Viral marketing uses strategies and techniques that encourage web sites or individuals to pass your marketing message to others. This type of marketing creates the potential for exponential growth in your message’s exposure and influence an so is an incredible tool for Affiliate Marketing.

The main benefit of viral marketing, also known as word-of-mouth marketing, is of course the fact that it doesn’t have to cost you a cent – just let your fans spread the word for you!

Whether you use your viral campaigns for brand marketing or in viral advertising, it is critical to their success that your message be both:1. Compelling enough to encourage it being passed-on

2. Supportive of your brand’s values and objectives (to raise your brand’s awareness).

A successful viral marketing campaign will suddenly get a life of its own and everyone will want to see it and when they get it, they will be keen to share it. It will start spreading like a virus – hence the name!

Also, because it comes across as a ‘recommendation’ usually from a friend or fellow member, it is very powerful, having a much greater impact that you could hope to achieve with advertisements.

There are several tricks to viral marketing, and here are some of the main ones:

  • Convey strong emotion – your email needs to make the reader feel something. Your communication must express an opinion or idea with commitment and dedication. You can not try to please everyone and be neutral. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.
  • Don’t make it an ad – don’t just email a sales pitch and expect it to be passed along.
  • Do something unexpected – self-explanatory. Follow the road less traveled, do something different – forget about promoting your product as being the ‘best’ or ‘greatest’, or make it look cool – everybody else does that; be different! You will make an impact and be remembered.
  • Always allow sharing, downloading and embedding – this is what viral marketing is all about. Encourage bookmarking and publication of social networks, etc. but don’t fill your website with too many icons.
  • Allow comments – this is a great way for people to connect with you; and when they do, make sure you talk back. However, you must be willing to welcome both positive and negative comments; keep in mind that the best viral marketing campaigns will evoke strong emotions. You can and should use your discretion, but never delete a comment just because it expresses a negative opinion.

Some ways you can implement viral marketing are:

  • Have an opt-in form that offers additional bonuses if they recommend a couple of friends and one of them signs up.
  • Affiliate programs, if you have your own product then get affiliates to place banners or links on each other’s websites.
  • Authors or product creators can give away free articles, books, software, etc – which they allow to be shared without alteration, encouraging the word to be spread. Because the document contains the author’s information and relevant links, their reputation and traffic to their site increases as the material is shared.
  • Authors who give away free articles, press releases, etc to others’ web-pages, get more visibility.

You can maximize the success of your viral campaigns by tackling many networks at once (ie, blogs, social media, videos and email lists). No doubt there are many email chains or PowerPoint presentations that you have received from a number of friends and relatives – increased popularity will likely trigger a greater spread.

As the saying goes: “if everyone is talking about it, it must be good!”

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Filed under: Viral Marketing

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