Viral Marketing and You!
A virus spreads and infects people through human interaction.
This is exactly what viral marketing, a popular and powerful type of web promotion, does: It is an online technique that encourages people to spread to others the message about your e-business, mostly by word-of-mouth. The technique creates either a potentially large base of prospects from your existing lists, or a new database of prospects for you.
VIRAL TOOLS! The basic tools of viral marketing are those free marketing reports and ebooks you distribute online to promote your business. One of the most powerful words in marketing is the word FREE. Hence, one way you can put viral marketing into action is to make good use of tools that don’t take much time to create and can be given away for free.
Other viral marketing tools are your email signatures, the free bonus on purchasing an item, and the free products that are spread around with your information attached. These are not the only tools available for you, but they will give you an idea on how to get started with your own viral marketing tool.
GET STARTED! Start a successful viral marketing campaign by making your own free give-aways.
Write an ebook or a free report on a topic you are very familiar with. If you can’t really write, get someone to write for you. Trust me, it will pay off in the end. If you’re good at programming, why don’t you write a small and simple but useful program to spread around?
Here’s where your viral strategy lies: attach your company logo product description, online link, and contact information on your free ebooks or free programs. Hopefully, producing these tools will not cost you anything, or little at all.
Request people to leave their e-mail address and allow you a one-time mailing if they want your free program. Contact them with your real product information later. They will already know you by your free product and will trust you, so it will make selling much easier. Ask them to tell others about your exciting free give-away if they find it useful.
USE OTHER PEOPLE’S PRODUCTS! However, if you can’t make your own free ebooks or program, you can use free products from third parties related to your business or product. You can make a list of them and offer it. Make sure, though, that you have a great list. An extensive list of free advertising tools such as ad submitters, FFA sites and classified ad sites might do the trick.
Remember that anything you offer for free must be useful to your potential customers. It must serve a purpose for them and that they can get something out of your free product.
Create and distribute a useless free product and watch your good reputation go down the drain! Create and distribute a useful free product and watch responses soar!
People tell other people what they like. If they like your free viral marketing tool and they tell other people about it, they also tell them about you and your e-business.
THE BONUS! Another way you can use viral marketing to your advantage is by offering a special free bonus on purchase of your product. This is a technique used mostly by affiliates of other people’s programs. You offer more than what the company you are promoting offers, making more people buy from you. If you’re reselling a program where people are required to place ads, offer them a free training report on how to place ads effectively and a list of advertising sites. People will soon get to know you as the person to buy a specific product from since you are offering more than the rest who are promoting the same thing.
The possibilities are countless, but the bottom line is: if you aren’t doing viral marketing to help you promote, you are losing money every day!
Rok Hrastnik, Internet Musketeers, Inc. (IMI) Search Engine Placement and Sales Copy Analysis and Creation are two popular services offered at http://IMIOBC.com. Our newest service, the creation and promotion of Ghost Articles to promote your business, is gearing up to be our most popular and useful service yet. Articles are created by our team of professional ghost writers @ http://GhostArticles.com.
“How To Use Viral Marketing To Blast and Expand Your Sales!”A.T.Rendon
Viral Marketing is the current buzzword phrase with regard to doing business online.
In a study released earlier this month by Forrester Research, http://www.forrester.com/, the conclusion was reached that those of us wanting to engage in online marketing should focus particularly and more aggressively on viral marketing.
What exactly is “Viral Marketing”?
Viral marketing is the Internet equivalent of “word-of-mouth advertising.
Have you ever visited a web site or received an email that impressed you so much that you immediately sent an email to your personal list of friends and family to share that info with them?
If you answered yes to the above question then you have already been bitten by the viral marketing bug.
It does not matter whether it was online business related or not, viral marketing is the act of spreading the online word or information about a given subject.
Many a non-business web site have received a million plus visitors due strictly to viral marketing. Those of us wanting to do business online can only dream of tapping into half that number of visitors.
How can you create a Viral Marketing effect for your online business?
There are several methods that have proven successful to create a viral marketing effect:
1. Give It Away For FREE.
The concept of FREE has fueled the imagination and the success of the Internet itself. And, although the FREE business model has been greatly scaled back in the post-bust Internet days, it is difficult to argue with the viral marketing success achieved by the early pioneers of FREE email, FREE web sites, FREE auto-responders, etc.
For those of us that can not afford to give away such expensive resources, we can give away FREE e-books, FREE reports, FREE Ezines or other such FREE information.
2. Attach Your Message To Each FREE Item.
All of those FREE email, FREE web sites, and FREE auto-responder services always added their short message to their FREE product or service.
You can do the same thing with your FREE e-books, FREE reports, FREE Ezines or other such FREE information.
We have found a successful way of getting new subscribers to our FREE Newsletter by offering FREE information on a variety of online business related subjects via auto-responders.
3. Duplicate And Multiply Your FREE Efforts.
When you give away FREE e-books, FREE reports, FREE Ezines or other such FREE information, make it easy for others to turn around and offer those FREE items to other like-minded online business interested individuals.
This not only duplicates your efforts but also has the effect of multiplying the work that you distribute.
Instead of just you doing the distribution, you can create a legion of people that willingly pass along your message when it is wrapped nicely inside of a FREE offer of some sort.
Begin your Viral Marketing efforts with these few easy steps and you will soon see the results by an increase in traffic and email. That will always equate to more new and expanded sales.
A.T.Rendon is an entrepreneur and published writer. Subscribe to FREE Business Classifieds Newsletter & receive FREE online access to our Password Protected “FREE Submit To Over 2.7 MILLION FREE Ad Sites!” mailto:subscribe_fbcn9@emailexchange.org Visit us at: http://emailexchange.org/?Articles
“They Are Stealing Your Visitors With Smart Tags!”A.T.Rendon
Did you know that your web site is now covered with “Smart Tag” links that can whisk your hard earned visitors away to your competitors web site?
This is the same thing as stealing your visitors because you happen to make use of a keyword or phrase that is tagged by this new technology.
Microsoft originated the “Smart Tags” in their Windows XP operating systems beta version.
They are a feature of Internet Explorer that “ADDS” smart links to pages everyone views. They enable real-time, dynamic recognition of content on Web pages and offer your visitors, “relevant options”, as they surf.
In other words, they place links, on YOUR WEB SITE, to destinations other than your web page. Including, if they pay for the privilege, to your competition!
Smart tags, which are created using XML (Extensible Markup Language), look different from other links.
Microsoft “Smart Tags” are purple and white dash underlines on a word linking you to a menu of info about that word.
However, due to HUGE public pressure, the Smart Tag feature will not exist in the final version of Internet Explorer 6, due out later this year.
Yet, it does remain a feature within Microsoft’s Office XP, the upgrade to Microsoft’s suite of applications that launched May 31.
The feature gives Microsoft unfair advantage because they can use these products to redirect users to MSN owned web sites or to sites that have paid Microsoft a premium for the service.
Worse still, the further use and development of this technology is being encouraged by Microsoft.
When this first came out, there was a solution that could prevent invasion of your site by adding the following tag to your code:
.
However, this code is useless against these third party developers, in particular, KaZaa, http://www.kazaa.com/.
KaZaa has already been downloaded 5.4 million times from CNET.
BTW, although we did download the software for evaluation in writing this article, our research revealed many people dissatisfied with KaZaa because it is extremely difficult to remove it from your computer.
KaZaa is apparently tapping advertisers to pay for keywords which will cause a link to show up on your web site!
When the keyword is found, KaZaa links show up with a yellow squiggle underline that appears highlighted when your mouse passes over them on your site.
Unauthorized, and certainly unwanted, links now exist all over your web site because of the use of this technology.
This technology makes it possible for you to link to other web sites that you would never dream of being associated with, possibly even to pornographic web sites or other such unseemly members of the Internet community.
KaZaa is already being brought to task and several merchants and Internet entrepreneurs have either filled suit or plan to do so.
All of these actions come in an effort to stem the tide of such intrusive and unauthorized use of web site content, that is copyrighted, and that you have spent your time and hard earned money in order to create.
We will have to wait to see if Microsoft is thrown into the mix for having developed this technology strategy in the first place.
A.T.Rendon is an entrepreneur and published writer. Subscribe to FREE Business Classifieds Newsletter & receive FREE online access to our Password Protected “FREE Submit To Over 2.7 MILLION FREE Ad Sites!” mailto:subscribe_fbcn9@emailexchange.org Visit us at: http://emailexchange.org/?articles
Written on October 30th, 2006
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