Viral Marketing and Website Traffic
If you own a website, you know that once it is live online marketing can be daunting and time consuming if you do not have an effective marketing strategy. If you want to increase traffic to your website, there are several marketing strategies that you can use that will provide you with a steady flow of traffic for years to come. One of these strategies is known as Viral Marketing.
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is the electronic way to spread the word about your product or service. It basically works similar to word-of-mouth advertising except you are spreading the word over the Internet.
Viral marketing is also a very cost effective way to generate a steady flow of website traffic because most of the tools you use to spread the word are free or inexpensive to set up. The viral marketing strategies we will discuss here will help you generate website visitors immediately as well as over the long term, and quickly build your reputation as an expert in your field.
Viral Marketing Strategies
Article Marketing: Write articles that relate to the product or service you are offering on your website. Not only will this help to establish you as an expert on the subject but it will also help to spread the word about your product or service and win the trust of your website visitors.
When you create the articles, submit them to online article marketing directories, include them in your newsletter, or permit others to reprint them on their website with a credit and link back to your website at the end.
Create an Affiliate Program: If you are offering your own product or service, create an affiliate program for others to offer your product. Make sure the commission you pay out to your affiliates encourages others to get involved with offering your product. As you increase the number of your affiliates the amount of traffic to your website will increase as well.
Write Press Releases: Create press release about your product or service and submit it to the online press release directories. In the press release you could invite the readers to visit your website for a free product or drawing. Make sure you take massive action because not all of the directories will publish your release.
If you get your release published by at least 4% of the directories you will have your website address visible to thousands of readers.
RSS Feeds: RSS feeds were originally designed for news organizations and now they are also used to distribute blog content and any updates that you make to your blog. RSS Feeds are also capable of distributing the articles you write throughout the Web. RSS means “Really Simple Syndication.”
Create a Mini-Course: Create a mini course about your product or service and set it up on an autoresponder. The autoresponder will automatically distribute each chapter of the course to your opt-in list of subscribers. There are many sites such as www.aweber.com that will provide an autoresponder service for you.
Although these are only a few of the viral marketing strategies you can use, they will help to get you started on your way to increasing traffic to your website both immediately and long term.
Learning online marketing with you,
~ Julie
Viral marketing has always been with us. Offline a new boutique that is unique and interesting may find customers visiting because their friends and neighbors are talking about the new store. Online, the viral effect is multiplied a thousand fold. Social media sites and YouTube account for many of the viral marketing phenomena we witness. A respected Twitter user with thousands of followers mentions a really funny video he just watched – and YouTube is the destination of hundreds of people who read the Tweet. Others pass the tweet on to their own followers by re-tweeting and the exposure grows.
