Viral Marketing Tactics: Supercharge Your Blog Marketing NOW!

Are you interested in driving more traffic to your blog? If indeed you’re interested then these viral marketing techniques will appeal to you!

To better help you understand this strategy I want you to consider the recent buzz about facebook. Do you know why facebook all of a sudden become so popular with internet marketers?

How about twitter.com?

Do you have the answer?

Ok, here it is: All of them did because of the viral nature of these social networking sites!

Facebook is built in such a way that when you friend someone on facebook your interactions with this friend become visible to every other friend of this your friend! This creates a viral spread of your interactions on facebook. This is the one big plus that has worked so well for facebook's and twitter’s popularity.

If you truly appreciate the popularity of these two social networking sites you’ll understand the power of these viral marketing techniques.

But What Really Is Viral Marketing?

Here are some definitions of viral marketing from across the web:

Wikipedia.org: Viral marketing and viral advertising are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of virus or computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.

Wisegeek.com: Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that relies on individuals rather than traditional campaigns to pass along a message to others. It usually refers to marketing on the Internet. Viral marketing is so named because of the tendency for messages to use “hosts” to spread themselves rapidly, like a biological virus.

Businessgyan.com: Viral Marketing (Word-of-mouth): It is the personal communication about a product between target buyers and their friends, relatives, and associates. Viral marketing technique passes along the company’s marketing message to create an exponential growth.

Sitenexus.com: Viral marketing is the extremely powerful and unique ability of the Internet to build self-propagating visitor streams, bringing about exponential growth to a company's Web site. This can consist of such things as affiliate programs, co-branding, link exchanges, e-mail campaigns, and off-line promotion.

Marketresearchterms.com: The effective way or advertising or producing brand exposure through social networks. The technique spreads throughout the network rapidly by word of mouth or by Internet resources like e-mail, blogs or other services. Like a virus, it replicates and spreads quickly. The cost of such a campaign is relatively low compared to the high rate of exposure to the target audience.

From the above definitions you can see that viral marketing have been proven to produce good results because it makes use of the tendency of a person to share something that he/she find informative, entertaining or amazing. It is simply an innovative way of using the traditional word of mouth marketing techniques of business promotion. And as you may know word of mouth marketing can produce outstanding results because prospects and customers gained through it are more reliable and profitable. It’s because of this effectiveness that many webmasters and bloggers now bank on it to spread their products and increase the popularity of their sites and blogs.

In this article I want to discuss some proven viral marketing techniques you can implement to produce outstanding results as a blogger.

#1: Create Informative Videos

Video has gained and continues to gain popularity on the internet at the moment. With the continued rise of broadband and ad-serving technologies, more sophisticated online video advertising is becoming popular. Right now videos can be embedded in emails and they are also becoming popular in sales letters. The simple reason is because they achieve greater response rates than plain text.

But how can you use videos to drive traffic to your blog or business site? It’s simply by taking advantage of the many video hosting sites on the net right now. Sites like Youtube.com allow you to upload your videos thereby giving the site users to syndicate your videos by placing a code on their sites or blogs. This means if you can create an informational and entertaining video and upload it to Youtube.com you have the chances of turning that video into free digital salesman for your blog as others can embed it anywhere on the internet.

#2: Ask Your Readers to Share Your Content

This technique has actually caught on with bloggers. It is one of the easiest methods in viral marketing. And the good part is that there are a whole lot of free scripts out there that will help you do this without any problem. For example, on this blog you can easily share our content with your friends and contacts on any of the social networking and social bookmarking sites.  At the top of every post there is a “ShareThis” button that gives you various options to share the article with your friends either through email or the social sites.  Like I said this is really popular with bloggers right now and there are various wordpress plugins that will help you do this without much ado so you can’t afford to ignore this simple viral marketing technique in promoting your blog.

#3: Give Away E-Books

Another powerful viral marketing technique that is taking the internet by storm is the use of free ebooks that comes with giveaway rights. Of course before now the printed word on paper and bound into books used to be the only way information was given and received. But not anymore.  Today the marketing ebook, which is slightly different from just an ebook has taken over as a powerful salesman on the net. The marketing ebook could contain text, images, links to web pages and navigation controls.

For effectiveness, your ebook needs to be interesting and informative. It should also have links back to your website or blog. Be sure to include a prominent section where you encourage your readers to pass on the ebook. Let them know that they can post it on their site as a free download, that they can use it as a bonus, and that they can bundle it with other products. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your message by willing participants.

Using viral ebooks as a viral marketing technique is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s even quicker if you use rebrandable ebooks that have been written by others. You can also produce your own ebooks by combining articles written by you or that have private label rights. If you have written a large ebook you can also use the first three chapters as a viral ebook.

On promotion, it could be done through offering it to your blog visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter and also posting the ebook to free ebook directories.

#4: Install Facebook Comments For WordPress

This is one of the latest that bloggers are using to get viral with their blog marketing tactics. Facebook comments for wordpress when installed on your blog gives your blog readers an option to post a comment on your blog using their facebook id. The idea is to cash on facebook’s  viral nature. Whenever anyone posts such a comment the comment does not only appear on your blog but also shows up as a status update on the commenter’s facebook page. Now if you understand how facebook works, that status update will also be visible to the commenter’s friends on facebook thereby exposing your blog to a large number of facebook users. If your blog is running on the wordpress platform I advise that you install the facebook comments plugin right now. Besides, I invite you to try out the system by commenting on the facebook comment box below!

Bottom-line: These viral marketing techniques works on common human motivations. So you’ll need to implement a technique that will be able to build on these common motivations and behaviors to produce the right result. Besides, ensure that your content is worth sharing because this is what will give your readers the experience that will help your viral marketing campaign succeed.

Now over to you. Tell us which of these viral marketing techniques you’re already using right now. And do you think bloggers should really use these viral marketing techniques in promoting their blogs?