Viral Marketing Techniques - 5 Further Top Tips

Hopefully these tips are slightly different from the usual rehashed list of ideas, and are ones which will help you to dramatically increase your website traffic and sales. Each of them are powerful stand alone ideas, but when combined give you a phenomenal increase in potential.

1 - Give your product away to the movers and shakers
All markets have a group of people who will heavily influence that market. They are the people who always seem to be first to the new products and services, and who will, when they find a good product, push it to the hilt. You will need to identify these people in your market (very easy) and introduce your product to them. Give them early versions of your product and encourage them to 'spread the word' to as many people as they can - perhaps offer them a bonus for this or get them to join your affiliate scheme. If you can get your product promoted on several large mailouts for free this helps to spread the word.

2 - Offer a multi-level affiliate program
An affiliate program is a very good way of attracting highly targeted traffic. If you get good affiliates they will be able to spread the word about you and your products far, far quicker than you could possibly do on your own. If you offer two or more levels of compensation this will encourage your affiliates to not only sell your product, but also recruit more affiliates under them. Believe me, a good affiliate is literally worth his or her weight in gold. Find your golden affiliate through Clickbank. When you have a good affiliate program in place your traffic and sales growth can (and should) be exponential.

3 - Put a unique 'Advergame' on your site
An 'Advergame' is a small online game designed to drive traffic to your site based on their value as entertainment. Their sole purpose is to advertise your site and product in a fun way. If your 'advergame' becomes popular (and if you are careful in your choice, there is no reason why it won't) it will create a vast amount of traffic. If you ensure that people encounter a squeeze page, forcing them to give you their name and email address before they can continue to the advergame, you will be creating a marvellous list to follow up at a later date. Don't forget, if your advergame is popular, people will spread the word to everyone they know. How good is that for viral marketing?

4 - Create a free software application
Try to think of something useful you really would like to have - an application of some sort, or what your target market needs. If you can't create programs yourself, hire a programmer to do it for you. Once it's ready you will have a powerful lead generator; allow other list owners to offer it to their subscribers, offer it in JV projects, post it on forums, give it away on your site or get it listed by the search engines. To obtain the services of a reasonably priced programmer post your requirements onto sites which specialize in this type of project, such as RentACoder, Elance or Scriptlance. Other sites can be found by a search on leading search engines. You can see if this is a viable project by getting quotes from programmers before paying out any money.

5 - Insert scripts into your webpage
Traffic generating programs are available which give visitors a reason to return to your pages time and time again. Tools like message boards, classified ads., free link pages and bookmarks can all help generate names to your list for no cost. Most scripts are simple to install, and should be well within the capabilities of all website owners.

Apply these tips to your Internet business and you should soon see an increase in hits and therefore your income. Don't forget that you do need to work at implementing all these techniques; they don't work overnight, but they do work.
By Paul Schaverien