Viral Marketing


by Steve Buchok - Date: 2006-12-01 - Word Count: 475 Share This!

I have read up as much as I can on this topic to see if anyone has come up with a viable way to transfer the concepts of viral marketing to the average website, the person who sells widgets or plumbing services or web design (like me). So far I would have to say NO. I have yet to see any viral marketing technique that will work for anything other than affiliate or marketing businesses.

Every eZine and eLetter that I’ve read on this topic has a few things in common. Get an eZine that you can duplicate and give it away. Sign up to emailing programs. Sign up for link exchange and banner exchange programs. Sign up to some other program that they recommend. The whole idea of the eZine is not to show you how to get traffic believe it or not, the idea is to get them traffic. You see, these programs that they have you signup for have multiple tiers to them. The more people they get to signup to them the more traffic they get. And this is what they are selling you on. It is a way to do viral marketing but it is misleading. In a lot of cases they have you pay for this information that when all is said and done becomes useless for the average website owner.

I’m not saying that viral marketing is bad or wrong but, I am saying that you need to find your own way to do it for your business. The key concept is to have the people that find out about you to tell others. Here is the basic idea:

Hotmail provides a free email service.
At the bottom of every email sent is a link to hotmail.
People check out there site and sign up.
Now whenever those people send an email the cycle starts all over.

Self replicating, self sustaining, exponentially increasing. These are the main concepts behind viral marketing and it can be achieved in the right circumstance and with the right idea. With every business being different there isn’t a way that I have found that I would say, “Yes this could work for any website”.

Before I end this little bit of information to you, you must also understand that some of the concepts in the viral marketing eZines might decrease your rankings in search engine. For example, link exchanges can decrease your listing depending on the link exchange program. Also if you are linking with directly with other sites it is best to link with related sites.

Below are a few ways I advertise my site and my abilities:
Create newsletters and articles and submit to article sites (like this one).
Write small programs and list them on download sites.
Submit to the major search engines (NO FFA SITES)
Optimize my site
Put your contact info and url in every email
Have useful content for your readers



Loves to create complex web applications and believes if it isn't hard it isn't worth doing. The soul owner and operator of WebcytDesign.net

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