Simple, but important question - Viral?

Hi Warriors,

viral marketing is the most powerful way of promoting your site, but still because it is complicated and most of the IMer's don't even think of doing their business viral, it is still one of the the most difficult techniques of internet marketing.

Hope this post will be aplicatable at least for few marketers and it will help you to grow your business.

Let's think of an example, where you build a new online project and you need it grow as fast as possible. The easiest way would be to use thousands of $ to buy solo ads and set up PPC.
Another method could be cheaper, but time consuming and it could be a forum posting, blog posting atc...

The most powerfull way of promoting remains word-of-mouth advertising,
Not only will it be relatively cheap, but also the spread of message through word-of-mouth can have potentially epidemic effects. This tipe of advertising is called viral marketing.

You need to know that, for each one successful viral campaign, there are thousands that failed. Your first viral campaign will probably not have to much success, bucause you need to have some knowlage what the "buyer" needs, to get your campaign going. There are some information that may help you to grow your viral business and I will try to share it.

At first, you need to have a good content, but I will not talk about this here.

1) Incentives - this is just a simple affiliate program, you need to reword your affiliates with some kinds of discounts, credits or other forms of earnings.

2)free content- if you have your main product paid, you may concider to give your buyer something worthless that will be good enough to share with others, forexample via social networks

3)social networks- this is realy powerfull, but it is not as easy as it looks like, you need to make the visitors to push the button "like it" and to be able to achieve this, we are gettting to the questions of the content.

4) video - youtube - if you will be able to make a great, funny and maybe educative video, and give it away for free, your project will get viral so fast you wont even understand. For an example of such a video have a look at this one I love this video

5) You may use some types of backlinks, use thank you page ads exchange to get your project showing on other people thank you pages. You are not loosing your subscriber, buyer while using this method as he already bought/subscribed to your product.

6) If your product help to other webmasters, ask them to have a little link to your site at the bottom of their site, for some kind of discount or as an affiliate link if you have affiliate program set up.

Please note !!!

There is many other ways of using the viral marketing, I have covered just couple of them, other warriors can post more informations bellow this thread.

Thanks
Adam