What Is Viral Traffic
Generation?
Generation?
In recent years there has been
more and more written about
Viral Marketing and why you
should be using it to drive traffic
to your site. So, what is viral
marketing, and why should you
care? Is this just another fad that
will soon fade away?
In short, viral marketing involves getting other people to willingly
spread your message for you. People who like what you have done
and tell other people, and the message spreads from person to person
like a virus. When that happens, it is referred to as your message
“going viral.”
It relies heavily on word of mouth advertising; someone sees or reads
what you have to offer and tells a couple of their friends. Their friends
see or read your message and they tell a couple of their friends, and
they tell a couple of their friends, and so on. The number of people
who are aware of you and your message increases exponentially. The
more people hear about your site, the faster your traffic grows. How
large will it grow? There is really no way to tell. The only real limit to
the amount of traffic possible is how many people your site host can
handle.
Just think about how quickly it could spread. If one person saw your
message and told 2 people, who told 2 people, who told 2 people, and
it continued, your message would very quickly be in front of thousands
of people. If each person just told two other people, look how quickly
it can grow.
1 x 2 = 2
2 x 2 = 4
4 x 2 = 8
8 x 2 = 16
16 x 2 = 32
32 x 2 = 64
64 x 2 = 128
128 x 2 = 256
256 x 2 = 512
512 x 2 = 1024
Now, just imagine if you started with 100 people spreading your
message, or 1,000 people. You can see that it doesn't take long
before hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people are aware of
who you are, and better still, are visiting your web site and buying
your products or services.
Viral marketing effectively taps into pre-existing social networks that
your customers are already using. By creating something that is worth
talking about and passing along, you create a “buzz” that spreads
across the internet, and traffic floods to your site to see what the buzz
is about. Once they are there, if they like what they see, they pass the
information along, and the buzz continues to grow.
Word of mouth marketing is by
far the most effective way to get
word out about your site. People
will listen to others that they
already know and trust much
more readily than they will listen
to you. These people do not know
you, so why should they trust
what you are telling them? After
all, you might be likely to say
anything in order to make a sale.
However, they will listen to a
friend or family member, especially if the person spreading the word
does not have anything to gain by telling them. It is just a friend
passing along a great deal they found, or some useful or interesting
information.
Why Should I Use
Viral Traffic
Generation?
You may be thinking that viral marketing techniques are only for the
major players with big budgets, and that it cannot work for small
businesses with small budgets. If that is what you're thinking, I can
assure you, you are wrong. You might not be able to afford to produce
the highly polished ads like the big companies, but there are still a lot
of opportunities for success. Any business or individual with a message
to get out or a service or product to sell can benefit from a well-crafted
marketing campaign.
There are several reasons that you should be using viral traffic
generation techniques to build your business and attract customers to
your website.
1.) It is a fast, effective way to drive traffic to your site.
Like I mentioned above, once the word starts to spread, it can spread
very quickly, and there is really no limit to how many people can hear
your message. Because your message often comes to someone from a
person they already know, it has more credibility than if the message
showed up uninvited in an email from someone they do not know.
Once the message starts to spread, it picks up size and speed as it
goes, like a snowball rolling down a hill. You may start out thinking
that your efforts were not very effective, then one morning you open
your email to find it full of new orders. When it works, it can work very
fast.
2.) It can be very inexpensive.
Once the word starts to spread, there is not much additional cost. The
biggest cost you will face is paying for all the additional traffic to your
site. All of the cost and effort of spreading the word about what you
have to offer is taken care of by the people spreading the word. More
than likely, the biggest expense will be the upfront set up or
production costs - depending on which technique you decide to use.
After that initial expense, the remaining costs are nominal.
3.) It can help shield you from negative comments
One thing to remember is that a negative message can go viral, too.
Unfortunately, you are not going to be able to please everyone. If you
do enough business, eventually you are going to have someone who is
unhappy with you and your business. It only takes one customer that
is dissatisfied to put a shadow of doubt in your customer's minds
about whether they should do business with you or not. Once that
doubt is there, it is hard to remove it. If people are not happy with
the service they received, they are more likely to tell people about it
than if they are happy customers.
