What is Viral Marketing?
Todays question is What is Viral Marketing. You hear this term a lot of times and it sounds good. But what really exactly is it? I have spent some time researching it and I decided to use some viral marketing. Guess where??? Right here on this very blog. Ive got some really cool data that I want to share & its coming from the blog. Now Im going to share with you 3 things about viral marketing that I think you can apply that will work. I will talk about how they work & how I implemented them.
The third one actually I have not yet implemented yet, but I will be soon, so I will give you a sneak peak on how you will be using it. First of all viral marketing is basically any kind of marketing. You know one thing that I dont like is when people talk about traffic generation techniques; they will list viral marketing as a separate thing. It’s the same. Viral marketing sits above. You do anything, and it turns viral. Social marketing, article marketing, video marketing, even your paid marketing, press release marketing, brand marketing. All of these can go viral.
Viral is just what happens with your marketing after you release it. So the point of viral marketing is for you to create something and then it gets spread throughout the world. This is exactly how MSN’s Hotmail became what they are. They became what Hotmail was and then got acquired by Microsoft. Just because every email that went out had a little footer saying Sign up now for your own free email account. Thats viral. Watch YouTube. YouTube went viral. Look at some of the top videos at YouTube. How many videos have you sent to your friends because you thought that they were funny? That is you participating in viral marketing. How many times have you Tweeted, or FaceBooked something that is funny or a link to something. That is you taking part in viral marketing.
So what we want to do in viral marketing is flip it. How can we device a way that will make other people want to tell other people about it? Basically word of mouth marketing. So the 3 that I discussed below are viral videos. There is nothing new to say there. Its video marketing at its best. You are watching something that I hope will go viral in sometime. I am going to share with you proof and evidence in a second that what I have been doing HAS gone viral.
Second is incentivized social media. This is a great thing. By the way, let me take a quick break. There are a lot of viral ideas and I ripped actually 3 of these away from a report that my friends put together. Click the link that is there somewhere around this video. You will have to share your name and email to get it. Its not mine its his, but I wanted to give him a shot out. Its a great report, read it if you want to know more about viral marketing.
So again the second one is incentivized social media. You want an example, look on the right side of the blog, or if you are watching this video somewhere else go to AnikSingal. Come and you will see that when I say win pads and win that go and read that page. This is what incentivized social media is. I want you to tweet about me, I want you to FaceBook me and in exchange I bribe you with something. Thats incentivized social media, see it for yourself. Go to Twitter and type @aniksingal and you will see that there are hundreds of people that have done this and that has helped me make this blog viral.
The third one is what you call Stats Based Press Releases. This is one of my favorite ones. I havent done this from quite sometime, but I want to start doing this again. Its the easiest way to go viral to media.
Its one thing to go viral to consumers and to people. But its a whole another ball game to go viral to media. And I did it. I did this once and the whole thing was absolutely mind blowing. So here it is in black and white. AnikSingal.com launched not so long ago, 134,234 visits since launch. Whooping 271,957 page views. Thats around 300,000 page views in 3 weeks. I accept that I have a list that I market to. 72% of them new visitors. My list isnt that big. My posts have been going viral.
Scroll down my blog and you will see how many times things are being tweeted. You will see how many times it was tagged “like” on FaceBook. You will see that I am using FaceBook plug-in for comments. That means this is how many times its being spread on FaceBook. Right now FaceBook is already referring 1% of my traffic.
Now I know that doesnt sound like a lot. But I just started. Its already got me a size-able traffic, free traffic. I have no idea where its coming from. The rest of it is direct type in traffic. This means my links being forwarded by people to each other. A total of 55% of my traffic is coming from that. That only means that the rest of coming from people clicking theirs emails as they do have an email database. 55% is just being
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