The Key To Viral Marketing

Create An Unstoppable Buzz Through Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing Welcome Message

Each of us has 24 hours in a day. How much you can accomplish in a single day is determined by how efficiently you use your time. If you try to draw traffic and grow your business on your own, it can be a time consuming process.

Then there was the idea of viral marketing. Have you ever gone to a restaurant because a friend recommended it to you? Yes, word of mouth is a very effective marketing tool. With viral marketing, you can reach a large number of people in a fraction of the time and cost.

You’ll be able to accomplish more in less time and make the most of your 24 hours. Viral marketing has enabled small businesses and corporate behemoths to reach a large target audience faster than ever before, and if you don’t take advantage of this online marketing phenomenon, you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Let’s dive right into the important aspects of viral marketing!

Introduction To Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing has been around since the dawn of the web 2.0 era. It is the evolution of word of mouth marketing as a result of the Internet’s rapid growth and the emergence of social sharing tools.

The internet was unidirectional in the web 1.0 era. In other words, I have a website where I write about various topics and you can read about them. Today, webmasters and their target audiences interact in multidimensional ways through web content.

People can use a variety of sharing tools such as blogs, microblogging platforms (Twitter), Facebook, and other social sharing websites such as Reddit and Digg.com to comment, share and “Like” (for Facebook).

This eases and facilitates the growth of viral marketing, making it the best way to grow someone’s business quickly.

What’s important to remember is that if you don’t take advantage of the wonders of viral marketing, your competitors will, and you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table. In the following section, we’ll go over the fundamentals of viral marketing and how you can use it to grow your business.

The Power Of Social Media

One of the most common mistakes that both experienced and inexperienced marketers make is underestimating the power of social media.

To give you an idea, Facebook is the most popular online social network.
It is the most popular social networking website in the world, with over 500 million users. If so, If it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, after China and the United States. China and India, respectively.

Social media has recently surpassed traditional forms of entertainment as the most popular pastime in the world, even eclipsing email. This simply indicates how much time is spent on social media activities. This means that there is a huge opportunity for viral marketing to explode in the social media scene. Imagine if you could reach out to millions of people because your idea or brand is relevant to them.

I’d also like to draw your attention to YouTube, the world’s largest video sharing website. YouTube receives millions of views each day, and due to the viral nature of videos, your business stands to benefit greatly from tapping into this viral video sharing phenomenon. Have you ever seen a quirky, funny video that made you want to share it with your friends?

Then there’s Twitter, the microblogging platform. Its ever increasing user base tells us that we must jump on board before it’s too late! Twitter has a massive market waiting to be exploited!

Viral Marketing Basics

So, how do you begin leveraging the power of viral marketing in your business? The first thing you should understand is that viral marketing is based on the power of word of mouth. That is, you must provide a means for people to share content with others.

If you have a WordPress blog, for example, you can install social sharing plugins so that sharing tools appear at the end of your blog posts. One of these tools is ShareThis, which allows you to include a variety of social sharing tools at the end of your blog posts, pages or even sidebars.

After you’ve installed viral marketing tools on your website or blog, you’ll need to determine your viral marketing objectives. Goals should be measurable so that you can track your progress and work to improve.

This could be something like the number of Facebook “Likes,” blog comments, weekly visitors, or monthly sales. Once you’ve determined your goals, you can devise a viral strategy to help you achieve them.

As simple as it sounds, viral marketing necessitates some planning and know how to get it right, which we will discuss now.

Creating A Viral E-book

Back in the day, anyone who gave something away for free without expecting something in return was considered a fool. However, the most astute marketers understand that this is not the case. They gave away freebies and incentives to build their fan base so that when they released their actual paid product, sales skyrocketed because people knew how good it was.

If you position your viral eBook correctly, it can help you generate buzz and hype about your company and products. This is how you make a viral eBook. First, choose a topic for your writing. The eBook should ideally be something that your niche market is looking for and be linked to a paid product that you plan to release in the future.

Mention in your viral eBook that you are providing your readers with exclusive “giveaway” rights to the eBook. That is, as long as the viral book remains intact, your readers are free to share your content with others.

You’ll need to sprinkle your website links throughout the viral book or use them in the footer. As a result, when your eBook is distributed, your links will be preserved and new readers will see your link and flock to it to find more good content.

Above all, remember to share your viral eBook with your followers so that they can help you spread the word.

Utilizing Facebook As a Viral Tool

One of the reasons Facebook has grown so quickly as the world’s largest and fastest growing website is that it is viral in nature.

With Facebook, information spreads quickly through word of mouth. That is why many large corporations have recognized this power and have been looking for ways to harness it.

Whether you own a small business or a large chain of businesses, you have the potential to use Facebook’s viral nature to grow your business by leaps and bounds. The Fan pages are a key viral component of Facebook.

What happens is that you can create a single page for your company and set up all of its basic information. You can then invite your customers to join you by “Liking” your fan page.

Once you’ve established a burgeoning community, encourage them to interact on the page and continue to provide content in order to create a social “hub” for your business on Facebook.

The viral marketing aspect comes into play when every interaction your fans have on the page is displayed in their news feed. All of their friends will see their news feed and become interested in what is happening on the Fan page. As a result, you will receive more likes and your page will begin to grow at an exponential rate. Consider it passive, viral traffic with little effort!

Utilizing Twitter As a Viral Tool

As previously stated, you can use Twitter as a viral tool to reach out to your target audience.

Twitter is the world’s largest microblogging platform, with millions of “Tweeps” (users) (Twitter people). Twitter allows you to send short updates to your followers in order to stay in touch with them in real time.

Here’s one way to generate viral buzz on Twitter. If your followers like what you’re doing, ask them to re-tweet or tweet about your web content, such as blog posts. You can also give away a free eBook to the top tweeter follower who promotes your content.

On Twitter, the hashtag is frequently used to denote specific events. Assume your company is planning a launch. To generate buzz about your launch, ask your loyal followers to tweet about it using the hashtag #.

When others search Twitter cyberspace for your launch using the #tag, they will see the amount of buzz surrounding it, and you will have gained instant credibility. Furthermore, if you can become a trending topic, your business will skyrocket!

Overall, Twitter can be used to establish a good rapport with your customers, causing them to be more responsive to your content and more willing to share it with others because they enjoy it so much.

How To Create A Viral Buzz

Here are some additional techniques for creating viral buzz that you can learn and apply right away in your business:

1. Hold competitions. Determine who can get the most Facebook “likes” and award the winner with a gift or eBook.
2. Tweetathon — Host a tweetathon for a common cause related to your line of business.
3. Always respond to comments. Responding to and retweeting people who share your content shows that you are listening and that you care about your customers.
4. Incorporate social sharing tools throughout the site. You can use the Facebook Sharer link to enable people to share content with their Facebook friends wherever they go.
5. Launch a YouTube channel. Remember that videos are highly viral in nature and can reach a large audience in a short period of time. Create some amusing videos and share them with your followers, asking them to share them if they enjoy them.
6. Use QR codes to generate curiosity. QR codes are a cool and funny way to market your business virally and it’s surprising how underutilized they are today.

In short, when it comes to viral marketing, content reigns supreme. The better and more viral your content, the more people will want to share it with others.

Viral Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

Viral Marketing is an excellent tool for marketing your company, but if you make the following mistakes, you will be doing more harm than good. Here’s what you should avoid:

1. Do not provide an incentive for users to share it and make the content itself good/funny — jokes are a safe bet.
2. Failing to capitalize on a successful campaign. If your campaign begins to gain traction, consider whether you can gain additional exposure, monetize the incoming traffic, or generate more leads.
3. Replicating a viral campaign that is inappropriate for your business. You will muddle the message you want to convey to your customers if you do so.
4. Failing to combine your viral marketing efforts with other marketing methods. You should not put all of your eggs in one basket — it is business suicide.
5. Failing to integrate SEO into your viral campaign. Don’t overlook the synergistic effect of SEO and keywords with your viral efforts!
6. Making it difficult to share your content. Always provide plenty of sharing tools for your followers to help them go viral.

Viral Marketing Final Thoughts

It is my sincere hope that this article has provided you with a thorough understanding of the benefits of viral marketing and how it can help you rapidly grow your business, generate new leads and increase profits.

There are no shortcuts to success, just as Rome was not built in a day. Proper planning, as well as obtaining the right people and resources, should always come before launching a viral campaign.

Your company stands to benefit greatly from the power of viral marketing. Even if you struggle to manage your viral campaign, hiring people to do the job for you can sometimes provide more benefits and easily cover your investment costs due to the hype and buzz you will generate.

If you’re still on the fence, the best way to proceed is to jump in, take action, and tweak as you go. I wish you the best of luck with your viral marketing efforts!