Successful Forum Viral Marketing

In order to be successful using forums to do viral marketing there are some things that are required.

Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research.

Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many types of forums could apply….everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home moms.

Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page ranking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this.

Choose forums that allow sig tags. If it’s possible read the rules before joining and pay attention to them. Your time is important, too. It is better to find out that a forum doesn’t allow posts with sig tags before you go to the time and trouble of joining.

After You Have Joined: OK…you have chosen two or three forums that meet your requirements…now what?

Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website.

Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This all but a universal rule and only displays the marketers lack of experience if he does so. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors….at worst, it is grounds for being banned.

Work the room. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there and take the time to get to know the users. Take the time to introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic.

As a marketer becomes a regular member, they will hopefully develop a good reputation and without saying a word about their promotion, those who are interested in their product will approach them.

Source: Profits-Marketing

Start Viral Marketing Campaigns Using E-books

Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It is, also, a powerful way to generate traffic to your website.

Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.

Now let’s look at using an E-book to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an E-book… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

Before you know it the E-book is spreading across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free E-book.

Make certain that you let people know that they have permission to forward the E-book around the Internet. When you create the E-book, you have the right to give people certain rights. One of those rights could be that you allow them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away.

You can write the E-book yourself, use private label content or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are a lot of ways to create an E-book. Once you have your E-book written, use software to create your E-book.

Source: Profits-Marketing

Creating a Buzz With Viral Marketing

Viral marketing has matured a bit over the years. There seems to have been a shift to the web not just being seen by agencies and brands as another tick box for any ad campaign, which is significant enough, but now being the medium where a campaign is launched to create a buzz before it hits TV and print. Even before a movie is released which used to be seen as the pre-launch buzz-generation activity. Big business “gets it”.

Buzz works! It can work for small and start-up businesses, as well. The planning stage of a viral campaign will set out objectives and develop the viral theme for a buzz. There are three core components to any viral campaign and businesses of any size can use them. They are:

The creative material: the viral agent that embodies the message you want to spread in a digital format (image, video, text, etc). The trick is to put together material that people will be eager to share with their family and friends and people are much more eager to share “advertainment” and advertisement.

Seeding: distributing and placing the agent online in places that provide the greatest potential spread. Direct viral material downloads or links on specialist viral third-party web sites in order to create awareness and spread before users get to the campaign destination site.

Tracking: Measuring the spread of the campaign to provide accountability and prove success. It is absolutely vital that you know what is or is not working. The only way to get that information is to track the results of your seeding.

Lessons have been learned, trends have been developed and there is definitely some science involved in creating a buzz successfully. The buzz technique is here to stay and, if used strategically, it can make a difference to the success of your e-business.

Source: Profits-Marketing

Four Good Reasons to Use Viral E-books

It is a well known and widely accepted fact, that E-books….FREE E-books…are one of the best weapons in a viral marketing campaign arsenal. Here are four good reasons why this is true today and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future:

E-books are cheap to produce and don’t take long to set up. If you have articles that you have already written about the subject you are promoting, you can simply combine these articles into an E-book. If, on the other hand, writing isn’t your forte, you can use rebrandable E-books that have been produced by others. Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search for “rebrandable E-books”. You will get a lot of hits and have many to choose from. One way to distribute these E-books to visitors to your website is to give them as a free gift for subscribing to your newsletter. If your E-book contains material that people will want to share with their friends and family, they will pass it along to them… they will pass it along to others…and you will make money.

E-books are capable of reaching a large audience. The only limiting factor is the enthusiasm or the participants. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that your E-book contain something that people will want to share like timely information or humor. Remember that people like to know something that the rest of the world needs to know. They will pass along something that makes them look like they are in-the-know.

E-books are a way to sell other products other than the one you originally targeted. For example; if you are selling garden products, your customers could also be interesting in E-books about lawns, trees landscaping, etc.

E-books are effective in building your reputation. It is an implied recommendation if you give a quality E-book and users willing pass on to others.

Source: Profits-Marketing

"Folksonomies" - a New Viral Marketing Tool

A new consumer phenomenon is called "tagging" or "folksonomies" (short for folks and taxonomy). Tagging is powerful because consumers are creating an organizational structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Here's how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us - a bookmark sharing site – and Flickr - a photo sharing site - consumers are collaborating on categorizing online content under certain keywords, or tags.

For instance, an individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and file it under the tag "iPod." These images are now not only visible under the individual user's iPod tag but also under the community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword. Right now Flickr has more than 3,500 photos that are labeled "iPod."

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to search. Type the word "blogs" into Google and it can't tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, or just what. Large and small sites alike are already getting on to the folksonomy train. They are rolling out tag-like structures to help users more easily locate content that's relevant to them.

Although tags are far from perfect, marketers should, nevertheless, be using them to keep a finger on the pulse of the American public. Start subscribing to RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are available for free, 24/7. Folksonomy sites can be also be carefully used to unleash viral marketing campaigns - with a caveat. Marketers should be transparent in who they are, why they are posting the link/photos and avoid spamming the services.

Source: Profits-Marketing.

6 Ideas for Viral Marketing

Ever wonder how you can use viral marketing in addition to Web 2.0? Well, first off, let me tell you that viral marketing IS Web 2.0! So, it makes sense that you would want to use viral marketing in your Web 2.0 marketing campaign. Today, I have given you 6 ideas on how to use it.

Here are six ideas to help you start your viral marketing campaign:

Purchase the branding rights to a viral E-book. Allow people to give away your free E-book to their visitors. Then, their visitors will also give it away. This will just continue to spread your ad all over the Internet.

If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, you really have a great tool. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their own website. Some people don't have one. Just include your banner ad at the top of the board.

Do you have a knack for web design? Create some templates, graphics, etc. and upload them to your site. Then, allow people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site. Make sure that you include a link back to your site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice in tact.

Write an E-book. Allow people to place an advertisement in your free E-book if, in exchange, they give away the E-book to their web visitors or E-zine subscribers.

Write articles that pertain to your product or service. Allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zine, newsletter, magazine or E-books. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the bottom of each article.

You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license allowing you to distribute the product free of charge to other people. Look for those products that provide "branding rights". That is where you can include your own name, website, and contact information.

Source: Profits-Marketing