Viral Marketing: Spread It Like Wild Fire

We continue with our traffic series, coutesy of Traffic Heist.

You’ve most likely heard the term Viral Marketing, but might not really know how to set up a campaign that is likely to go viral, being carried from person to person, eager and willing to share your website link with friends, family and online acquaintances.

In reality, creating a viral marketing campaign is nowhere near as difficult as most people believe, and can yield an impressive return on investment if done correctly.

Here are a few ideas to help you set up a viral marketing campaign of your own:

#1: Offer Incentives

Viral marketing always works best when a valuable product or service (including tangible items) are offered. By encouraging activity such as requiring that a user refers or recommends your site to five friends prior to being able to download the digital product, or receive an entry into your contest, you are able to instantly generate a buzz around your site.

You could give away digital items such as a report, ebook, script, audio file, video clip, course, software, scripts or even coaching.

You could also offer physical items such as tshirts (with your logo printed on the front), mouse pads, coffee mugs, calendars and so on. (think, www.CafePress.com)

You can also consider giving a discount to a product or service, rather than offering something for free. I’ve done this successfully by offering my visitors an instant discount just for filling out my “Refer A Friend” form, and sending off an email broadcast to five or ten of their contacts.

#2: Be Incredibly Different

If you want to generate a buzz around your website, you need to stand out from the crowd by being original, different, perhaps controversial. You could create a blog post highlighting an opposing view to a recent news clip, or create a video that takes on an entertaining or comical approach, such as a parody of a recent event.

#3: Run A Contest Or Challenge

One of the easiest ways to create a viral campaign is by offering a contest where the user has to fulfill certain tasks in order to be eligible to win prizes.

This could include promoting your product as an affiliate, completing a survey (helping you compile demographic information or feedback about your website), or it could be as simple as posting a comment on your blog, or adding you to their Twitter account.

If you look at the overall picture, rather than just the immediate surge of traffic that your website will experience, you will be able to end the promotion, benefiting from the new subscribers, followers and continued traffic that you’ll receive.

During the Christmas holidays, NameCheap.com, a popular domain registrar gave away a few hundred dollars worth of domain registrations just for having people follow them on Twitter and answer questions to trivia challenges. While this created an immediate buzz from people hoping to win a free domain name, it didn’t cost NameCheap much in promotion and in the end, they not only had a large following of users on Twitter, but they had reached out to new customers who are likely to continue registering domain names, since after all, they have the one they received free already hosted at NameCheap.

#4: Save People Time & Money

Consider creating a package that you can give away with resell rights, to marketers and online businesses in your niche market.

Marketers are always looking for free content or giveaways that they can pass onto their list, and be offering resell rights, you pass on a pre-created PDF file that includes your website link in every copy distributed.

This means FREE promotion, while providing fellow marketers with valuable content that they will gladly send out to their subscribers, or feature on their website.

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