Viral Marketing Tips

Monte: So those are two really great places you can go. Number 5. Get Viral.

Jay: Viral is really hot. A lot of things on the internet are really hot and then they go away for a little while and they come back again. The most powerful marketing tool is still word of mouth. When people tell other people to go to sites, and we’re doing some of that tonight by sending people to a number of sites. It includes that word-of-mouth recommendation. So, if you can come up with something “viral” which is a term that comes from the word description of virus, you know it spreads by word of mouth like a cold or a virus is. So if you can come up with something that’s so cool, or so interesting, or so valuable, people will send other people to those sites. There are a couple recent examples that are really popular. One of them is the JibJab web site, and I’ll put a link up for that one. I’m sure most of our listeners saw the JibJab web site during the recent election, and it was a parody of “This land is your land, this land is my land.”

Monte: Right. With Bush and Kerry and they had some of the underlings on the little skit. It was really funny.

Jay: Yeah. And it got incredible traffic and became one of the top web sites on the internet virtually overnight by virtue of having something so cool that people would send it to all their friends by email or by IM and say “check this out.” Another one that became really popular is the Subservient Chicken; and this is a really funny web site you could go on, and I just posted a link on YNOT Radio. And you could go to Subservient Chicken and ask the chicken to do anything you wanted. You could tell him to jump on his couch, or turn on the TV, or do the splits, or build a fort with the pillows on the couch in the background; and if you clicked on a really small link at the bottom of the site, you found out that this was the Burger King chicken. It made Burger King really cool to a whole generation of people who were playing with this fun site and also driving a lot of traffic to the site and improving the links to the Burger King site.

Monte: Yeah. It’s pretty funny. You can have him do all kinds of stuff. Create a fort with pillows, do the splits, and it’s a funny, funny skit as well. And what about one of the famous ones, is the elf bowling in one of the viral games.

Jay: That’s a great one to check out. There’s a site called Nstorm.com and Nstorm has built a number of elf bowling games, and they become really popular around this time of year.

Monte: Gosh, I wonder why.

Jay: You can bowl these elves and there’s a bunch of funny Santa caricatures as well.

Monte: Okay, great. Well, the Viral is very key. I mean, we’ve grown our business by Viral marketing and word of mouth; and we’re going to be coming up with a Moniker word game that we’re going to be passing around as well that should be pretty fun, and we’re going to give away domain names, and free web hosting and all kinds of stuff with it. So, we’re excited to have a Viral game as well using the same strategy.

Jay: And the key there is just to make it so cool or so fun that people send it to other people and spread your business around the web.

Monte: Yeah. It really works. Okay, number 6.

Jay: Number 6 is customer email. And your best source of revenue is your current customers. So you can utilize email to offer your customers a special promotion. Tell them about a new product or service, promote a complimentary product to one they already own. Did they buy a photocopier from you? Send them an email with a special offer for photocopy paper, for example. Your best source of business will always be from your current customers, and they’re also the best people to refer you to other people with a Viral offer.

Monte: And number 7.

Jay: Number 7 is a banner trade or link trade with a vendor or complimentary supplier. We talked about the importance earlier of trading links because it improves your performance in Google; but another really cool thing you can do is find a complimentary partner, someone who’s in your business but not a direct competitor, and you can trade banners or links to your web site and to their web site. You’ll give them a banner for every one they give you, and it’s a great way on a relevant web site to build traffic to your site.

Monte: Right. And it builds credibility; because if they’re going to post your link and you’re going to post theirs, it means you’re working together to help build a mutual community that’s interested in your products and services. So it works really well with people that you already do business with. Number 8.