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By Richard Grady
If you have spent any time at all studying Internet
marketing, then you are bound to have come across the term
'viral marketing'. In fact, it is one of the first things
that most people learn about when starting their Internet
journey and very often it is a subject that is quickly
forgotten or discarded as being an unrealistic way of
generating traffic. However, I did something this week
which made me look at viral marketing in a new light and
proved to me that it is incredibly effective.
For those that don't know, viral marketing is used to
generate traffic and it works by getting other people to
spread the word about your website. Because of the fact
that you are using other people, your 'message' can spread
across the Internet very quickly - just like a virus, hence
the name.
One of the most common ways of using viral marketing is by
writing an eBook that contains links back to your website
and allowing other people to give the eBook away or resell
it to their own customers. If you manage this process
correctly, you can end up with hundreds or even thousands
of people distributing your eBook. Because of the fact
that every eBook has a note of your website link in it, a
fair proportion of the ultimate readers can be expected to
click through to your site (and hopefully a few of these
will buy something from you).
Of course, viral marketing doesn't have to be based around
an eBook - another way of using this technique is to create
a site that is very unique or amusing. The sort of site
that you look at and 'just have to tell your friends
about'. These sites can generate huge levels of traffic in
a very short space of time as each person emails their
friends to pass on the website URL.
Now, the reason that I say that people often give up on
viral marketing as being unrealistic is because it can seem
like an incredible task to write or design something that
is going to have mass appeal AND then get the word out to
enough people and persuade them to start passing your
eBook/link/whatever on to even more people. Also, viral
marketing doesn't always happen quickly - it can take
several months or even longer for the traffic to start
flowing at a reasonable level. To be honest, I am pretty
much an 'I want it now' kinda guy and for this reason, I
haven't really relied on viral marketing that much for my
own businesses (or so I thought!)
So what happened this week?
Well, nothing super-exciting really - I simply did a search
on Google for the following term: 'UK-Trader's UK
Wholesale Guide'. As many of you will know, this was the
first eBook I ever published back in 2001. I also issued
resale rights on the first version of the eBook (again in
2001) but quickly stopped selling the rights as I was
spending too much time policing those that chose to sell it
in breach of the resale rights conditions.
Anyway, my Google search revealed over 2,000 search results
for the above term! Now, whilst some of these results
related to my own websites and those of my affiliates, a
massive number were in respect of sites that were selling
the 'resale rights' version of the eBook or that were
acting as an affiliate for someone else that had the resale
rights.
Considering that I had only issued resale rights in limited
numbers, during a period of just a few months and over
three years ago, I found the number of search results quite
incredible. Just imagine what sort of numbers I could have
generated if I hadn't stopped selling the resale rights and
had allowed my viral marketing to continue.
Even if each of the above references/links generates only
one visitor to my websites each month, that is still over
2000 free visitors every single month. In addition, not
only do these visitors not cost me anything but I don't
have to do anything to get them.
I was so surprised at the above results that I am planning
on releasing resale rights to the latest version of my
wholesale guide in the near future and if you have a
product to which you can apply a viral marketing technique,
I strongly recommend that you give it a try. What have you
got to lose? More importantly, what have you got to gain?
One other thing to bear in mind is that once the word is
out 'virally', it is quite literally impossible to stop the
traffic that your marketing virus will create. So to sum
it up, if you get it right and create the perfect viral
marketing campaign, you will end up with FREE traffic every
month that you don't need to DO ANYTHING to receive and
that would be IMPOSSIBLE to stop, even if you wanted to!
Sounds great to me.
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