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Also known as Guerilla Marketing, viral marketing uses existing communication networks to make the audience willing for advertisement. There are many ways to employ viral marketing for your website.

Traffic Exchange Programs

While these may not strictly be a form of viral marketing, some are very close. While programs like Instant Buzz offer no incentive to visit the advertised site, some programs do. In Traffic Swarm, unlike in autosurf programs, you have to view each site for about 20 seconds, and then manually move on to the next one. You also select which sites to visit and which to skip. This gives some incentive to read the content, and may lead to actual visitors.

Link Referral takes this to the next level. Members who wish to earn more publicity not only need to visit sites they choose, but need to review some of them. This means they are likely to pick interesting sites to read, and may stay on these longer.

All traffic exchange programs also have a referral system. For instance, Instant Buzz offers to send an invitiation to refer 10 friends at sign up. This is similiar to the viral marketing model: existing social networks are used for advertising. However, most of the advertising may go to premium paid members and the service itself.

Interesting Freebies

Now this does not mean an advertisement like “One out of every ten computers free!”, but something that does not seem like a product. It could be a fancy screensaver connected to your site’s content and including a link to your site, or it could be a free mp3 from your garage punk band, which just had your address read aloud at the end. The important thing is for it to be creative, and different from your products.

Now you should not only have it on your site, but let visitors freely redistribute it. This way they will tell their friends, who will tell their friends etc. If your freebie is software, a very good idea is to licence it under GPL. This way no one will flame you for distributing the link to it (and your site) on free software forums and sites.

Continue to Part 2 on Viral Marketing.

by Sutocu | July 10, 2007