Im am thinking about trying some viral marketting methods and wanted to hear about some success stories. what has worked for you and what didn't work?
I tried a viral marketing campaign for a debt scam site. My "brilliant" idea was let people scam each other via email by creating a scammer email based on the values people entered (favorite pizza topping, price of your shoes, etc.) Then email would then have tags at the top and bottom saying "you've just been scammed by your friend _____ . If you want to avoid scams, visit my site..." My brilliant idea wasn't brilliant once I sent it out to the masses - trying digg and a few other places. That page now gets an occasional visitor from an offsite link (no on-site links to it so I could track the traffic source to it) but for the most part got a nice traffic boost of people for a few weeks but probably less than 1000. What I learned was that by trying SOMETHING and pushing my site name out there every day, I was getting traffic. Had I never TRIED, I wouldn't have got the traffic that I did. Seth Godin once wrte a small article on what is considered a good viral idea. If I recall, it was something entertaining, easy to understand, easy to pass on to friends, might have even been somethign we could all relate.
I have success with viral marketing by giving away an ebook with give away rights that contains my links. Try that. It usually works very well.
I can list it in my ebook directory if you'd like, just shoot me a PM with your ebook's info. Also, I recommend reading through "Unleashing the Ideavirus" by Seth Godin for some viral marketing ideas.
At one point, about 3 or 4 years ago, I got around 40 email addresses (they emailed me) because I put a link on the bottom of my sig and some jokes I passed around. I figure it must have reached about 400 people. Prior to that, I had a list of 600 people I mailed once every few days, and people kept subscribing. The sad part, I don't have that list anymore. The consolation is I know how to do it again. But it was something just for fun back then.
The Key to viral marketing is the following: Ask yourself these questions: Have I ever told a friend or two about a website I have visited? Why did you tell your friend about it? Do you think others would do the same? Think about Youtube, people see an awesome video and they tell there friends to watch it, post it on there myspace, and basically promote for Youtube. Now there are 18374 other sites doing the same thing, so the idea is old but the concept won't die.
The Animal School movie I produced (in my sig) went viral... it has generated over 20K subscribers to my list and 95K unique visitors last month, which was the site's 5th in existence. My free coloring book also gets a lot of viral traffic. The key? Produce something interesting, compelling, creative... something that YOU would want to forward to YOUR friend... something of VALUE!