Viral marketing is one of the newer Internet marketing techniques online today and is one of the most popular tactics being used. If you’re just creating an Internet marketing strategy for your home based online business or you’re considering revamping your current approach you should consider adding viral marketing to your Internet advertising portfolio.
First of all, what is viral marketing? According to the marketing terms website: “viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message. Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.”
Here are five viral marketing techniques you can use to ensure the success of this strategy for your online home based business:
1. Video has taken the Internet by storm and, needless to say, so has video marketing. With the emergence of YouTube as one of the most popular sites online today and with the appearance of many other video sharing websites there are many outlets available for you to share your video message.
Your approach here is to create a video which is unique in some way and which has the possibility of going viral. If your creation is popular it has the opportunity of being viewed by hundreds of thousands of people via the various video sharing websites with YouTube leading the way.
By adding your link to your communication you have created the chance of attracting an avalanche of visitors to your home business website. The only drawback here is that people may only be visiting because of the entertainment value of your video and not because of your product.
2. Setting up an affiliate program is another popular viral marketing tactic you can employ. After you’ve created your product you employ other Internet marketers to promote your merchandise for a set rate of commission for each sale. By enticing other sales people to promote your product you’re basically setting your home business on auto pilot.
However, you do have the added responsibility of managing and paying your affiliates. If you’ve created a quality product which has a high conversion rate the possibilities are endless for your home based business by using this viral marketing approach.
3. Creating and distributing viral PDF reports is another very effective strategy which provides many opportunities for targeted traffic for your home business website. When using this tactic you simply choose a topic related to your marketing niche and create a 20-30 page report. Be sure to include links to your affiliate products and your own website so you can gain maximum exposure.
Also, add a page introducing both you and your home based business so you can become established and get recognized on the web. By distributing your report from your own website and by giving other Internet marketers the private label rights to your work and encouraging them to give it away you are also creating the potential for an endless stream of targeted traffic to your home business website and to your affiliate offers.
4. For people who enjoy writing, blogs are still one of the most popular information outlets on the web today and provide an excellent opportunity to take your product viral. Just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t know, a blog is basically an online journal. Three big advantages of blogs are: they are easy to create, even for the most technically challenged of us, people like to visit other people’s blogs and the search engines find them very attractive as well.
These three benefits combine to provide the perfect viral environment for creating back links by leaving comments on other blogs, by adding social bookmarks and of course by pinging and by adding tags. Blogging in and of itself when approached correctly can create a lucrative income for your home base business online.
5. Finally, the current popularity of social websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has created another perfect storm scenario for taking your product and home based business viral. These sites receive unbelievable amounts of traffic on a daily basis so this would lead us to the conclusion that attracting traffic to our own offers can be achieved by creating forums and social networks in our own marketing niches.
This may seem like an enormous challenge but there are many free scripts available which will allow you to do this including a free offer from Google. The key here is to create highly targeted social networks which can direct people, who are very interested in your product or service, to your home business website.
By employing some or all of these five viral marketing strategies you can drive a torrent of targeted traffic to your home business website and establish your enterprise as an entity to be dealt with on the Internet marketing scene.