Which Viral Marketing Method Is More Powerful?
Viral marketing is not so much a method as it is a skill. You can perform a viral marketing campaign in a lot of different ways. Some of them are more effective than others. Some may be more effective for different types of businesses even. Some types of viral marketing that marketers have tried in the past include:
- Article marketing
- Blogging
- Link baiting
- Link building
- Video marketing
- Podcasting
- Forum marketing
- Social media marketing
- Social bookmarking
Which of these methods you use for your viral marketing campaign depends a great deal on your goals, your strengths and your audience. For a long time article marketing was considered the king of viral marketing. Then it was blogging. These days it is video marketing. But the best viral marketing campaign is a mixed campaign that uses more than one method and incorporates a strategy of cross-pollination.
How To Kill A Viral Marketing Campaign
Viral marketing is much more sophisticated than it used to be. It is rare that someone mass submits hundreds of articles in one day to thousands of article directories and expects to get a flood of new traffic to their website that converts. Sure, it happens. But it’s rare.
Today, viral marketing is more about the Wow Factor. You’ve got to the wow the audience before you get them to your site. If you don’t wow them until they get their then it’s too late. So what are the tools for producing the wow effect that will get new visitors to your site?
- Articles
- Social bookmarking websites
- Social sites like Facebook and Twitter
- Videos
- Blogs
In the old days of viral marketing, the product was mostly content. Today it is largely social. Look at the list – social bookmarking, social networking, videos (think YouTube, a social network that is also the No. 2 search engine), and blogs (a medium that is half social and half SEO tool). See the theme?
So the question is, how do you kill a viral marketing campaign? Take it out of its social context. Be anti-social.
Viral marketing is social media marketing on steroids. It is, in a word, the maximum effective use of the combination of social media and SEO. Want to kill it? Just break one of those two legs of the viral marketing stool and your campaign will fall on its face.
Conan O’Brien’s Viral Marketing Campaign
You’ve likely heard of the Jay Leno – Conan O’Brien rivalry that happened over an NBC late night spot. NBC and Jay Leno blamed Conan O’Brien for failing ratings when it was likely due to a younger audience being more interested in the Internet as medium than television. Just as TV replaced radio and relegated it second-class status, the Internet is fast doing the same to TV. Unfortunately for Conan O’Brien, he got caught up in that.
However, unfortunately for Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and his fans are more Web-savvy so you could say they are the future.
Pace Lattin does a good job of defending that position in a SiteProNews article. After Conan’s abrupt release from NBC, the late night funny man and his fans went on the viral attack and saved his reputation for another generation. That’s the lesson. Never discount a comic whose face is in the mud. He’ll make mud pies and spread them all over cyberspace. Isn’t viral marketing fun?
Viral Marketing Through E-books
E-books were very popular at one time. When the Web was young you’d see the free e-book downloads and when you got to the last chapter of a 200-page e-book you got for free you suddenly realized you were in the middle of a sales pitch. To get the next e-book you’d have to pay something. But you were encouraged to share the free one with your friends.
Another version of the e-book viral marketing method was to offer downloaders a way to brand the free e-book under their own name as long as nothing in the e-book changed. Of course, all the links pointed to the originator’s website. Viral marketing at its best.
For awhile, free e-books went out of fashion. But they seem to be making a comeback. This might be due to the increase and interest in e-book readers. Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and the Sony eReader have all become more popular. So too have e-books.
The truth is, e-books are a great way to spread a viral message. They work. If you do it right you can gain a new audience and sell your services. Viral marketing through e-books is one of the most powerful ways to reach an audience online today. Some things never change.
What Will Viral Marketing Look Like In 2010?
Viral marketing has undergone a few changes over the years. In the early days article marketing was considered viral marketing. And e-mail marketing carried with it some viral components as well. Then blogging started catching on and viral marketers started employing blogs to great effect.
Along with blogs came RSS – really simple syndication. Bloggers found that people would subscribe to their feeds and read them in their e-mail. After blogging, there was social bookmarking. And social networking to a great extent.
In 2005, video marketing started taking off. Then Facebook and Twitter took off big. What’s next?
I think 2010 will see a resurgence of video marketing and this will likely be the year for mobile marketing as well. Viral marketing is about to get more complex. Only the most savvy of marketers will be able to pull off a real successful viral marketing campaign as it will likely require a multi-tiered approach employing several viral marketing methods from the past.
The Key To Successful Viral Marketing
There are as many ways to succeed at viral marketing as their are people doing marketing online. There is no one right way to conduct a viral marketing campaign. But there is one common element to every viral marketing campaign and there always will be. If you can tap into that one element then your chances of succeeding are greatly enhanced.
So what’s the key?
The key to any successful viral marketing campaigns to solicit others to do your marketing for you. How do you do that? There’s a real simple way to get others do your marketing for you – offer something of value.
Yes, that’s it. Make sure you offer something of value for free to those other people and they will do your marketing for you if they believe in what you are doing.
It is getting harder and harder to conduct a viral marketing campaign online due to the low barrier to entry and the number of people competing for attention. Your offer has to be outstanding. You have to offer something that is free and that people will find of value. Strike a nerve and they will promote your offering for you.
Why Viral Marketing Isn’t Bad
Mention viral marketing in a crowded room and you are likely to create a stampede. People will run to get away from the virus. But viral marketing is not bad. It won’t make you sick and it won’t spread to make anyone else sick, though it might spread to make them happy.
In a word, viral marketing is simply a method of getting the word out about what you have to offer that utilizes other people’s resources to spread a message quickly. The latest tool that has been used for this kind of communication is Twitter. This social networking tool has been used for everything from selling products and services to warn people of impending disaster, or spreading the news about disaster that just happened. It’s a powerful tool.
Though Twitter is a powerful viral marketing tool, it’s not the only tool that can be used for this purpose. Other social networks like Facebook and YouTube can be used as well. When you use these types of services to spread your message to others and persuade them to help you, that’s viral marketing. It’s fun, it’s catchy and it’s good.
What Will Viral Marketing Look Like When …
Google controls the social web?
It’s not hard to imagine. Besides the search engines, the most popular websites in cyberspace are social sites (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter). And Google is in the race to control the social web with such tools as Google Wave and Google Friend Connect. Plus, real-time search, personalized search, Google Reader, and the list goes on. What will happen when Google controls the social web?
Viral marketing will always be the same. Friends tell friends and they tell friends. But I have a feeling that when Google is involved the terms and results will explode beyond imagination.
Is ‘Viral’ Marketing Really Achievable?
Many small business owners still wonder “just what is viral marketing?” It’s a good question. Isn’t it related to social media marketing?
Well, sort of. There is a difference.
Social media marketing is any marketing that utilizes social media as its primary distribution model. Viral marketing can often be accomplished through social media, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in order to achieve its desired effects.
So what are those desired effects?
Viral marketing – the heart of it – is really about getting others to share your information with their friends through voluntary efforts. When you have that being done on a mass scale, your content is said to “viral.” That is, your viral marketing campaign is successful. The question, how do get that to happen?
There are various strategies for succeeding at viral marketing. First, your content has to be worthy of sharing. If it doesn’t interest readers then readers won’t share it with their friends. So the most important thing is to make your content super content. Then, you’ve got to get it front of the eyes of influential people. Find the most connected and influential people in any circle and get them to view your content. If they like it they will share it. After that, it’s a matter to giving your content a little nudge here and there. Successful viral marketing is achievable.
Will Personalized Search Boost Your Viral Marketing?
Earlier in December, Google announced that personalized search will apply to all searchers even if they are not logged into their accounts. That means they will be getting personalized search results on every search query. Will that benefit you or hurt you?
I don’t think it will hurt you if you are SEOing your web pages the same way you have been. Effective SEO is effective SEO.
However, personalized search may not do you any favors if you don’t consider one very important detail: Searchers who find your competition before they find you and like what they see may never find you. That’s why it is very important to do everything you can to ensure that your website is found. And that means expanding your Internet marketing efforts beyond the organic search listings.
It is more important now than ever that you use every available means to get traffic to your website and that your website offers a solid user experience so that your visitors want to keep coming back. Otherwise, you could be relegated to irrelevance forever.
Viral marketing can play a key role in this. All you need is one really relevant viral marketing campaign to get a load of traffic to your site and convince them they want to stick around. That’s the hard part. The easy part is knowing that’s what you need.
When it comes to personalized search, it’s not the end of the world. It’s only the end of the world for those websites that can’t leverage their marketing efforts in the right way.
How Viral Is Real-Time Search?
Now that the search engines have introduced real-time search as a part of the search results, you can bet the viral marketers are beating down every path to find a way to capitalize and exploit every opportunity. But how many opportunities are there in real-time search?
Well, the opportunities are there, but you have to know how to find them. The website that gets the most attention in real-time discussions is Twitter, but real-time and Twitter are not necessarily synonymous. When it comes to search, the search engines throw in results from a variety of sources – not just the most popular ones.
For instance, Google “Dallas Cowboys” and you’ll get results in real time from Twitter and a variety of news sources as well as the Cowboys’ own website. Run the same query at Bing and you may not get real time results at all (I didn’t).
By the same token, you could just as well get results from Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube in your real-time results.
But how do you capitalize on the viral opportunities? Well, if you focus on the social media sites that are relevant to your marketing offering and just run a viral marketing campaign the same way you normally would then your efforts stand a much better chance of appearing in real-time results if you are successful at going viral. In other words, instead of focusing on getting into the real-time results for a relevant search query you should focus on prosecuting an effective viral marketing campaign and the real-time results will take care of themselves.
Going Viral: How Many Friends Do You Have?
Going viral is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Which is a bit ironic because there are a lot more people online to see what you have to offer. But, of course, there are a lot more people competing against your for interest too. And that’s why it is so hard.
Viral marketing consists of two things:
- Quality product, service, or message
- Serendipitous discovery
The first of those really needs no introduction. If your product, service, or message isn’t worth telling people about then it won’t go viral. No one’s going to tell their friends about something they don’t find interesting or worth telling about. It’s the second quality – serendipity – that could make or break you.
Serendipity is often thought of as luck, but it’s really more than that. It’s a kind of luck, but not like a roll of the dice or a pick of the draw. It’s more like a planned kind of luck. Serendipity happens to those who expect it and pursue it. But it does happen. It just doesn’t happen because you pursue it.
Sound like a jumble of words? It’s not. Viral marketing is all about making friends. And helping your friends see the value in what you see value in and encouraging them to share that insight with their friends. If there is real value in your perception then you could go viral. Serendipity.
So the question, “How many friends do you have” is somewhat rhetorical. You could have all the friends in the world, but if none of them see the same value that you see then viral won’t happen. But if you have something valuable to offer and no one to offer it to – well, you get the idea. It takes both. A valuable product, service or message and an audience ready and willing to see the value in it. That last one is the thing you’ve got to pursue. It won’t come to you.
Two Essential Elements To Viral Marketing
If you want to run a successful viral marketing campaign there are two absolutely essential nonnegotiable elements you must infuse into your content. If you have these two essential ingredients then your content may go viral. It isn’t guaranteed to go viral, but it is guaranteed NOT to go viral if your content does not have these two essential ingredients.
So what are they, these two ingredients?
The first absolutely essential ingredient to any viral marketing campaign is a message that resonates. You have to produce content that gets people emotional. It must anger them or make them fall in love. It can produce a positive feeling or a negative feeling, but it has to elicit a strong reaction. Otherwise, people will ignore it and your message will not go viral.
The second ingredient to a successful viral marketing campaign is easy accessibility. Your content must be accessible to anyone anywhere. In other words, it cannot be behind a paywall. If people have to jump through hoops to get to your content then they won’t share it with their friends. They won’t even experience it for themselves. You’ll kill your viral marketing campaign before it begins.
That’s it. Any viral marketing campaign that even hopes to succeed must, at a minimum, possess these two qualities. Otherwise, you might as well just hang up your viral hat.
Viral Marketing – Hope, Help Or Hype?
You’ve likely heard enough of viral marketing that you are beginning to wonder whether or not it is all hype or whether you have any hope. Truth is, much of it is hype. But the flip side to the truth is it’s not all hype. You do have hope.
But pulling off a successful viral marketing campaign is not easy. You can’t just throw together an idea and in 24 hours see a groundswell of viral activity all because you rubbed a few stones together. It does take some thought and energy to pull a good viral marketing effort off and it helps to know a little bit about human psychology. What makes people tick? What would make someone want to help you spread your message?
Viral marketing is a bit of a double-edge sword. If it works, great. If it doesn’t it can also backfire. You could actually see some negative repercussions. That’s because you can’t predict how people are going to react to your efforts.
When it comes to viral marketing, there’s no one solution that will work for everyone. It takes good planning and a fair amount of trust in human nature.
Twitter List Widget Promises To Go Viral
Twitter has a new widget that will surely be used as a viral marketing tool and has a lot of great potential. It’s called the Twitter List Widget.
If you haven’t heard, a couple of weeks ago Twitter introduced Twitter Lists. People have been going hog wild crazy over them. There are now thousands of lists on Twitter and the list of lists is growing. The list feature itself has grown into a viral marketing tool.
Now, you can take your own lists or anyone else’s list and create a widget for it, put it on your blog, and share it with the world. It’s one more viral marketing tool that you can use to spread the word about your brand.
To learn more about Twitter List Widgets and other viral marketing tools, visit Reciprocal Consulting.
How Viral Is Your Marketing?
There are two ways go viral in Internet marketing:
- Planned
- Spontaneous
Naturally, you can’t plan every thing you do to go viral. It’s nice if you set a plan in motion and it works. But it need not work in order for your message to go viral. The crowd can make it go viral for you.
In order to tap into the spontaneous viral marketing pool you’ve got to have a message, but not just any message. It’s got to be a great message. It’s got to be a message that people will want to share with their friends. If it’s great enough, people will share it without any prompting. And that’s the kind of viral marketing that works best.
Of course, you can always plan a viral marketing campaign. And if you can do that and pull it off, great. But note that just as many attempts to plan a viral marketing fail as succeed.
If you focus on building great content – I mean, really great content – then the viral marketing will take care of itself. All you have to do is give it a nudge and it will go.
The 7 Principles Of Viral Marketing
Dr. Ralph Wilson, one of the early pioneers of viral marketing – and Web marketing in general – showcases 6 principles of viral marketing. These are principles that he says should be a part of every business’s viral marketing campaign, only he says if you have most of them then you’re golden. I’d add another one to the list, but before I tell you what they are I’d like to review Dr. Wilson’s list. His 6 principles of viral marketing are:
- Give something away
- Effortless transfer to others
- Scales easily
- Exploits common human behaviors
- Utilizes existing communication networks
- Takes advantage of the resources of others
These are pretty useful principles. The first one is almost a no-brainer. The idea is to give something away that others can pass on. It must also be easy to pass on to others. In other words, people you give it to should be able to send it to their friends without much fanfare. The freebie must also be scalable, which is a word marketers use to convey growth from small scale to large scale with relative ease. Exploiting common human behaviors gets to the heart of all sales messages – tug on people’s motivators. By utilizing existing communication networks, because you don’t want to have to invent something that people will have to learn to use when they’ve already got the tools you need to distribute what you have and want them to have. And finally, use other people’s resources as much as possible because, after all, if it’s viral you can’t do it all yourself.
This about sums it up. But I’d add one more principle to the list. It’s already in Dr. Wilson’s 6 principles, but it isn’t stated outright – so I’ll just say it. Make it easy. Simple. Don’t complicate things. If you follow Dr. Wilson’s 6 principles of viral marketing then that should automatically happen. Your plan will be simple. As it should be.
The Many Faces Of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing seems to be the new buzz word in Internet marketing. Everyone wants their content to go viral. Everyone wants to see their content get distributed across the entire Web, but not everyone understands just how to make that happen.
The bottom line for any kind of marketing is to ensure that your content is before the eyes of the people who will actually use it. That’s half the battle in viral marketing right there.
Viral marketing can often occur spontaneously. When you share something with a friend and that friend shares it with another friend then that friend shares with another. Now imagine that each friend shares your content with five other friends. It’s easy to see how quickly this process can multiply. Just look at how many friends you can reach after going five levels deep:
- You – Share with 5 friends
- Level 2 – Your 5 friends share with 5 friends each = 25 friends
- Level 3 – Each friend’s friend shares with 5 more = 125 friends
- Level 4 – Each Level 3 friend shares with 5 friends = 625 friends
- Level 5 – Each Level 4 friend shares with 5 friends = 3,125 friends
After five levels of sharing, your content has reached 3,906 people including you and your five friends. Now take that one more level and you’ve touched 19,530 people. That’s how viral marketing works.
But what medium should you use to produce that can result? It depends. Where are the people you want to reach? Are they at StumbleUpon or YouTube? Try it there. How about social bookmarking sites like Digg? If that’s where your audience can be found then that’s where you need to submit your content.
The hardest thing about viral marketing is predicting how people will respond. Not everything that looks hot goes hot. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Viral Marketing And Its Changing Face
Viral marketing has changed a bit over the years. In the old days it meant you wrote a few articles and distributed them in various places online to build links and drive traffic back to your website. While article marketing still works when done well, there is so much competition and “noise” that to be really effective in getting your articles to go viral you have to write out-of-this world articles, which you should be doing anyways.
After the dot-com bust of 2000-2001, viral marketing changed a bit. Blogging began to pick up speed and early adopters soon found out that if you wrote a great blog post you could attract a lot of links. Blogging is still on the upswing and can still be effective as a viral tool.
However, video marketing took off in 2004 and 2005 and seems to be picking up speed at the same rate that blogging did just a couple of years before. 2010 looks to be the year of the video. Many Internet marketers have used videos for great viral marketing campaigns and many still continue to experiment with video to great success.
Twitter is another tool that marketers are using to great effect. Many marketers have reported it as a great viral marketing tool in its own right.
Still, viral marketing is ever changing. The best viral campaigns will no longer be relegated to the use of one tool. In the future, viral marketing will become a multi-tiered strategy of its own. Successful viral marketers will devise campaigns that consist of more than one marketing tool and that use many media in conjunction to reach their defined audiences. That’s as it should be. And I’m looking forward to the day when viral marketing isn’t just some buzz word that people use to sound important.
5 Viral Marketing Methods That Still Work
Viral marketing has come a long way since the early days of e-mail marketing where the marketer sent out an e-mail and half his list forwarded it on to their friends. Then the next thing you know you’re hearing about the next Internet millionaire. You bought his book, right?
Actually, it probably didn’t quite work the way some of them said it did either. But viral marketing does work.
Here are 5 viral marketing methods that have been proven to work and that still work today:
- Video Marketing – People love to watch YouTube videos. YouTube is one of the most viral websites online. One video getting a couple hundred thousand page views can make you a lot of money and increase your reputation. Videos are good viral marketing tools.
- Article Marketing – Article marketing is an old form of marketing online, but it still works. Write an article, distribute to a few article directories, and see how many publishers pick it up for distribution. It still works.
- Blogging – It seems like everyone is doing it, and maybe they are, but a well written blog post can attract a lot of attention. It usually happens by a few people linking to it and a couple of high profile people promoting it, but once your blog post goes viral there’s no stopping it.
- Twitter - Twitter is the new kid on the block of viral marketing, but it sure is a cool tool. Build a list of devoted followers who watch (and listen) to what you have to say. Post some links and watch them go viral.
- Social Media Marketing – Social media is one highly misunderstood marketing form. It not only involves entities like Digg and Twitter, but your blog and Facebook are great tools on their own. Every social media site has its own idiosyncrasies and methods for distribution, but if you can figure it out, social media marketing is an awesome viral marketing tool.
Viral marketing often requires a plan, but it has been known to work spontaneously. The key is to deliver content that people can sink their teeth into. Make it great and it will go viral.
Is Twitter A Viral Marketing Tool?
If you are a Twitter user, or just getting started with Twitter, then you might be wondering whether or not it can be used for viral marketing. The answer – the short answer – is any tool can be used for viral marketing. Whether or not it is effective is another question. Better yet, a good question is can you make it effective?
A viral marketing tool is only as good as the person using it, and the plan. Articles make great viral marketing tools, as do videos, but not every marketer has learned how to use them. The same goes for Twitter.
Read the latest guru’s e-book and you’ll get the impression that Twitter is the best viral marketing tool since cotton candy. And it can be, but there are certain rules of etiquette and best practices that one must learn before trying to employ it. And it’s best to learn those from someone who understands the territory. I hesitate to say “expert” or “guru”, but it does need to be someone who is knowledgeable and experienced in the different nuances of the technology. Even if you do it yourself, it makes sense to consult with a Twitter consultant.
Is Twitter a viral marketing tool? Yes, in capable hands it is. Your goal should be to make your hands capable.
How To Go Viral Without Too Much Effort
Viral marketing gets a lot of airplay, as well it should. Just one successful viral marketing campaign can put your company on the map in hardly no time at all. But how do you do it?
There are any number of ways to make a viral marketing campaign work. But if you want to make one work without much effort then you’ve got to get other people involved in the spreading of the virus – I mean, word. Perhaps the best way to get others involved in helping you spread the word is to give them an incentive. And the best way to do that is to provide them with rewards for their efforts. An affiliate program is the perfect choice.
While there are no guarantees, if you offer a lucrative opportunity for others to profit from your successful efforts then you’ll encourage them to spread the word for you. If you provide a good product or service, great support for your affiliates, and offer unbeatable rewards, they will do the legwork for you and deliver viral results while you sit back and watch.
OK, I wouldn’t encourage you to sit back and watch. But if you have a good army of affiliates working for you then you don’t have to work as hard to see your marketing efforts go viral. Affiliate marketing is where it’s at. Viral marketing is the result of a good product, a good affiliate program, and great rewards.
Viral Marketing And The ReTweet Phenomena
ReTweeting has become an important component of the Twitter experience and could perhaps create a Digg like experience for users. One gets the feeling that reTweets are now more important than the original Tweet and if the original Tweet has a marketing angle, the viral marketing angle can be tremendous.
As proof of the popularity of reTweets, Twitter is looking to add a re-Tweet function to the site. There are already plenty of third party re-Tweet options around already, each providing Digg like re-Tweet buttons.
WebProNews provides a list of the benefits of re-Tweets:
- Retweets are viral
- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed
- As opposed to a Facebook “like,” a retweet is shared with everyone
- Retweets typically give credit to sources
- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships
- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content
- Retweets can inspire further conversation
- Retweets can be good for branding
- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.
- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content
The practice of re-Tweeting is growing and as businesses start to see the value in Twitter as a marketing tool – viral marketing will bloom.
Viral Marketing Tip: Focused Twittering
Viral marketing gets a lot hyper for good reason. There are plenty of ways to go about running a viral marketing campaign and achieving success. Here are some tips to help you in your next Twitter marketing campaign. How to go viral on Twitter:
- Put some thought into your Twitter name. Try to get something that is easily brandable (and it helps if it matches the brand you’ve already created)
- Use Twellow, Twitter Search, and such tools to find followers in the niche that you work in.
- Maintain an active Twitter posture (10-20 tweets a day is ideal – not too many and just enough to keep your name in front of your followers)
- Ensure that all of your tweets provide value related to your niche
- Write a keyword-focused description on your Twitter profile
- Use @replies to respond to your followers and build relationships
- Retweet helpful tweets from others
- Build up a sizable following (there’s power in numbers)
- Stay away from automation whenever possible, but in light doses you can pre-schedule certain tweets that are recurring using services like Tweetlater and HootSuite
- Put a Retweet button on your blog
- Use Twitter Tools to automatically post your blog posts to your Twitter account
The key to going viral on Twitter is to build relationships with people in your niche who are like-minded and to provide value upon value upon value.
Is Twitter A Viral Marketing Tool?
If you’re familiar with the popular microblogging service Twitter then you understand how you can pick up followers and direct them to your website. But can it go viral?
Listen to the gurus and you’ll think that Twitter is the breadbasket of the Internet. Build a Twitter stream, get 100,000 followers – or, if your Ashton Kutcher, 1 million will do – and drive that traffic like cattle, Baby! Is it really that easy?
As an old sage once said, nothing worthwhile is easy. And so it is with Twitter. It is worth the effort and it can go viral, but it is work.
The key to succeeding with Twitter is to find people to follow you who are interested in what you have to offer. But how do you do that? There are tools available, such as Twellow and Tweetlater, to help you do that. And you can find people to follow by keywords, by location, or by interest. Or you can just scour the follow lists of your friends.
Twitter is not in and of itself a viral marketing tool, but it can go viral if you are persistent and consistent in your marketing efforts.
Is Viral Marketing Contagious?
God, we sure hope so.
Pardon the bad joke, but viral marketing is a misunderstood science. Too many webmasters think if they follow some blueprint then they’ll get boat loads of traffic overnight because they used so-and-so’s winning formula. But viral marketing is not about winning formulas. It’s largely a hit-and-miss proposition and some of the most successful viral marketers have more failed campaigns than successful ones.
The reason you hear so much hype around viral marketing initiatives is because the ones that win big really win big. That’s when people start talking.
But you don’t have to make a million dollars in order for your viral marketing efforts to pay off. You could have something go viral on a small scale and pay off. It just depends on the size of your market.
The main ingredient in any viral marketing campaign is creativity. You want your marketing campaign to target a specific market with something that will get their attention. When it does, they’ll talk about it. And they’ll help you market your business or product without so much as even a request. Often, you can’t even predict what will go viral. It sometimes is something you didn’t even plan on. When it is, you just grin and eat the butter.
What Is Viral Marketing And How Can It Help You?
Viral marketing is a catchphrase in internet marketing circles that can mean a number of things. It’s true meaning is any marketing effort that catches on and creates a buzz about your business or products so that people in the marketplace are talking about you. Ideally, you want everything you do to catch on and go viral. Realistically, that’s not likely to happen. However, you can create viral marketing campaigns that catch and drive traffic to your website.
Tools that online marketers have used to create viral marketing campaigns that have been successful include:
- Blogging
- Article Marketing
- Social Media (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
- Widgets or Gadgets
- E-mail newsletters
- Video
- And more
Anything can go viral. But not everything will. So you have to plan your campaigns carefully. Is video right for you? Are articles? No two businesses are alike. Your situation is unique and requires a custom plan. What worked for your competition last year might not work so well for you this year. That’s why a professional consultation with a company that can implement a viral marketing plan successfully should be your first step.
Expanding the SEO Skillset
There was a time when Search Engine Optimization was all about three main practices: meta tag stuffing, title tag stuffing and keyword stuffing. Sensing a theme, are we? During the early development of SEO, these tactics coupled with a bit of hard coding were pretty much all that was necessary to pull decent rank and all fell into the general category of “Search Engine Optimization” as they composed the majority of the knowledge needed to do such. Build a search-friendly site and show up on searches; it was as easy as that.
However, more and more over the past few years, these once primary strategies for optimization have been thrown into the “onsite SEO” category for a new era of SEO. There has been much discussion of a new brand of SEO Specialists, cooler, slicker and more capable — having better “Networking” and “Social Media” skillz.
Yes, “Skillz” with a “Z” for the newer, cooler SEO specialists.
Unarguably, things are very different now. Sure, the number of tools and variety of skills required to launch and maintain a successful SEO Campaign have grown at an alarming rate in just the past year, let alone the previous decade, but too many are quick to dismiss the old practices for flashy theatrics — as if having years of experience was a bad thing?
Consider the following bit of “geek-related” history:
In the early 90’s there began a war. This was not a normal war however, and many were unaware of its existence. This was a video game console war between Nintendo and Sega. Essentially, these companies were in competition to be the leading Home Video Game Console System and each company had a distinctive advertising campaign. Nintendo took the straight forward approach, simply marketing their products for what they were, while Sega marketed their systems as being the cooler, optimal alternative to Nintendo — perhaps their strategy can be best summed up with a quote from one of their commercials: “Sega does what NintenDONT”.
So what’s my point? It’s simple. Sega, with all it’s glamor, flash and big words, died in 2006 with it’s final system, the Dreamcast, and prior to that, the company released some of the worst systems of all time. Meanwhile, Nintendo is still alive and strong, and its products are among the top searched items on Ebay today. Even in competition with such beasts as Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo maintains comparable results and an even higher demand.
Okay, so what’s my real point? Think of it like this: In this parable I’ve presented to you, Nintendo represents the traditional SEO Specialist — simple, solid, effective and of high quality, yet able to adapt and leave a lasting impression on the internet. Sega, on the other hand, represents this new brand of SEO Specialists — presented as more socially capable and better equipped to utilize the new era of Social Media oriented SEO Campaign Management.
I predict a very similar outcome for this bout.
The fact is, SEO has evolved over the years and, while many aspects have changed, it is important to remember to utilize traditional means as well as newer tools. A successful SEO campaign is all about managing a balance of incoming links and sources, networking with other sites sharing similar interests and building a search-friendly page tailored to the campaign’s keywords and targeting goals. One can perform Social Media Oriented SEO for a website all day long but without an appropriate architecture on-site, all this will be in vain.
Be careful when entrusting your online advertising efforts to a firm and before you sign on, ask yourself these questions: Are they a reputable firm? Do they have solid experience as the foundation for their strategy or are they built on outrageous claims and ineffective, over the top practices in less than the complete range of strategies? Can they work with me one on one to ensure than we build a custom tailored campaign? Will they charge outrageous fees or will I be paying them based on the Campaign Performance?
Believe it or not, many Internet Marketing Firms want to answer these question and concerns.