Home Business : What Is Viral Marketing?

Home Business : What Is Viral Marketing?

Are you a blogger or home business entrepreneur?  How are you getting your audience to become aware of what services or products that you are offering?  If you are restricting yourself to getting people that know you to distribute your content around, then you’re losing on the game even before you start.  If you are not getting unique connections that are not necessarily related to you distributing for you your content simply because they have found value then your business is losing out.

You need to get your content distributed to as many people as possible who know you and those that don’t know you but will be attracted from your content.  You need to get your content viral using viral marketing.

What is Viral Marketing?:

As home business entrepreneurs you will be creating various marketing campaigns which focus aims or focuses on getting viewers to promote your campaign which has attracted their attention to a large number of their friends, making the overall growth have a snowball effect rolling down the hill and gathering volume and speed.  Your viral marketing strategy should be aimed at gaining speed, because if the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth will quickly fizzle. There is a great advantage here for you, because you are getting people to pass on your marketing message to others, and this is being done free of charge so that you can consider these people as your “marketing team”.

How does it work?:

In order for this strategy to work, there are two key elements which need to be addressed:

• Forwarding
• Message
• Incentive

Forwarding:

If you want to have your message being forwarded then you have to have your share tools in place that are user friendly.  User friendly here simply means that the tools should not require your “marketing team” to spend hours without end trying to forward the message to their friends. The share tools should be also linked up with other network platforms for example Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc., so that it take just a mouse click for them to forward what they find a message that needs to be shared amongst their network and friends. Here we are obviously looking at the Internet which is as you know the easiest and cheapest form of implementing your virall marketing.

Message and Incentive:

In viral marketing strategies, the message and incentives go “like a pea in a pod” you cannot do with one without the other.

Depending in what line of business you are in, if you are sending E-Mail as a form of viral marketing, then your message or call to action should be clear of what you expect the readers to do.  The golden rules in such communication are that the message should be clear and concise.

If your viral campaign does not communicate the incentive, and its benefits, effectively enough, you may as well not have bothered sending it viral at all. An ineffectively communicated incentive is no incentive at all. If you have planned your campaign properly, you will see that most successful viral marketing which provide people incentives to participate you will see that people will be ready to forward your marketing message to others. 

The incentive which you offered them is something which they found of value and worth their time to participate in your request of forwarding. This incentive can take the form of a cash incentive, a 'free' product/service that would otherwise have traditional commercial value (e.g. free video training on personal development or even helping them develop their business for example how to generate more leads etc.) Again remember to make it a user friendly to access gifts as anything else will be annoying.