What Works & What Doesn’t in Viral Marketing
Stop with the enforced e-mail forwards already! Trying to force or bribe people to forward your info to a friends or family in order to be rewarded or win looks skanky in today’s ultra-permission-based world. Especially when you tell visitors nothing about their friend’s or familys privacy in the space directly next to the e-mail form.
A true viral campaign gets forwarded because consumers are compelled to do so by the glory of the content, not because you bribed them with points or something else.
What absolutely will not work:
Suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and family will not work. Adding a line at the bottom of your e-mail that reads Please feel free to forward this message to a friend is more likely to get it deleted than forwarded.
What absolutely will work:
Offering something worthy of sharing like a valuable discount, vital information or offering an incentive for sharing like additional entries into a sweepstakes or an added discount or premium service will work.
Relevant or timely information, research, or studies that are included in your e-mail might encourage the recipients to share with their family and friends. Interactive content like a quiz or test, especially if its fun, will inspire forwarding.
Jokes and cartoons are almost always forwarded to everybody the recipient knows. Why? Because they are entertaining and entertainment is meant to be shared.
A really cool multimedia experience is always going to achieve a lot of pass-along. Rich media is new and the novelty and tech factors alone are often enough to make the e-mail recipient eager to share it.
Oops! Almost forgot one really important thing.You can craft a brilliant e-mail following all the rules, but if a consumer visits your site and has an experience less that what was promised, you are going to achieve viral marketing, alrightthe bad kind. So be certain that your product or service is ready and is as advertised.
What an E-book Can Do for You
An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to explode the distribution of your message by willing participants.
This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site.
Using viral E-books as a marketing method is cheap. It doesnt take long to set up and its even quicker if you use rebrandable E-books that have been written by others. Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search. You will find many rebrandable E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business. One method of distributing the E-book is to offer it to visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family it will promote your business for you.
E-books are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited only by the enthusiasm of the participants.
E-books are fairly easy to create. Its possible to produce your own E-books by combining articles that you have written or have gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.
A common approach is to use material that has Private Label Rights, including articles and reports that have been written specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Using a portion of a larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters of a large E-book could also be used as a viral E-book.
Start Viral Marketing Campaigns Using E-books
Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It is, also, a powerful way to generate traffic to your website.
Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.
Now lets look at using an E-book to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an E-book a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.
Before you know it the E-book is spreading across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free E-book.
Make certain that you let people know that they have permission to forward the E-book around the Internet. When you create the E-book, you have the right to give people certain rights. One of those rights could be that you allow them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away.
You can write the E-book yourself, use private label content or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are a lot of ways to create an E-book. Once you have your E-book written, use software to create your E-book.
-
More Useful Links!
