3 Tips for Viral Marketing

You may have noticed that we received a large quantity of comments on the "Digg Hooligans Take Over Website" post earlier this week. This was the result of the article being "Dugg" by thousands of users on digg.com. Our story hit the digg.com homepage just after 11pm on Monday. This lead to over 2400 visitors in a matter of hours.


This was all made possible through "Viral Marketing".

Viral marketing is based on the idea that if someone finds something interesting, they are likely to pass it on to their friends. Sometimes what is being passed does not appear to be advertising at all. In this case, as users "dugg" the story they were in fact telling others that they should read it too.

Viral marketing gets its name from its similarity to a virus. The point of viral marketing is to "infect" one person with your marketing idea, who will then spread the news to someone else, thereby "infecting" them.

The earliest use of viral marketing is usually attributed to Hotmail, a web based email provider. When Hotmail was first starting out, they would attach advertising to the bottom of emails that were sent from their users. The idea was to have people sign up for Hotmail because they got the message from their friends.

Viral marketing is very successful because it works to create a buzz about the product and then subtly encourages people to tell someone else. Because of this, the advertising doesn't have to reach the secondary user directly. The person initially "infected" by the viral marketing can "infect" many others with no additional work required on the part of the advertisers.

As an email user, you have probably contributed to viral marketing campaigns without even realizing it. Remember that interactive game or funny video that you forwarded to all of your friends? Most likely, somewhere within the "message" was a link or logo of the company who created it. When you passed the video on, you gave them free publicity and brand recognition.

"This is cool... I want some viral marketing traffic", you say.

No problem... here are three very important tips to get you started with your own viral marketing campaign:

1. Make people feel something
The most important thing is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion and express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:

• be filled with love or hate.

• be very happy or insanely angry

• be an idiot or a genius
  

You want people's blood to be pumping of excitement. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions. Your story must spark an emotion or it will never catch on.

2. Forget about you, your product or your company.

Focus exclusively in creating a good and interesting story. Sure, you can add your product into the mix, but it must not be the most important thing. Nobody cares about you, viral marketing is all about a good story.

3. Make it easy to share.

The whole purpose is for others to share your story, so make it easy. Everything you do to make sharing easier is going to improve your chances of success. That means that you need allow people to easily play your file, send it to friends, link to you, etc.