endorse or use. Identifying these groups in traditional marketing is a relatively subjective process, time-consuming and a often unreliable process.

Viral marketers, however, can take a more scientific approach. To maximize the impact of their marketing they seek individuals with a high Social Networking Potential or SPN. This Social Networking Potential is an algorithmic representation of the size of a person's social network and their ability to influence it. (For those of us who had trouble with basic Algebra, an algorithm is a series of carefully defined successive steps that need to be completed in order to accomplish a specific task. Algorithms are also the basis of Google's search engine operations.)

A number of different factors enter the SNP equation. They include the number of online community memberships, blogging frequency, web sites visited, content of personal websites, online affiliates, number of articles published, job title, employer, and other relevant data. Once this demographic and lifestyle data is analyzed, a SNP coefficient is calculated and assigned to an individual or social networking group. This rating can then be used to pinpoint people and groups who are prime viral contact points.

Savvy marketers and advertising agencies are also developing their own unique ways of identifying prospects with strong social networks and communicating with them through viral campaigns. There are now also specialized viral marketing consultants and advertising agencies whose clients include Fortune 500 companies. This investment of time and money indicates viral marketing is finding its niche in corporate America.

Many viral marketers simply compile "seeding lists" of high-traffic websites and online communities whose visitors are strong social networker. A typical could include sites like, myspace.com, bebo.com, kontraband.com, borednation.com, linkedin.com and a wide range of others. There are specific social network sites that appeal to teenagers, college students, twenty-somethings, music groupies, parents, and even corporate executives. More sites like youtube.com tare emerging and developing a more broad based audience appeal. Today, there's an online social network for just about everyone.

Viral seeding lists aren't direct mail lists or email lists. Contrary to the belief of many mainstream marketers, viral communications are not confrontational or unsolicited. The objective is not to annoy prospects with "pop up boxes", " banner ads" or spam.

"Discovery" is what viral marketing is all about. The idea is to get a prospect to voluntarily find or discover and then interact with a communication containing an offer and branded content, and then pass it along to a friend. The communication could be a website, a video, music, a blog, a photo of the day, an advergame or other message. That's why they're "planted" on high traffic, highly targeted websites and portals, in news groups, bulletin boards forums and other online places where the right people will discover them and pass them along.

"Flying under the radar" is critical to the success of viral advertising. Viral communications cannot appear to be ads. Members of online communities and web surfers in general have become more sophisticated and have developed "filtering systems" that screens out obvious hype. Viral communications need to be very subtle and carefully disguised and strategically planted so they can be found by the right prospects and passed along. The more subtle, friendly nature of viral advertising is what makes it so effective with individuals or market segments are non-responsive to traditional advertising. Viral marketing in this respect is quite similar to "PR".

Very often, the offer in viral marketing is "Free". It could be a free email account, a free web page, a free screensaver or wallpaper, free software, video or music downloads, a free magazine subscription, a free T Shirt or product sample. The big creative challenge is to make the free offer appear to be really free with no strings attached and not just another advertising gimmick.

Viral marketing is far more sophisticated that many traditional marketers or even guerrilla markets give it credit for. And an increasing number of large companies are finding a place in their promotional mix for viral marketing as well.

In order to be effective, viral marketing requires a carefully developed plan. The plan is no different that a traditional marketing plan. A basic plan includes:

• Objectives - a clear outline of exactly what you want to accomplish

• Strategies - a detailed plan of how you're going to it

• Target Audience - the market segments you're trying to reach

• Media - What social networks and online communities you're going to use

• Creative Strategy- What are the formats, styles, tones and offers of the communications

• Budget - How much you plan to spend annually and how the money is allocated

• Tracking and Results Analysis- How you measure the effectiveness of the campaign

One very effective way for any business to use viral marketing is to boost the effectiveness of a TV, print or direct response advertising campaign. It's a simple, low cost and very efficient means of increasing your advertising effectiveness. Viral campaigns can be "seeded" in targeted social network sites and online communities that will "discover" your message quickly and pass it along. The message very often reaches a potential audience of millions virtually overnight. Usually you can see measurable results and a "lift" in your advertising performance in a matter of days.

In presenting the idea of viral marketing to some clients, I've encountered some very strange and humorous misconceptions it. One very conservative client described viral marketing as a "pack of high school kids in garages, techno-geeks in basements and pornography merchants in seedy bedrooms sending out spam that will infect PCs everywhere with deadly computer viruses." Wow! I never realized viral marketing is destined to bring about the downfall of online civilization as we know it today. Well, thank God I'm a MAC guy and immune to most dreaded viruses. Better abandon your PC right away and get yourself a MAC today!

Viral Marketing has become serious business. Major national advertisers are shifting an increasing percentage of their advertising dollars from TV, radio, print and mail into interactive online media, including viral marketing. Like search engine marketing, pay per click advertising and guerrilla marketing, it's found its niche and is here to stay.


make money online, make money online, make money online
earn money online, work at home,

Viral Marketing - Internet Success

Traditional radio airplay, standard brick and mortar distribution and being signed by a major record label are no longer the only means of getting your music noticed. Thanks to digital distribution and the massive appeal and easy access to the Internet, unknown musical talent now has a chance at real success. Additionally the indie musician is not stuck with the costs of making an entire CD. They can make a single and post it on the Internet, gaining huge success from one song.

With a little know how and marketing sensibility any upstart musician or experienced musical act can now achieve success, great success in fact on their own. Recently, while a guest on the Sirius Satellite Radio Show The Good Life, I spoke with the host who told me that his two teenage boys get most of their music off the Internet and never listen to regular radio anymore.

Why? Because they can obtain music from acts they wouldn't be allowed to listen to on traditional radio. They're tired of the same old bands and singers being played over and over again. "Most don't have any talent, they're just showpieces." This isn't the first or the last time I've heard that statement from teenagers and adults alike.

For the indie artist who wants to reach a broader market (and you must have a good product) and receive more exposure for their product on the Internet, the first thing you need to do is market, guerrilla market and then market some more. How do you do that? There are many ways that I mention in my book, The Indie Guide to Music, Marketing and Money but here are a few simple suggestions:

•Join music boards and start in on the discussion. At the end of each of your posts make sure to put who you are and your website. Add something to the conversation, don't spam. Write helpful hints and post them on the boards, etc. If the boards don't allow tags but they do allow you to post your email address, make sure it's something with your website at the end. Have a real email address but DON'T use your main email because it will be spammed.

•Start networking at local musician meetings and songwriter / artists forums in your region. You can find them on the Internet. These meetings host artists such as yourself who get together on a regular basis to discuss the music scene and present their latest creations. It's also a wonderful place to get the pulse on gigs you can join in on and new marketing ideas.

•You know all that annoying spam snail mail you receive with pre-paid postage envelopes inside? Why not save the envelopes and put a little note inside that states since they were kind enough to share their information with you, you're returning the favor. Also, with any bill or any correspondence you send out that's official, include a one sheet or little card that has a blurb about you and your music (watch the weight; you don't want to add more postage). Make sure to put your website on whatever material you have.

•Start your own podcast and post it on all the podcast sites.

•Why not send your music to different podcasts. Ask permission first. Send them to your site where they can hear a sample or two and if they are receptive to playing your music on their podcast, send it along. If they use your music in their podcast you may have gained new fans and sold more CDs.

The most important thing you can do is to play live. Go to Wal-Mart, Starbucks and other local shops and ask if you can put on a free concert there. Anywhere and any place that will let you play, do! Make sure to have a sign up sheet where people can sign up for your newsletter. Then create a newsletter and send it out once a month at the most. This is a form of "Buzz Marketing" also known as "Viral Marketing." At the end of the letter make sure you include your webpage of course. Tell your fan base they can pass it along to whoever they want.

This is a very very tiny list of things you can do. The time for the indie musician is now. Take advantage of it! Many blessings to come your way.


make money online, make money online, make money online
earn money online, work at home,