It’s often very difficult to be creative when you’ve got a lot of things to deal with in the business, but viral marketing strategies aren’t patented or copyright and anyone is free to use ideas that other companies have tried and tested and apply and modify them to their own business model.
Here then is a list and explanation of some of the more popular ways of generating traffic to your website and selling your products using viral marketing strategies.
Encouraging links to your site
Apart from asking people to link directly to your site, you can get them to do this themselves. Let’s say, for example, that you’re selling a new type of baseball bat. The best way to get your message out to the community is to start registering on forums about baseball, fan websites, posting comments on baseball blogs and so on. The best thing is that you don’t even need to do this yourself. These days, many companies hire SEO experts to do all the posting and writing for them.
Write good articles. Writing articles is often the best way to get traffic to your site. Pick a website builder that has lots of features that let you add articles easily to your blog or website. Hire professional writers with SEO abilities who have a knack for writing good content. Good content is the key to getting real traffic to your site, because people really do recognize fluff and will ignore it assuming you are just another spammer.
Distribute articles with links. When you have a lot of good articles, encourage visits to your site by posting links on various forums and blogs. People like when you include a short summary with your post and not just a link, because then they don’t feel compelled to click on it and will not develop hostile feelings from the outset. You can also offer your articles freely (filled with links back to your site of course) to various other blogs and sites which are experts in your topic as well. This is an excellent way of reaching out to people.
Affiliate programs
Another excellent way of encouraging visits to your site and hooking in clients is to set up some sort of affiliate program with the clients you deal with most frequently. An affiliate program is another marketing strategy that simply uses preexisting business networks to spread word about your product. It works on the “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” philosophy. The compensation can be either monetary or it can be in the form of services and products. For example, a graphic design team may affiliate with a writing team and then do work for each other occasionally. If anyone needs a graphic designer or writer in their contacts then they will be quick to suggest and promote their affiliated partners.
Newsletters, mailing lists
These two are excellent ways of getting the message about your product across and a good website builder will have a way for you to request visitor emails and feed them into your database so you can mass mail clients later on with information about goods or services. If you’re going to make a newsletter about your product then it’s often a great idea to produce something very high quality for completely free. People really like free stuff and if it’s high quality as well you can be sure that it will get passed around and your product will gain a lot more exposure.
Your mailing list is also an excellent way to get information out to clients. One key is a detailed catalog of your goods, services, prices and availability or stock. Sending out this catalog either electronically or by post is a very good way of getting the word out about your product.
Word of mouth advertising
This is one of the best viral marketing trends today. If your product is good and the advertising is good as well, you can be sure that people will tell others about it increasing your business. Producing a good product that people will like has nothing to do with luck either – it all boils down to how much market research you did before you even began to develop your goods or services.
These are of course just a few of the viral marketing trends that you can use to promote your product. There are many more that are all easily applied to your business model, whatever it is.
