Viral Marketing Strategies For the Online eMarketer
What is online viral marketing? It is know as a successful advertising campaign. The phrase was a creation of a business school graduate, made popular by the media and a media critic Douglas Rushkoff. This refers to your ability to reach millions of people by starting out with only a few.
If you tell me something that I think is interesting, I will tell my friends about it. They will tell their friends as well if they like it. They probably know people that I do not. So, the circle of growth is unlimited. Many years ago, and even today, it was called work of mouth advertising.
The main difference between word of mouth advertising and online viral marketing has to do with the sheer potential number of people that someone can or does speak to daily. Using me as an example. In my “real” life, I talk to my close family members every day. I may speak to my family and friends once per week.
Some of them I haven’t talked to in years, “live”. But, via e-mail and social networking sites, I communicate with all of them, every single day. If something really grabs me that I think my friends will love too, I will share it with at least 30 people.
Surveys find that the average person shares this with only 12 people. So, I may be a little outside of the loop. The main feature is that the 30 people that I know will share with others. Effortless, this information ripples through this wave of people. Will the free ride eventually end?
If you have an effective online viral marketing strategy, you may be able to generate numerous waves; when one crashes, another forms. There are a number of different strategies, but all of the effective ones include one element. There is something “free” for people to share.
In some cases, it is just a well-done, simple commercial. Sony created one a while back. It was posted on YouTube and people sent it around. To date, it has had hundreds of thousands of views. How many people ended up buying something? Who could be aware of?
This is the point. To reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the not so distant past, TV advertising would have been the only option. And, of course, you would have had to buy space on the most popular shows and the costs are prohibitive. With online viral marketing, you can reach that many people for next to nothing.
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Digg can send a lot of traffic to a site but if you’re not one of the eliete users on digg it can be hard to promote your content there. Some people make up for the innate unfairness on digg that gives established users prefrence over new users by buying diggs. This can be a good way to get some momentum behind your link so that the ‘bandwagon effect’ will kick in and other people will start digging you because they see you getting so many votes. The problem is this can be expensive as a lot of sites charge a dollar or more per vote but you can get them for much less at Basicdig.net. This makes Basicdig.net an ideal tool for people who are promoting content on digg for the first time or even the veteran promoter who is just tired of paying high prices.