UK SEO and Internet Marketing Forums
viral marketing

Hi,
Can any one tell me about viral marketing?
Thanks.

The other way to create a viral marketing excercise is via www.google.com/alerts and use the expression 'social networking sites' in your keyword/anchor text search terms - or blogs - as the search results come in daily you can log onto the sites and see who's in a similar market and co-operate with each other in linking strategies.

My understanding of viral marketing is something which is passed on from one user to another, hence the name 'viral'.  For example a 'hot' ebook or YouTube video would 'go viral' if it was very popular and users started emailing it to each other, blogging about it, and posting it on MySpace etc.  A truely viral marketing campaign starts quite small, and very quickly can reach a massive audience. 

This is further compounded if the product or service itself helps to transmit the message.  The best example of this is when Hotmail first launched and at the bottom of every email was a link that sais 'click here to get a free hotmail account'.  At the time nobody else was giving away free email accounts and it was a truely viral explosion - Hotmail went from virtually unknown to one of the biggest players in the email marketplace simply because every time someone sent an email that acted as an advert for the service.

You can benefit from viral marketing concepts by making your content easy for users to pass on, and encouraging them to do so.  Think about YouTube - every page has the embed code so that users can paste the video on to their own sites, and that video then includes a link back to Youtube!  I've done the same thing with free Flash games and it got me over 27,000 backlinks with virtually no promotion on my part - just gave them away and each one gets me a link!

Do a quick search for Mike Filsaime on Google, he released a free report a while back called Virology which goes into quite a bit of detail on this.

Bill

You can always find a solution for this in wikipedia, still i will give you the link also, go through it for a definition and deeper understanding of it. http://www.davidcastle.org/BB/general-search-engine-optimisation-discussion/broken-link-checker/

Here are a few other ways to go about viral marketing...

1. Viral ebook, give away a free ebook with valuable content for your target market.
Then submit your free ebook to givaway events, free ebook directories, freeware
sites and your opt-in list. Your ebook will become viral from being passed around
the internet if the content is good enough. Include a link back to your site or
product from within the report.

2. Tell a friend script, install a tell a friend script on your website. If your contents
good enough you should start receiving viral traffic. Word of mouth is still one of
the most effective marketing techniques around.

3. Social bookmarking, if you have an interesting or funny story, submit to digg,
stumble-upon and other social bookmarking sites.


Just my 2 cents


paul