Thursday, 19 June 2014

Making Use of Viral Marketing for Your Internet Based Business

Viral marketing is one of the more powerful communication mediums in marketing, and yet, due to its complexities and people's little understanding of it, it remains one of the most difficult marketing methods to implement. This article will help you place some of the principles of viral marketing into perspective and hopefully give you a basic understanding of the topic and some strategies to implement it.

Let's picture a scenario where you are a starting entrepreneur with a business of selling chocolates to a small neighborhood. To begin the business, your stakeholders must first be informed of the product that your business sells; therefore, marketing plays an important role in the launch of the business.
The most straightforward way of selling your chocolates would be achieved through direct door-to-door marketing. This involves approaching one household at a time with hopes of closing a sale with each attempt. Of course, this method is inefficient and time consuming with no guarantees of a high conversion rate. A second method would involve sending direct mail or print adverts that you place in mailboxes throughout the neighborhood. While this approach saves time and increases awareness, you would have little hope in attracting any sales as your message will be placed amongst a clutter of other junk mail. Also, with such a small population, the profits may not cover printing cost for the adverts. Finally, you can broadcast your message through mediums such as radio or television and attract a fair sum of consumers but the high cost of doing so may not be affordable to a small starting business.

The role of word-of-mouth advertising is to generate buzz by getting the whole neighborhood to be talking about your chocolates. Not only will it be relatively cheap, but also the spread of message through word-of-mouth can have potentially epidemic effects. The exclusive use of word-of-mouth advertising on the Internet is known as viral marketing and we will take a look at some simple techniques of applying this method to your business.

In order to let people know about your online business, you have to let them know about your site. Now, are you, yourself, going to be able to let everyone on the Internet know about your site?
The obvious answer is "no!" Think about it: You could spend twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year promoting your site, and you still would barely scratch the surface of the people who are online. "So, what can I do?" you ask.

Well, the best way to get word of your site out there is to utilize viral marketing.
Viral marketing is where you create an ebook (though it can also be a software program) that contains links to your site. You then allow others to download the ebook or software program (for free, usually) and give it away to others.

The reason why it's called "viral marketing" is because, once your eBook or software program is spread around, it can keep going and going, much like how a virus is spread from person to person or animal to animal.

Of course, the eBook or software program must contain quality information or provide a useful application in order to convince other people to pass it to other people they meet (such as their subscribers, members of forums they belong to, social media friends and followers, etc.).

The idea behind this Video Sharing strategy is that, if these people like the information or the application you provide, they will likely visit your website via the links inside to learn more about you and your business, as well as to gain more quality content and useful applications.

This means that they will be more likely to purchase your products and services because, if you were willing to give away quality free content, their mindset will be that your paid content has to be even better. This can be a very powerful mindset to convince people to see you as an expert in your niche and to purchase your offers.

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