What Everybody Ought To Know -- About How To Use Viral Marketing To Boost Online Business.

10 High-impact Viral Marketing Strategies YOU can use to save time and money!

By Dr Tony de Bree MBA, TheKnowledgeCircle & Go4estrategy Consulting

One of the most effective and efficient new opportunities on the Net are the possibilities of viral marketing. In this short article you will learn:

1. What a virus is.
2. What viral marketing is.
3. What succesfull viral marketing strategies look like.
4. What 10 viral strategies YOU can use best.

You have to admire a virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don´t even have to mate -- he  just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration. This is what happens if also favourable conditions are met:

What does a virus have to do with marketing you might ask.

“Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence".:

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. The medium or the carrier can actually be anything digital like emails, eBooks, articles, software, websites etc etc. But in any case, it has to be something of value. Or else the virus will not spread.:

Off the Internet, viral marketing is known as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing." While others have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term "viral marketing" has stuck.

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services, 2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and, 3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates, 4. Who see the message, 5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then 6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates:

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

In summary, Viral Marketing is allowing people to giveaway and use your free product or service in order to multiply your marketing quickly over the internet. The idea behind viral marketing is that you include your ad with the freebie people giveaway or use. Or in a product that you have sold to them with either resale rights or master resale rights.  

Although I have seen many different viral marketing strategies over the years, some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy.

But below are the six basic elements you should include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it combines, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

a. Gives away products or services
b. Provides for effortless transfer to others
c. Scales easily from small to very large
d. Exploits common motivations and behaviours
e. Uses existing communication networks between people
f. Takes advantage of others' resources

Let's examine at each of these elements briefly.

a. Gives away valuable products or services

"Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free web-templates, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the "pro" version.

"Cheap" or "inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but "free" will usually do it much faster. And succesfull Viral marketers are patient. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit sooner or later. Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and then you will earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

b. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Think again about the virus. With the flu, people tell you to stay away from people who cough. Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, eBook, article (like this one) website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. And because of its digital formats. Digital formats make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. Remember: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

c. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like a virus the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you're okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model. So make sure you have the right autoresponder in place with the right scalable solution. The one we use can be found at the bottom of this page.

d. Exploits common motivations and behaviours

Succesfull viral marketing campaigns take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated "Netscape Now" buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviours for its transmission, and you have a winner. But beware of differences in culture. Not all people are the same!

e. Uses existing communication networks between people

Most people are social ´animals´. Behavioural scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too.

That is what relationship marketing is all about. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do opt-in/permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion. But there is also a downside to that principle. If you cheat on people, that will become known very quickly also.

f. Takes advantage of others' resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the message across. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others' webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers (especially when the article is in the form of a webpage like this one). Now someone else's newsprint or webpage is transmitting your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.