Have you got a Virus? – 5 Viral Marketing Techniques

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I’m sure you have all heard of Mafia Wars and FarmVille and the company behind it all Zynga. They allegedly authorized an advertising agency to plant fake $25,000 bills on the streets of San Francisco with the web address if their new expansion pack to Mafia Wars on the back.

Obviously someone was not happy about this, but how cool is it! Imagine if you could do that with your own business, what would you expect to get back in return? The traffic would be amazing, just think about it, where would all of these notes end up? Everyone would want to know where they came from and you can guarantee visitors to the web address on the back.

Imagine if you created a little ‘Urgency’ or ‘Inspire Wonder’ on the back. Something like:

• You have 48 hours to claim your free gift!

• Earn $1000 today?

• Go Here to claim your free gift

• Do You Want a Genuine $25,000 Bill!

The possibilities are endless and traffic potential enormous. Obviously the cost of fake dollars is quite a cheap exercise by simply photocopying the bills and resizing them. However I’m not sure of the laws surrounding copying money and the legal implications but the concept is awesome!

This can also be done with business cards, you know the ones we all see on our windscreens (windshields) ‘Earn 20k per year’ at events where there is a lot of public interest. Yeah it might be an old technique but it works!

Guys seem to forget about this type of marketing and by taking it to the next level and being a little more inventive just like Zynga, you can actually profit from it especially in the form of traffic opt-ins and affiliate sales.

What about Viral eBooks?

Viral eBooks are probably if not the most popular form of viral marketing in the online marketing business. Allowing giveaway rights to eBooks spreads your content immensely.

Since taking part in Jacinta Deans 100 blog comment challenge and hopping over 100 blogs in two weeks, I noticed a lot of students of various marketers offering an eBook as a give away. Now these eBooks do offer good information but also have an ulterior motive, which is the generate traffic back to the originator with the added pleasure of an affiliate sale from the provider via a branded link.

Brandable eBooks are a great incentive for the new marketer to make some cash from affiliate sales, however ultimately it’s the originator who reaps the benefits of traffic, list building and after sales. So be it your own eBook or your mentor’s they are an excellent source for traffic and affiliate sales.

Check out Viral Pdf. A nice little tool for branding your own PDF give away reports and eBooks with affiliate links for that ‘Viral Effect’.

What about Software?

There are many ways to capitalise with software to get a viral effect. One recent promotional give away that springs to mind is Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing script. He gave this script away to all who wanted it, word of mouth (another viral technique), email broadcast and YouTube spread the word around that all you had to do was signup for it to get it for free. Sure you got hit with an upsell but it was free and do you really think that the guys who downloaded it were not going to pass it around? I wonder what the back link stats are like from the free download?

Free Monthly Websites (due for a massive makeover on October 27th) is another product which works in a similar way. The products are free to download but they all have links back to the source via a copyright link (affiliated of course). The viral effects are huge with this type of software. In my opinion more so than a free eBook as software commands a higher perceived value than a basic PDF report or eBook.

Think of it like this:

• Download Your Free eBook

• Download Your Free Website

Guys are going to go for the free website every time as it seems to hold more value than a mere eBook. Maybe not to you or me but what about cold traffic which is not yet involved in the marketing scene. EBook or website what would you go for if you were a green newbie?

I see a blog template going viral everyday! Check out Dosh Dosh Adsense Theme. I know for a fact this theme has generated huge amounts of traffic back to Dosh Dosh. It’s been around for at least 2 years and has been downloaded thousands of times by Adsense aware bloggers. Take a look at your own blog for example, I would bet you have a link to the supplier of your blog template at the bottom? Just stop and think about the earnings potential of that! Imagine you have affiliates, advertising, list building, Adsense and much more at your disposal on your site, and all of those blog template back links incoming. It’s not surprising these guys make 10k per month from blogging.

Another and probably the best viral software of all is plugins! Everyone is looking for the next hot plugin to do miracles to your blogs. Imagine you create a plugin that hits the top ten plugins of the year and gets a feature on the wordpress dashboard feed. My guess is your traffic stats are going to rise like crazy and again word of mouth, blogging and news feeds will all talk about it. The viral effects are amazing for this type of product.

Check out Elance.com if you have a good idea for a plugin. You don’t have to be a techie to have one made for you. You just have to have the idea!

What about Articles?

Article marketing is as viral as it gets and as cheap as it gets too. Your article is free to write, your article is free to submit and your article is free to use as long as you leave your link in the bio section. The link is how your article becomes viral. There are literally thousands of people using content related articles on their websites every day which are written by others, and most if not all article submission sites allow you to use the author’s articles as long as you pay them some sort of kudos for the pleasure.

You can build a whole website using article content, and even use them to feed your blog. Of course your content is not your own, but the article marketers know this and that’s why they provide you with the content and the viral back link to their higher priced products.

Check out Go Artciles and Ezine Articles and you will see the potential! It’s free to join as well so give it a go, write a couple of articles and setup Google Alerts to see if your article gets some hits. Ezine Articles also has a monitoring system to check if your article has been used and voted on.

I know I have not covered all the ways to generate viral material online, I will leave it up to you to add to it if you wish or discuss in the comments section!

What I am going to do is leave you with ‘Viral Technique Number 5‘ and the rights to copy this post to your own blog if you wish as long as you give me a little credit for it Edit it and post it but please leave my link in:

Article Post source: http://www.dansumnerblog.com

Let’s Get Viral

Related posts:

1. Are Old Internet Marketing Techniques Really Dead?
2. The 7 Link Challenge….Lets Go Viral!

Tagged as: Viral Article Marketing, Viral PDF