- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Viral marketing is a great lead generation strategy for online businesses. Here are some of my thoughts on this strategy:
Creativity is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition for business on the Internet today. With so much competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed.
It doesn't matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website: if people don't know that you exist, you are not going to make it big. Worst of all, you business could fail miserably.
There are many different methods of getting noticed online. One of these is called Viral Marketing.
While the term Viral usually depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business.
Viral Marketing Overview
Viral Marketing, also known as Viral Advertising, is a marketing technique used to build public awareness of a product or company. Viral marketers use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product, by promoting other forms of addictive media that people love to pass on to their friends and acquaintances. The media will normally contain some subtle form of advertising for the company or product in question.
In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it is relatively low cost. Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates to help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.
Using Viral Marketing to your advantage
The main advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential leads. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.
Most sites and companies these days use some form of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.
Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story - many ideas are still out there. Create a buzz. Hollywood has this down to a science. Ever notice how many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them more popular?
Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had much success with it. A classic example is Microsoft's Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.
Now it's your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your business.
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Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine
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