Archive for August, 2008:
What is Viral Marketing ?
Many people may have heard the term “viral” associated with different styles of marketing and wonder what some of them are, but specifically what is viral marketing? Well, the simple answer to the question is that this type of product promotion is a form of advertising, which deals mainly with the infiltration of the Internet, with advertisements, logos, and critical product placement in a manner that will most easily entice people to buy their products.
The idea behind viral marketing is that if you can get the product up in multiple places on the web and in front of as many eyes as possible for as little money as possible, you are doing some really good marketing on a budget. Most of the companies behind this style of promotion are smaller businesses that just want to get the word out about their product but don’t have the money to hire a public relations firm or spend money on advertising.
One of the more effective methods of viral marketing is to form a Joint Venture with another business. While you have the product, your JV partner may bring his customer content list of thousands and his marketing skills to the project. In most cases a JV will benefit both parties involved with an equal split of the profits and possibly the work.
Another form of getting your product, to race around the internet world, is to set up an affiliate program with 100s of individuals and business promoting your product. The difference between a JV and an affiliate, is the affiliate will only get paid a percentage of each individual sale personally made by them.
If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what is viral marketing, then you should realize that it is something anyone with a computer and a little bit of technological savvy can do. First of all, using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is a fairly ingenious way of getting your product or service out to the public. You can set up a site, get all of the relevant information listed on your homepage, and then add friends.
Theoretically, just adding whoever to your profile isn’t going to do you any good as they are likely looking to connect with friends and won’t be interested in your product. The best way to market yourself is to look through the MySpace groups and find those with similar interests. Say that you are a writer marketing a new book. Adding other writers isn’t going to get you a whole lot of customers, but adding people who are fans of your genre, well, that’s a different story.
Some viral marketing ideas include sending out chain letters with information about your product buried within a story that urges people to continue resending the letter to all of their friends. This is a decent idea, but if you use the chain letter to try and collect money for something that doesn’t exist or run a scam for a business, then that is fraud and is a crime. You have to be careful and make sure that you aren’t breaking any laws.
Now that you have an answer to the question of what is viral marketing, you should also know that using viral marketing plans too much can cause some problems. If people feel they are being slammed by the product, then you are going to find many of your potential clients turned off by your aggressiveness.
Just remember that you’re trying to get the word out and tell people about your idea without being too pushy and you should be just fine.
Tags: what is viral marketing, internet marketing
The Key To Success of Internet Marketing Companies
If you are thinking of climbing a mountain to find a guru, fine. Do it. But don’t ask for the key to success of Internet marketing companies. You don’t need to climb a mountain for that, it’s actually pretty simple: find the people who are looking for what you sell, or what you do.
No doubt as you were rushing off to start doing exactly that, it occurred to you that while it’s a great idea, it isn’t immediately obvious where to start. Well, think about it. When you want to find something, what do you do? Fire up your search engine, right? Of course you do! The key then, assuming you actually have a product or service people would want if they found you, is making yourself easy to find in search engines.
It always amazes me how difficult some companies are to find. Maybe my hobbies are obscure. Maybe hobbyists make the products I’m interested in and not people genuinely interested in having their business succeed. But really, it amazes me how often I hear about a product, search for it, can’t find it, and eventually after scouring Internet forums and meandering through link after link, I find exactly what I’m looking for.
The journey’s always interesting, but really, if they optimized their website so that search engines could find them, then I could find them. I might be more eager to give them my money if I didn’t feel like I had to climb a mountain just to find them.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is, simply put, the process of improving your odds of people finding you through search engines. It is also the key to the success of Internet marketing companies. This typically involves choosing targeted keywords carefully. And then making sure they appear often, and in the right places, on your site.
Ideally, through various SEO techniques you can also ensure that your site will show up on the list for most logical searches, but you can push your site toward the front of the list. The higher you are on the list, the more likely you’re going to get lots of visitors. After all, what do you do when you use a search engine? Do you scour all the results up to page 20? Probably not.
As a marketing strategy, you need to consider how search algorithms work and what people search for in order to succeed with SEO. Your efforts will most likely involve more than just keywords.
They can involve the actual coding, presentation and structure of the site. It can also involve fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from spidering your site successfully. If you are not familiar with terms like spidering, you’ll need to do your homework before you can hope optimize your site.
Either that or you’ll need to hire someone who already knows all this stuff. Beware of trying to fool the search engines, however. Most search engines are sophisticated enough to filter out the obvious attempts at spamming the search engine with junk hits just to get your site up there.
It’s tricky, but learn about SEO. It is the key to the success of internet marketing companies.
Tags: internet marketing companies, seo techniques, search algorithms
