Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!
(another free article for you to read from T.M.R.)
Creativity
Traffic is the one virtue a site must possess to successfully compete in the race for online business revenue. With so much competition and rivalry, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.
It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product and a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it will all be for naught (that means 'A Big Fat Zero' for all you folks from Rio Linda).
While there are many methods and schemes used by e-commerce sites today, there one of these that is underused and mis-used: Viral Marketing.
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. It also has nothing to with pop-ups, pop-unders, or spyware. We have all had more than our share of those.
Viral Marketing Overview
Viral Marketing also known as Viral Advertising, is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. Many forms of media are used to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product.
By means of an attractive, useful, or amusing free product consumers are allowed and encouraged to pass the "product" along to friends, co-workers, or associates.
Companies depend on the idea that if people like the content of a media product, they will pass it on to their friends and family.
They sponsor a media product, such as a new, innovative idea, a cool flash game, a funny video, or an amusing story and trust that one user will pass it on to several people, who will in-turn pass it on in a geometrical progression.
It is not a pyrimid scheme because there is no cost to the user.
Included with the free product is the company website address, and maybe the offer of other products. Of course, there is no obligation.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it has a relatively low cost. Viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product or information to another usually through email or email attachments.
If a person sees the name of a person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and will usually open it to check it out. It becomes a very ethical and functional way to reach a large number of targeted consumers and eleminates the need for spam.
Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. Your discount or rebate may be calculated on the number of recipients you influence to view the product or partake of the co-offered products.
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 traffic flow of 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 sites and online companies are catching on to the effectiveness of Viral Marketing and Advertising.
Not using it, along with other methods such as Search Engine Optimization, could kill your business.
The effectual use of viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.
Viral Marketing is a very unobtrusive way to get people to learn about you and your business. You "allow" them to pass your advertisement along. The low cost is another plus.
All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story, or something that you may come up with. Many ideas are still out there waiting to be realized.
Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?
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 big company known to utilize the scheme and it worked wonders for them.
Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits. Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.
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