Viral Marketing
This involves spreading a "virus" that spreads, in the positive sense, about you via word of mouth and e-mail. If you can get the people in your niche talking about you, you’ve done half your work already.
The terms “link bait” and “viral marketing” have been overused in SEO and marketing circles, but these are very powerful techniques that you can use to bring traffic as well as high search engine rankings to your website.
Basically, viral marketing is getting people to start talking about your website. From an offline sense, it is called “word of mouth marketing” and is one of the most powerful forms of marketing you can possibly tap into. Many of the world’s greatest companies have been built upon word of mouth. Google, Hotmail, Amazon, and offline companies like FedEx and Dominos pizza. These companies were first built upon word of mouth before they had their million or even billion dollar advertising budgets.
Basically it comes down to building interest. You want people to mention it on their blogs, on their websites, to friends etc. In short, you want your readers to also be your marketing force. To make this happen, you have to understand that viral marketing is not just about what you provide on your website or how it helps people (or even the value) – it’s about the experience. If you can create a powerful, compelling user experience around your website
that attracts your target market and if you make it exceedingly simple for your customers and readers to spread the word, you will have a situation where your customers market your website and do it far more effectively to their friends and their contacts than you ever could.
Viral marketing is similar to networking and affiliate marketing because it forces you to build a positive experience (to over deliver) – and in the process you’re forced to be creative and improve your website (that is, your need to market your website effectively causes you to create a better website). One of the easiest gimmicks to use for viral marketing is to offer something for free on your website/blog. People LOVE free stuff – reports, newsletters, tools – you name it, marketers have used the “free” hook to establish a foothold in all markets. The best free stuff is something that has never been offered before, going way beyond the call of duty and giving away a HUGE amount of value for free.
However, if you’re a bit skeptical about giving away your hard work for free, consider this: The fastest way to reach as many potential customers as possible to build a “buzz” around your website is to get people to talk about your work in forums and on their own websites and blogs. In other words, get people to reach out to communities and sections of your target market that you would never be able to penetrate by yourself.
Now in order to do that, you have to ensure two things: One, your work should be worth talking about (create a better website) and two, make it extremely easy for people to talk about you. Getting your market to talk about you is not easy – but if you stick to it and if you make it happen, it’s more effective than any other strategy we’ve talked about here. You don’t incur the costs of paid advertising and viral marketing tends to get you tons and tons of links (and traffic) – doing most of your link building work for you.
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