Article Discussion: Viral Marketing

The speed at which a cold gets passed around is bad, but the speed of word of mouth about your website is good, according to Wayne Hurlbert who explains how viral marketing can help your website. Learn how you can increase traffic to your site.


Read the full article here: Viral Marketing

"In fact, viral marketing messages have been known to spread around the entire world, in less than a day."

That's a quote from the article .. The article makes a viral marketing campaign look easy.. and there's
an example about microsoft .. I don't think my sites can compete with microsoft .. not yet anyway

Viral marketing and the examples given in the article can only apply to a high traffic website ...!!!

the success of Google is a good example of marketing by word of mouth. It took a little longer than a day (just a couple of years)

Thanks
It was really a nice article .
"The word can be spread around the world in literally the blink of an eye."
Thats true

While the examples used in the article were for larger businesses, the principles can still be applied to smaller businesses and sites.

Viral marketing is all about referrals and word of mouth from your "customer evangelists". In that sense, it is a tried and true technque. It is just that via the internet, it can travel at lightning speed.

Happy satisfied customers will happily recommend your business to others. They will forward your e-mail newsletters. They will link to your site.

Like all marketing, it takes time. Viral marketing can work rather slowly sometimes; but it will be noticeable.

On the other hand a campaign can spread very rapidly. You have to make certain your business and site bandwidth can handle the growth.

Viral marketing is replacing traditional marketing because it allows low-cost, rapid, highly targeted, personalized, and therefore extremely effective, communication and propagation of marketing messages to existing and potential customers, by leveraging relationships of trust.

Viral marketing is much much harder now days though. The web has matured and unless you have a truly unique idea, or else manage to develop a business model which gives something away for free that was normally at a price, it is near impossible to actually get enough marketing done by word of mouth. You can see this especially within such industries as that of adult. The largest adult website in the world has never once paid for advertising (thehun), yet today, even when a site offers to give away 1 the amount of free stuff (shall we call it, lol) than his, there is not enough interest to actually have an effect great enough to even constitute a successful site by word of mouth (however this is not to say word of mouth does not help).

I would say, that in order to be able to lay claim to a successful site, you need much more than being able to place reliance on word of mouth advertising (which also happens to bring in the highest quality traffic I find - apart from SE's). I have tried a viral approach on a number of my sites, and plan to rely somewhat on it on my latest project (http://www.lyricsdump.com) in which I will implement systems (which where recommended by a fellow SEOCHAT member I might add ) to allow users to contribute to the site by adding, correcting, etc lyrics they find. Time will tell how successful such a user friendly approach will be though, and although it requires more effort on my part I guess, I do have some faith in this approach.

(Good article/topic I might add)

Congratulations Wayne, Another great article.

This is a powerful concept. I've gotta figure out how I can do this. I would enjoy bringing the server down.. lol.

I saw a website in my country were viral marketing really have worked. It's a website for younger people (a community with guestbooks, photos, forum, SMS etc.) The website haven't been launched officially yet, but because of viral marketing (PR0 yet, it's totally new) it has allready approx 6200 members, 146 was logged in and 158 was online the last time I checked.

Thanks everyone.

I aprreciate everyone who reads and comments on my articles.

Viral marketing is not always easy, but then everything that is truly beneficial to your online business is going to require hard work and patience.

In that sense, viral marketing is much like SEO. There is a need for much experimentation and patience. There is a constant requirement of tweaking, measuring, experimenting, and then repeat as necessary.

All my best on your viral marketing efforts. :smile:

Wayne Hurlbert

an interesting article

usually when I think of "viral marketing" I almost don't even associate it with for-profit ventures, it seems like usually the ones that really go around tend to be non-commercial sites

The danish company Bullguard, who develops firewall- and antivirus-solutions, used viral marketing in one of their campaigns.

They had a small video on their site, where a naked man was bitten in a very private place by a bulldog. They encouraged people to pass it on to their friends, and a lot of people did.

The message in the campaign was to be prepared for sudden attacks.

I have also seen very skillfully done cartoons, flash games and contests get passed on very quickly.

You expect me to believe you bumped a thread that is nearly 4 YEARS OLD! to post that?

Get out of here with your useless spam!

Yes Pagi, this is happening almost everyday and has become a routine affair...I suggest you and all other caring members should make use of that spam button as soon as you see such a post!