Multiple Income Newsletter
ISSN 1289-024X

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Viral Marketing - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!

While the term "viral" easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Overview

Viral Marketing is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using viral marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Distribute viral ebooks/reports

You can also create and distribute viral ebooks. First, create an ebook or report packed with powerful valuable information that others could use. Put your links in the appropriate section of the report, with a compelling reason to encourage the reader to click to your website. Once there, your website should be ready to do its intended purpose e.g. make him sign up for your newsletter, or buy your products.

You can either sell the ebook at a nominal sum, with master resell rights, or give it away completely FREE. To have the maximum viral effect, giving it free usually gives the best results. Indicate prominently in the ebook that the recipient now has full distribution rights. This will encourage the reader to pass it on, thus creating the unstoppable traffic coming to your website through the links in the ebook.

When designing the viral ebook, don't commit the same deadly mistake as most marketers, which is : they focus on what they can get out of the deal.

Rather, you should ask yourself:

How can I offer them what they want? How can I create so much value for them that they can't help but pass the ebook out to others?

You can take it a step further to allow the reader to brand the ebook with their affiliate details for some of the links. This creates even more motivation for him to pass it on.

In summary, there are 3 key success factors in viral marketing:

1. You MUST give other people a strong incentive to pass your viral ebook on to others.
2. You MUST make it EASY for them to set up and pass your viral tools (e.g. branding software).
3. Your viral ebook MUST be consumed, i.e. read and used.

As usual, if you need to reach me, do drop me an email and I'll be glad to respond.

To your continuing success!
Thomas Choo