Viral marketing works best when it induces websites or visitors to pass on a marketing message to other sites and people, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. In simple words, you pass your message on to 10 other people – each of these 10 people pass on that same message to 10 other people and so on. Such collaborative communications, by nature, need others in the chain. Everyone simply tells everyone else. ICQ, a service that prompts you when selected friends or colleagues are also online, is an example of a service that is viral by its nature. Its users want to tell their friends about it so that it will be more useful to them.
Viral communication is clearly an enormous opportunity for creating brand growth. Get it right and the rewards are enormous. Your consumers will spread your message for you, at astonishing speeds to a phenomenal number of people. Get it wrong and your carefully crafted proposition will get little further than the marketing director’s inbox.
Viral marketing can be performed in several ways. Many of these different forms of viral marketing have enjoyed enormous success over the years. One proven application for viral marketing is ebooks.
Ebooks or electronic books are self-contained files usually in PDF format exactly like the document you are reading now. The document could be a website you've created in HTML, a Microsoft Word file or nearly any other digital media format. When downloaded, the file opens up on your client’s computer, usually using the Adobe Reader software application that can be downloaded free from Adobe.com.
Ebooks are very similar to normal physical books in the sense that they are rich in content. They are a huge resource for information. Anything you can put in a physical book, you can put in an ebook and it costs practically nothing to compile your ebook. If your site is about tropical birds, you might write a tropical bird guide. If your site is about web design, you could write a beginner's web design tutorial.
An ebook basically is a packaged document that allows authors a great deal of flexibility in presentation of content. Ebooks can be downloaded from your website and stored and read offline at any time. Ebooks come with user-friendly navigation tools that lets the reader skip to any page or search for any keyword in the ebook. Ebooks can be completely interactive with the Internet and can contain live links, graphics, forms, JavaScript, embedded video, audio, animation and more. Hyperlinks and internal search engines enhance navigation, allowing the reader to find items of interest quickly and easily.
Ebooks will play a very important role in viral marketing over the next few years, no matter what the product or service offered by a company is. How can your business benefit from publishing ebooks with a viral marketing twist? Read on to find out.
Why are ebooks an effective viral marketing tool?
Here’s how viral marketing with ebooks works. First of all, it is essential that your ebook contains interesting information. It’s pointless to market something that is of no use to anyone. Readers of your ebook should learn something from the ebook. In this sense it is very similar to a physical book. A reader would throw away a book after reading a page or two if she finds it to be boring and dull. The same is the case for ebooks. No one would want to download your ebook if it is not rich in practical content. In other words, your ebook should have some useful information that the reader wants.
To use ebooks effectively as a viral marketing tool they should be offered to visitors of your website for free. The production and distribution costs of an ebook are generally very small. This is what makes it an effective tool for viral marketing. As you can see by reading my “Dotcomology” ebook, viral ebook marketing is not just something I talk about. It’s something I practice in my own business.
Your ebook should have the layout and feel of your business service or product, which would familiarize readers with your brand. Do you see how I’ve done this for my Plug-In Profit Site service throughout this ebook? The ebook you create would have a message promoting your website and a link to it. This will bring back the reader to your website and create an opportunity to generate business. Thus, ebooks can contain advertisements or links to your website that would persuade the reader to visit your website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have some message about your business and a link to your website that would interest the reader and encourage him to visit your website by clicking on that link. It’s simple really. Like this: Click here to visit my website. ;-) How does viral marketing come into the picture here? How do you ensure that ebooks can be given to more and more readers and in turn generate traffic for your website? A very simple way of doing this is to allow other visitors to your website to download your ebook for free and allow them to give away the ebook for free to others. Be sure to include hyperlinks to your website throughout the ebook. Also, you can include brief advertisements and all kinds of other things if you want. Your customer can either upload the ebook on their own website or offer it to their friends through email in the form of an attachment.
To make the ebook even more appealing to your customers you can offer them incentives. For example you could give your customer the ability to brand your ebook with their own affiliate ID for your product so that they earn a commission every time a person visits your website (through their branded version of your ebook) and buys a product. Affiliate program software (discussed earlier) can be integrated with your website that would give you a detailed analysis of all your visitors and track the affiliate who referred them.
Now your affiliate can give away your ebook to others, which makes them look good for giving something valuable away for free. Plus, every time your affiliate brings in traffic to your website through their branded version of your ebook, they earn a commission. This gives your affiliates a reason to be excited and tell others about your ebook. Imagine this scenario duplicated by hundreds and potentially thousands of people passing around your ebook and you’ll get a sense for how quickly your marketing message can be spread across the Net. This is exactly what is being done with the “Dotcomology” ebook right now. I could have turned this information in this ebook into a paid product if I wanted to, but I know the benefit of viral ebook marketing far outweighs the profits I could earn selling this information online.
To further benefit from ebooks, you can allow your customers to copy, change, and co-brand the ebook, which would contain a few ads and links about their own sites in addition to your own links. This will also help your customers to generate traffic for their websites. Think about it… The more incentives you add to your ebook that inspire other people to pass your marketing messages around, the more you will benefit from viral ebook marketing. It’s that simple.
Ebooks are one of the best promotional tools online. With its vast variety of uses, just one quality ebook development and distribution can produce an on going viral marketing tool that will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week spreading your marketing messages around the world exponentially.
Tips for Creating an Ebook
The most important aspect of an ebook is the content. Unless the content is well written and interesting, you will find it hard to attract customers. So the first rule of thumb is to produce useful content.
The format of the ebook is also very important. I recommend that any ebook you develop be created as a PDF file. The main advantage of using PDF is that it works with almost all operating systems whereas many other types of files cater only to Microsoft Windows users.
Additional tips to consider when creating an ebook include:
There are many different ebook compilers on the market that can help you accomplish everything discussed above. Simply do a search engine search for “ebook software” or “ebook compiler” and you’ll find plenty of options. The two software programs that helped me turn this “Dotcomology” ebook into one of the most popular and widely read Internet marketing ebooks of all-time are Adobe Acrobat at Adobe.com and viralPDF at ViralPDF.com.
Email is one of the best ways to spread your marketing message. It's fast, cheap and, most important of all, it can be viral. Have you ever sent a message to your friends, maybe a joke or a story, only to have it sent back to you days later with several other email addresses in the CC field that you don't recognize? That's because your friends have sent it to their friends, and those friends in turn have sent it to their friends and so on. The email chain is often endless.
Email is an ideal mechanism for viral marketing, because a message can be spread to multiple recipients almost instantly. Email allows us to touch people at any time and in any place.
Email enables a whole new dimension of branding by allowing our brands to be directly connected to the times and places in which we deliver them. Because we can touch people more precisely, we can brand ourselves more accurately as well. Email that you send to your customers and friends, if interesting or useful, could again be forwarded by your customers and friends to their own customers and friends.
A good illustration of viral marketing through emails is through ezines and newsletters. The term ezines is coined for publications sent through email. These publications could be anything such as articles related to your business, press releases for a new service offered by you or any other write-up inviting people to visit your website.
We had a whole chapter on newsletters already in this book. However, what we didn’t discuss then is that newsletters can be a great viral marketing tool. If your newsletter contains information of value, such as tips, hints, news or tutorials, you'll find that subscribers will forward it on to others, and that’s viral marketing at it’s best.
The use of newsletters can also help build content for your website which increases search engine visibility. Another great benefit is that your newsletters, ezines or ebooks will proliferate links on many sites that point back to your site. Several leading search engines, including Google, use page-ranking algorithms that measure how many links point to your site and rank your page in search findings accordingly. The way to do it would be to encourage your readers to upload your material on their sites.
However, you must remember that a newsletter should contain valuable information, not just sales copy, otherwise interest will quickly drop off and you'll be getting a number of unsubscribe requests. Worse still, your ezine will be deleted as soon as it arrives, leaving you with a valueless list that only sucks up your time, resources and bandwidth.
Tips for Writing Articles that are Viral
Pick a topic that you know something about and then go to the search engines and find as many websites as you can that deal with that subject. As well as collecting information for your article, make a note of any URLs that offer free resources dealing with the topic of your article. Include those URLs in your article.
You should choose a topic very carefully. Once the topic is selected, doing enough research on the subject is vital. Organize the material and write in an interesting style. Make sure that you provide links to free resources.
The content in your article should not be pure sales copy. There has to be valuable and genuine information. Promotion of your product or service should be subtle. Viral marketing using articles is much different than running an email marketing campaign that blasts millions of mail messages to unsuspecting readers.
At the end of your article, attach a 5 or 6-line “About the Author” box that includes your site URL or autoresponder subscription address.
When you have finished your article, do NOT send it out straight away. Hold onto it for 2 or 3 days and then come back and read it again. You'll be amazed at the improvements you can make. Those final improvements are what make the difference between an article that gets published and one that doesn't.
Once you are satisfied with your article, send it to your own ezine list, publish it on your blog and encourage your subscribers to publish your article on their sites. Additionally, you can use article distribution services such as SubmitYourArticle.com, IdeaMarketers.com and ThePhantomWriters.com to increase the reach of your article and possibly get it published on hundreds of other websites. Plus, once it’s online as a “free reprint” article, you’ll find that many new webmasters will find your article on someone else’s site and re-publish it on their own site including your resource box. This is an extremely powerful form of viral marketing. You are providing valuable content which other websites want and need which in turn motivates those webmasters to publish your article and spread your marketing message via your article’s “About the Author” resource box.
12.3 Viral Marketing with Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs create powerful alliances between an online merchant's website and various "affiliate" websites. Affiliate programs as discussed earlier, are a great marketing tool, especially due to the fact that they are viral in nature.
However, affiliate programs are attractive only if they offer useful and valuable incentives to the affiliates. The best form of incentive would be cash in the form of commission from product or service sales. This is the best incentive for your customers to join your affiliate program and spread your marketing message.
Tips for Making Your Affiliate Program Attractive
The most important aspect of any affiliate program is the incentive. You should offer better incentives than your competitor sites. Money is the biggest and best form of incentive you could offer your customers. Offering a percentage of your sales revenue resulting out of each successful hit can be a great incentive.
If you are selling a digitally downloadable information or software product, I suggest offering 50%-75% commission to your affiliates. Since these type of products cost you practically nothing to distribute once created, you want to offer the highest commission possible to motivate your affiliates. Otherwise they will simply find other people’s products to promote who pay better than you do. Trust me on this one. I’m a top affiliate for multiple affiliate programs online who have won my loyalty by paying me better than their competition.
Apart from the normal incentives, offer something unique such as cash awards and bonuses for the top affiliates who are responsible for bringing in the highest traffic or highest business to your website. This would provide greater motivation for affiliates to not only join your affiliate program but also refer your website to more people. In fact, one affiliate program that I was not a member of started publicizing a contest where the person who referred the most new members by a certain date would win a $10,000 cash prize. Because of the excitement from that company’s membership, word got out and I decided to join the company’s affiliate program myself so I could take a shot at the prize. A few weeks later, I had referred over 600 new paid members to the company through my online marketing efforts and won the coveted $10,000 prize. Today, I continue to actively promote that company (Empowerism) and bring them hundreds of new members every month through my Plug-In Profit Site service. That’s the power of offering a prize/reward to your top affiliates!
Standard affiliate programs only reward the direct affiliate for referring new customers. To stand out from the crowd, set up a two-tier or multi-tier affiliate program. In other words, reward both the affiliate responsible for bringing customers to your website as well as the person who had originally referred this affiliate. Allow me to illustrate this strategy. Let’s say that John referred Max to your website and your affiliate program. Max liked your affiliate program and joined it and eventually bought your product or service offered on your website. In this case, John would get a percentage of the profit. Now let’s say, Max referred your website to a friend of his – Harry. Harry visits your website – likes your product – and buys it. A single tier incentive program would reward Max by giving him a percentage of the profit generated. A two-tier incentive program would offer Max a percentage of the profit, as well as John a percentage of the profit, because John referred Max in the first place. Multi-tier affiliate programs can be very profitable.
The above point can be explained in simple terms as “Make it as easy and as natural for affiliates to promote your product or service as possible, by letting your affiliates benefit from those whom they refer”. This will encourage your affiliates to convince more people to visit your website, buy your products and join your affiliate program.
Using Ebooks for Affiliate Marketing
If you've been delving into affiliate marketing at all, you're no doubt aware of the viral potential for ebooks. It's the affiliates who make them viral, after all, passing the word about the product to their website visitors, ezine subscribers, and clients, with the goal of earning a commission from a sale. This is, after all, exactly how the “Dotcomology” ebook has become so popular.
The possibility of re-branding the ebook (that is, customizing certain portions of it, or changing the affiliate link coding so that the current host of the download can gain from the affiliate commissions) adds pass-along momentum as discussed earlier.
Let me explain the concept of re-branding further. If you've created a useful ebook which also promotes your products or services and where affiliates can change the links in your book to point to their affiliate links, you can let your affiliates give this book away to their visitors and subscribers as something useful for them, as well as something that gives your affiliates a chance of selling your products to everyone who reads their branded copy of your ebook.
Remember, an ebook can come in the form of a report, a catalog, a sales presentation, a detailed list of features, and so much more – the possibilities are endless. It could be whatever that is helpful to your visitor and your customer. It can contain graphics, hyperlinks and, with some compilers, even animated graphics and multimedia.
An affiliate can use downloadable ebooks to enhance the attractiveness of his or her website or ezine, use the ebook as an incentive or simply engender a feeling of trust in their visitors and readers by providing quality information and advice for free.
This technique allows affiliate program merchants to help their affiliates to become more acquainted with viral marketing and more effective in selling online. Using ebooks as a source of affiliate viral marketing can dramatically increase traffic and profits for any website.
TIP: Did you know that you can brand this “Dotcomology” ebook with your own affiliate ID and earn 5 streams of residual income simply by giving it away to others for FREE? It’s true. If you have not done so already, click here to sign up for the Plug-In Profit Site so you can get started. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to earn money simply by giving away this “Dotcomology” ebook to other people.
12.4 Viral Marketing on the Web
How many times have you followed links from one site to another and another – only to end up at the first website? The Internet itself is really the best environment for viral marketing.
As discussed earlier, the simplest and most obvious way of getting people to link to your site is to make it an incredibly useful site packed with informative material. This takes advantage of the main reason people use the Internet - to find information. If you narrow down the focus of your site, you have a much better chance of being found on the search engines, and by those who are looking for the specific information you provide, and hence your chances of being linked to increase dramatically.
Inbound links from other websites to your website provide two benefits: increased traffic to your site and increased rankings in search engines that calculate inbound links in their algorithm, like Google.
Like you, other site owners are trying to increase their link popularity and require reciprocation or give preferential placement of your link on their site if you provide a link in return. This means you need a page or directory on your site to provide reciprocal links. Creating a links page or directory within your site makes your site more content rich and certainly more viral in nature.
Also, you can encourage your visitors to link your website to theirs. This is only possible if your website is useful to them and rich in content. Sometimes, providing incentives to visitors for link reciprocation would do you a world of good. You can encourage visitors and other complementing sites to reciprocate your website’s link in return of commission and “giveaways” for each person visiting your site through their link. This strategy may pay rich dividends.
12.5 Word-of-Mouth Viral Marketing
Word-of-mouth is considered the very best marketing, because it is unsolicited. Here are some ways to encourage friends to share with friends, and use their network to promote your site.
Install “tell-a-friend” software to generate referrals. Such software allows visitors to recommend your website to their friends and customers. For this to work, it’s imperative that your website is informative and useful. Try and provide something unique on your website. This could be a new product or a new service that would interest your visitors and encourage them to spread the word for you.
Create email newsletters and send these newsletters to your friends and customers. Always encourage readers to forward your email newsletter to their friends. Do this at the end of a newsletter, and you may inspire some readers to do it instantly.
Create attractive press releases with a link to your website and send these to customers and friends. Press releases are incredibly viral in nature. By providing a link at the bottom of the press release, you ensure that the reader can click on the link and visit your website. It is a good idea to submit your press release to publications that have the same type of target audience as you. Once you get some good press from the release, word-of-mouth marketing happens automatically.
12.6 Measuring Viral Effect and Performance
As with any marketing campaign, tracking the results and optimizing performance over time is absolutely necessary. Understanding the effectiveness of your viral marketing campaign is crucial information, not to mention interesting. You might be reaching a huge audience with your viral campaigns but the key is to analyze how many of the people reached actually visit your site. You may have an effective viral marketing strategy but somehow your message may not be efficient enough to bring visitors to your website in the numbers needed. Small changes in a message can often increase your conversions by 200% or more, so getting a detailed analysis of the viral effect and performance of your campaigns is critically important.
Thankfully, sophisticated viral marketers can track insightful and actionable data that can be used to evaluate performance. Important metrics to analyze are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers should separate the click-through and conversion rates by original customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. These metrics will alert a marketer about the offers and customers that drive the highest ROI.
I don’t know about you, but for most people, tracking all of these various metrics can get pretty complicated. It’s important to do, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of people who want to make money online don’t really have the time, dollars or patience to setup a system that tracks and decodes all of these figures. If you’re not the kind of person who wants to set it up and figure it out all by yourself, I encourage you to review my Plug-In Profit Site money-making system which automates most of the difficult, time-consuming activities normally associated with making money on the Internet. Click here to learn more about the Plug-In Profit Site and sign up today.
