Viral marketing

Hello Friends,

I would like to share with you about Viral Marketing in SEO. Viral marketing is a term coined for spreading news about a website by word of mouth, through the web. If you have something really "cool" or "outrageous", and a few people tell a few friends about it, and those friends tell more friends -- you've hooked into the phenomenon known as viral marketing. It works the same way as a cold virus -- you catch it (hear about it) from your friends and relatives.

You can ask people to tell a friend about your website. You can provide incentives for doing so. What you should not do is ask them to give you email addresses so you can send out an email (which would be spam if it came from you, unsolicited, to their friends). Instead ask them to tell their friends about your site. Put up a form allowing them to do that. Or ask them to put up a link to your website from theirs. Make it easy to do that by putting the code and any image necessary on a page so they can just cut and paste it. Or give something away to those who send you a certain quantity of visitors.

The original success of hot-mail as a way to get a free email address is entirely due to the viral marketing effect created by a link at the bottom of every email sent through Hot-mail, saying "click here to set up your own free Hot-mail account." That's another form of viral marketing. According to them, it was an unintended effect. They were swamped with requests and had a major problem keeping up with demand.

Google used a completely closed viral marketing plan to start up gmail, Google's free email service. It would not let you in unless you were invited by another gmail user - viral marketing. This was very successful for gmail. Viral marketing works well if used correctly.

A good viral marketing campaign requires some cleverness--some real thought. Look at the service or product you are selling and come up with a way to get people to tell their friends about it, and you will be on your way to starting a viral marketing campaign for your website.
-dvdv882