Author: Kevin Sinclair

What would happen if one of your friends tells about your newest blog to her five friends and they, in turn, tell their friends and it goes on like this? Pretty soon you will have all the traffic you need for a comfortable income from your new-found writing careers. Is it possible to to achieve this kind of success using the virality of the social web, or does it sound like a pyramid scheme?

The emergence of social web provides opportunities for viral marketing that never existed before. Face to face talk or talk over the phone has its limitations in reaching your audience. The Web 1.0 offered forums for a limited viral marketing opportunity. The social web has opened up avenues manyfolds expanded online reach. This article describes seven techniques for using the social web to achieve virality.

1. Before jumping to social websites to launch your viral adventure, make your site social web friendly. Provide a link on your site for users to invite their friends. When someone joins your site through an invitation, reward points to the inviter. Announce a contest on your site and reward the top inviter with e-books or a t-shirt with your site logo.

2. Spend sometime at Digg. This is a community based news popularity web site. If your blog article hits the front page of Digg, you will get thousands of visitors and some of them will eventually become your regulars. Study the types of articles that end up on the front page of Digg. Write your blog articles targeted to Digg users.

3. MySpace is the ultimate social website because of its sheer size in terms of visitors. If you have lots of friends who have their MySpace pages, create a niche network community in MySpace with common interests. Post teasers of your interesting blog articles in your MySpace page with links to your full article. Ask your friends to write comments on your blog postings.

4. Take a look at Delicious. Google Delicious to get the url because it is not a dot-com domain. It is a social bookmarking site to store your bookmarks online. You should build a network of friends at this site and study their bookmarkings to assess the type of articles they prefer to bookmark. Tailor your blog articles to mimic the article style your network appreciates.

5. Visit a site called Squidoo. At Squidoo you create “lenses” (a Web page) about any topic. You can create as many lenses as you want and you can embed external links in your lenses. Squidoo lenses also have a good search engine credibility. So, your sites will get some good external in-bound links for free.

6. LinkedIn is an online community of experienced professionals. Create your account at LinkedIn and network with professionals in your fields. Offer some free services for other professionals in your network and solicit their recommendations. All recommendations appear in your profile. LinkedIn provides great opportunity for someone to find your business or services.

7. YourElevatorPitch provides a free online spot to announce your business and services. User rates your ad pitches. This site also allows you to link back to your site.

Other sites worth exploring for viral opportunities are Flickr and YouTube. Both the sides accept multimedia (photos for Flickr and videos for YouTube) contents. These sites are good for establishing your brand by regular posting of theme oriented humorous contents.

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Author: Joshua Watson

Viral marketing is a creative marketing technique that relies in large part on social networks to reach its audience.

It is worth mentioning that viral marketing shouldn’t be confused with other traditional publicity techniques because whilst the second relies mainly on paid promotional services the other uses the free online community has a means of spreading the word.

If done correctly more knowledgeable marketers will even be able to put into motion an entire well orientated marketing campaign, many times requiring no money what so ever.

Mounting a viral marketing campaign or trying to accomplish a viral effect isn’t easy, but with the help of a few methods and practical tools the chore could be greatly facilitated. These seven profitable online marketing rules will provide a good starting point whilst also helping make a site more profitable.

Provide email newsletters
Creating an interesting newsletter only takes a few hours at best and the results could be quite rewarding. The email newsletter will basically serve two very distinct purposes. The first mission will be to provide subscribers with valuable information and the second to serve as a reminder to visit the site.

To take the most advantage of each subscriber the newsletter should contain catchy bold headings and only short well written introductions containing a link to the articles available on the site. An email newsletter although not the best example of viral marketing, can still deliver compensating results especially if the newsletters are made widely available.

Feed the world
Feeds are the single most important allies when it comes to Viral Marketing. The internet has taken a rather particular liking to feeds and now there are hundreds if not thousands of sites dedicated entirely to them.

Feed aggregating sites can catapult and propagate the reach of a feed way beyond its normal boundaries. Also another benefit worth mentioning is that just like email newsletter, after a reader subscribes to a feed, they can be used to provide valuable news updates and serve as a reminder to visit the site.

Give free goodies
People love free things no matter what they might be. The internet revolves around free services, it could be considered a tradition.  A site could offer a wide range of things starting from icons, wallpapers, templates, themes, software, plugins, ebooks or even services like free hosting and publicity.

Start a competition
Starting a competition is an excellent way to motivate readers to take a more active role on the site. This will be achieved by engaging the reader’s competitive nature. Just like free gifts, people love to win prizes no matter what they might be. These can even one of the free goodies but instead of giving them away, they are awarded as a final prize.

Employ the power of free services
Social networking and bookmarking sites are the nucleus of any successful viral marketing campaign. Using free sites like Myspace, Flickr, Yahoo Mash, Digg, reddit and Twitter could help kick off the much desired viral effect.

These sites are perfect since they are completely free and have an extensive user base ready to be exploited. Most people are not aware but the blogosphere is a giant social network worth millions in publicity and a remarkable breeding place for viral marketing.

Captivate dreams
Internet users are normal human beings that just like everyone else in the world, have expectations, personal desires and dreams. Individuals will only share, propagate, something that is worthwhile and meaningful.

Something spectacular that will catch the attention of the community driving them to desire and want to be part of the movement. When writing an article, beginning a competition, offering free gifts or selling a product, it is essential to include a good sum of marketing magic to turn that ordinary item into something literally spectacular.

Go the extra mile
Viral marketing requires perseverance and a good amount of inventiveness. With the spreading out of the internet most individuals have become quite sedated to nearly all common advertisement techniques. Going the extra mile means creating new emotions, developing new solutions, solving old problems and making a lot of noise in the process. Create a buzz with bold statements, integrate innovations and turn ordinary everyday things into cyber works of art.

Viral marketing is the alteration and exploration of new frontiers. To be successful, marketers will have to establish new ingenious ideas and persuade the various social communities to desire them. In the end viral marketing will be a natural process of autonomous propagation, requiring no interference from its creator.

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