Viral Marketing

January 15, 2009 · Filed Under Making Money, Viral Marketing

by Hal Major

Traffic is the life blood of a blog…

It is the measure of success of a blog. Regardless of your goals and objectives as a blogger, you must think in the terms of visitors and traffic.

Your first objective above all else is to build traffic. Everything else comes with the traffic or put in the negative context, with no traffic there is nothing else.

In my post Blog Traffic Secrets I listed the topics to be covered in this series of posts. Viral Marketing is the first of the posts.

Going Viral

The first traffic strategy in this series of posts is on viral marketing or advertising. Going viral is a simple process and can generate a lot of traffic to your blog.

Viral Marketing definition

Source: www.marketingterms.com

“Marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.

Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.”

Sizzle or Fizzle

As the definition points out the results of a viral advertising campaign can sizzle when a large percentage of people pass along the message, or completely fizzle when few or no one passes it along.

In order to make sure it gets passed along it must be a message that people are looking for. The message has to answer their questions, help them accomplish a task, or solve a problem. You must know what your readers want. I’ll discuss in a later post how you find out what readers and visitors want.

Let’s assume we already know and we are going to address those wants and needs by writing a report, article, ebook or making a video.

Give Away Free Answers

Your report, article, etc. will give some of the answers to your readers questions and problems, at no charge. You don’t want to give away the whole store in your report. Write enough to convince the reader your an authority on the subject and they will want to read more. A report of about 1000 to 1500 words is enough.

You can create your report from your blog posts. This way you don’t need to constantly create new content for your blog and your report.

Take a guess as to where they can find more of your wit and wisdom. Did you guess your blog. Yea, see you are an authority, but you knew that already.

In the report you will include context links back to your blog. At the end of the report put your name and blog URL. If you make a video be sure to include your blog URL as the opening and closing shots. Mention the name of your blog throughout the video. Don’t overdue it, though.

Small Business Viral Marketing Tips, SES San Jose 2008

Hit the Links

The context links should be the keywords that your blog is focused on. And, that you have posts that will expand on the information from the article or report.

End of Story

The last page of the report will tell the reader what and how they can use the report. This is commonly called the “License”. Since you want the report to get used and passed around feverishly, the only restriction is they can’t change any of the content or links and they must show you as the author including your blog URL.

They can give the report away. They can sell the report. They can post the report to their blog. They can break it up into smaller pieces as long as all credits remain intact. They can use it to gain subscribers to an email list. They can post excerpts in forums and on social sites as long as you’re shown as the source.

Conclusion

The advantage of viral marketing/advertising to increase blog traffic is it continues to work as long as the topic remains relevant to what people want. It’s sticky. I still get visitors and sales from a free report I wrote 2 years ago about keyword research techniques.

Read the first post in the traffic generation series: Blog Traffic Secrets

Go to the next post about Article Marketing.

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