When Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith founded Hotmail.com they promoted it with a simple idea they called Word of computer advertising. Every message sent by a subscriber had a one-line promotional message attached.Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com. Within the first 18 months of business they claimed 12 million sign-ups to their service more than what CNN and AOL could garner in the same time period. With a cost per acquisition of just 4 cents this was a resounding success and a brilliant use of Viral Marketing Technique.
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the messages exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.
It is an extremely effective form of word-of mouth online promotion strategy used for amazing success by web frontrunners like Hotmail and Bluemountain.com. For a home based or small business, viral marketing is a smart and cost effective way to promote business and generate new sales leads. It is easy and fun.
The biggest benefit of viral marketing is that it helps you maintain a cost effective level of brand awareness at all times. It can reach beyond your target audience and mine for new leads; it creates a buzz around your products and services and provides accountability when tracked.
Also see: http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/viral-marketing.html
Here are some tips for you to get your viral marketing campaign on the right track:
Once you have started off the process all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. For more information on viral marketing take a look at:
http://www.nmk.co.uk/article/2003/04/02/viral-marketing
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Banner Advertising:
Paying $15 for a 1000 impressions on a high traffic website. Sounds like good exposure for a low price It is! After all you will have a 1000 unique people view your banner. But how many actually end up clicking on it, and how many more actually end up buying stuff from you According to most industry sources the average click through rate of a banner campaign is 0.38%. So you get 3.8 people to click on your banner for $15. And the rate of conversion is typically 1 to 5%. So how much do you actually spend before a person buys from you You do the math. It appears quite a lot to me.
What about those popup ads Or the ones that keep popping up and refuse to close Wouldnt that give you more exposure Some banner sellers would love to make you believe that. Well its not the case. Ever had one very stubborn popup refusing to close How irritating is that I would never even buy anything from that kind of banner advertiser. Its downright irritating to have banner popup in the face when you are in the middle of surfing for some useful information.
Pay Per Click Search Engines:
The internet boom may be over, but for search engines the boom may have just begun. Many engines, the most famous being Overture and now Looksmart have turned to this model. Pay per click model makes you pay for the amount of actual clicks your site link receives and not for the number of exposures. Sounds good It sometimes is very effective too. For starters, you get quality traffic, cause the people who click on your link would have searched for a term relevant to you. However it can be pretty expensive. Overture makes you bid on the term you want to rank high on, and trust me sometimes the bids get pretty high. Looksmart on the other hand charges you $0.15 for each click through you get. Pretty expensive, if you have a small budget.However, if this scheme appeals to you, you are better off asking a SEO to implement it for you, instead of trying it yourself, since it can get pretty expensive for competitive terms.
Conventional Media Campaigns:
News paper advertisements, Posters, Television and Radio adverts, all come under traditional forms of advertising. However for most medium sized websites Television and Radio ads are way beyond budgets. And for an internet firm, it is of paramount importance that the newspaper or magazine reader who views his ad, remembers the website name. And as most experiences marketing guys will tell you, for that to happen you need to advertise regularly for a period of time. You add up the cost for an effective campaign and it will work out to be quite a sum.
Search Engine Submissions:
Search engine submissions include keyword analysis, study of competition, optimizing your website for the chosen keywords, submitting to search engines and directories and repeating the entire process and submissions over the period of time. Sounds quite a lot It is. But is it expensive Well, it varies for the kind of optimization you require, but trust me, at the end of the day, it is cheaper than most of the methods we discussed above.
Can you do it yourself Yes you can, if you have the time. Should you train somebody inhouse No, I dont think so. You will end up paying him a monthly salary which will definitely work out to be more than what you will pay a qualified SEO, and more often than not, he wont know all the tricks and methods a professional SEO would use.
What about those quite cheap off the shelf softwares that promise so much Well, they dont choose your keywords, they dont optimize the website, they dont study your traffic trends over the period of time, and finally they dont change with the rapidly changing algorithms and guidelines of search engines.
How about the traffic quality Is it inferior to the traffic generated by banner ads or newspaper adverts On the contrary. People had to have searched for a keyword relevant to your website before clicking on the link. Hence the traffic generated, contrary to the myth, is highly targeted.
And lastly, Are Search engine optimizers expensive Not at all, especially in comparison to the other forms of marketing. And a good SEO, will help you drive much more quality and sustained traffic to your site than any of the other mediums would be able to...
Hope you enjoyed reading this article... Look forward to hearing from you. So until next time... Happy Surfing!!!
Webmaster of different SEO websites. Hobbies are writing articles on SEO for public readings.