Viral marketing refers to information that is passed along from person to person. The internet is a great viral marketing medium because you can distribute your content very quickly to a large audience. It’s similar to a human virus. Think of the swine flu or cold virus that spread quickly if you were in the same room as the person with the virus.
Benefits of viral marketing
The amount of traffic generated to your website will increase in proportion to the number of people your content reaches. The larger your audience the more visitors you’ll receive. Viral promotion strategies may include article marketing, videos, reports, ebooks, affiliates, images or simply writing compelling content.
Article marketing: an example of how to generate traffic with viral marketing
When marketing products on the Net lots of content is constantly needed to build backlinks, increase search engine rankings and provide material for your website visitors. Your customers are what keep you in business so if you take good care of them by giving them valuable content you’ll build long term relationships.
1. Write a compelling article
- Create a list of keywords using the free WordTracker or Google keyword research tool
- Create topics based on each keyword
- Create an attractive headline to draw readers into your article
- Write several paragraphs containing tips related to your headline
- Create a resource box that offers a free report as an incentive for visiting your website
- Include anchor text (hyperlinked keyword) and your full web address in the resource box
2. Submit to article directories
The top article directories receive millions of visitors and are visited daily by the search engines. When you submit your article to them you’ll generate instant and long term traffic. Instant traffic comes from RSS feeds, email alerts and ezine publishers selecting your article for publication. Long term traffic comes from your article appearing in the search engines. This happens because you get a high quality backlink from the directory plus backlinks from other sites that publish your article.
3. Publish on your blog
Publish the article on your blog so visitors can pass it on to others or comment on it. It will also be distributed to your RSS readers through the RSS feed built into your blog.
4. Use social media
Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to notify potential readers about your new article. Add social bookmarking icons to your website or blog for visitors to easily bookmark your content.
5. Repurpose your articles
Convert your articles to videos, podcasts, short reports and ebooks. Use video sharing sites (e.g. YouTube), podcast and ebook directories to spread your content virally.
Viral marketing through writing and distributing content, creates a snowball affect that can generate traffic to your website instantly and continuously for many years to come.
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