Viral Marketing Techniques - 5 Top Tips

Hopefully these tips are slightly different from the usual 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 - Distribute a brandable e-book or report
This type of product is one which a list or website owner can alter using a rebranding tool to include references or links to their sales page. Although it still remains the copyright of the publisher, it is a very powerful tool, and enables the distributer to show where the book was downloaded from and will include their affiliate link and/or website url. By encouraging others to distribute your e-book you will receive a steady stream of traffic. A wonderful tool for creating rebrandable pdf. e-books is Viral PDF.

2 - Ask all your visitors to 'Tell a Friend'
If you are interested in certain things it's quite likely that your friends will be too - it really is a truism that 'birds of a feather stick together'. Employ this to your advantage by asking your visitors to recommend your site to friends or colleagues via a 'Tell a Friend' feature. This is simply a small script which is inserted into your website which allows your visitors to enter the details of people they think would be interested in visiting your site. When completed they simply press the button, sending the recipients an automatically generated email containing your site url etc. This is as close to word of mouth as you can get on the Internet and is a highly effective means of attracting targeted traffic.

Generally simply asking for a referral is all that's needed, but if you want to get even more 'friends' told, offer people a bonus like a free e-book (see above for the best kind to hand out) when they use your form to refer their friends. There a a number of free 'tell a friend' scripts available. Just Google for them.

3 - Include a means for visitors to recommend specific pages
This is simply a variation of the 'Tell a Friend' theme and enables your visitors to recommend a particular page on your site to other potential visitors. These pages could be articles, reports, newsletter sign up pages or even your special offers. To find out more about this feature look out for CJ Send Page.

4 - Distribute your free e-book or report to directories
You will find, with the minimum of searching that there are countless sites which compile lists of free products, mainly information products. You may submit your free e-books and reports to these sites. This will bring you extra exposure and subsequent traffic to your site. You must make certain that the product you're submitting is top quality and that people will feel that they have received a worthwhile product, even though it was free. If they are unimpressed with your free product it's not very likely that they will want to visit your site and actually pay for something which could be of the same poor quality. If you cobble something together in your lunch break it will look exactly like you did that. Always be aware that you have to provide quality at all times.

5 - Find out and adapt other peoples viral marketing techniques.
A lot of the most successful Internet viral marketing techniques are ones which were first hugely successful in a different industry. They were then adapted to suit the Internet. You can find out about these techniques from Lycos Viral Chart or ViralBank.

If you apply these tips to your Internet business you should soon see an increase in your hits and subsequent income. Please don't forget though that you do need to work at implementing all these techniques; they don't work overnight, but they do work.

A further 5 more ' obscure' viral marketing techniques are offered in another article:- ''Viral Marketing Techniques - 5 Further Top Tips'. I spent hours working on that title.
By Paul Schaverien

Also Read Viral Marketing Techniques - 5 Further Top Tips