In the world of Internet Marketing it's so easy to get caught 'doing it doing it doing it' instead of developing a pre-meditated marketing strategy and sticking to it for the long-term. The term 'viral marketing' is becoming more and more popular. Many people in the Internet Marketing field know that it refers to putting into place techniques that will enable the automated gathering of new prospective customers. Here are 3 top ways to help you start marketing your website virally today: 1) Publish a free ebook and make it available for free on http://www.download.com. All you have to do is produce a 10 to 20 page PDF book on your chosen topic, include plently of links back to your website and and some affiliate links if you wish and publish it. If it's any good and people like the information then they'll share it with their friends. 2) Produce some screencapture videos and publish them on http://www.YouTube.com. Whatever your specialist subject, pick a subject within it that that you're able to train people on and put together a simple 5 to 10 minute 'how to' video. One of the best paid-for pieces of software that you can use for this is Camtasia, but there are less feature rich, cheaper or free screen capture software programs available. Remember to include your website address at the bottom of the video! 3) Turn your customers into your sales team. Who best to sell your products or services that the people who are willing to pay money from them?!? Make sure that it's in your automated post-sales process to offer your most recent customers the opportunity to earn back their investment by making 2 or 3 sales to anyone else. Good luck with your viral marketing!
Some nice tips thanks for sharing. I like the idea of using viral videos - a friend of mine made some short videos a few years back and never did anything with them so I think it's time to dust them off and stick them up on YouTube.com (with a small banner on the bottom pointing to my site of course). My site is more of a social network (although I still struggle with calling it that...) got any ideas for marketing these as there isn't a 'product' that I'm selling? ...I'm of the opinion that if people like it then word-of-mouth will make it a success... Cheers, p.
It's just getting it to the tipping point that's the hard part. There's always the option of getting your users involved as part share holders in the business. Say you decide that if your long-term goal is to sell the business, you say to your users that 25% of the money made from the sale will be divided among the users. Then you give people who refer more users a bigger share of the 25% pie.
I will try the idea of posting a book in download.com. But how to rank top in download.com without spending money? Any ideas?
Firstly try optimizing the title of your free download and the content of your ebook description on download.com for phrases popular for your item. Secondly - if you have another website and you are able to advertise your ebook download, always link to the dowload.com link URL. That will make the download more popular and therefore rank higher on download.com.
I agree - great tips. Viral Marketing is a phrase that is cropping up everywhere. The Million Dollar Homepage was 'viral', The Paper Clip Experiment was also 'viral' I have never tried download.com, it sounds quite interesting. Thanks for this tip!
Some great tips here. I have never written an Ebook, but may consider it for my affiliate marketing website one day.
I have many many secret tips that I will reveal soon on viral marketing. Once concept is so powerful that it it just relates to this thread. Great thread!!!
Download.com has been good to me in the past. I have never tried the e-book route, but a few years ago I added a software package of free games that included an affiliate coded link for a larger paid package. It worked great for a long time until suddenly one day it was gone. I no longer had the email account I had originally used with them so I have no idea what the problem was - probably that I didn't respond to something they sent me or too many bounced messages to my address or something. But while it was posted on their site it worked really good.
To make promotional campaigns seriously viral, you need to provide some incentive for users to pass on your material. A good example was the recent Death Of AdSense report. Downloaders were offered $1 per referred download, of the free product. Since the PDF was free, people were almost guaranteed to download it, so everyone started promoting it. So 3) is definitely the key
So how much does download.com charge to upload one item? Last time I checked (3 years ago) it was something like $80. any changes there? Dave
The biggest thing everybody's leaving out is that the information has to be really good... that, or really funny.
Thanks for the tips but, unless I'm looking at the wrong section of Download.com, it looks like it's only for SOFTWARE?
I suppose the idea is that the video needs to be self-promoting. There needs to be something extra in it (uniqueness, humour, shock ...) that attracts a viral response, that makes people want to pass it on without you having to do anything.