Free Viral
Marketing Products
Offering free viral marketing products is the first of the paramount
important 9 Viral
Marketing Success Criterias.
Free viral
products work since the word Free
is the biggest
customer magnet. "Free"
even attracts people who otherwise wouldn't be interested.
Examples of free viral marketing products suitable for the internet
include
-
Software downloads
-
Social medias like Facebook, Flickr and
Twitter are inherently viral, since a marketing message spreads
due to the use of the product. It works both for users, wanting to
spread a message but also for the company itself which gets their
product promoted due to the users urge to share and communicate with
friends.
-
Information including e-books, and free
articles to use on websites.
-
Free e-mail services like hotmail
or yahoo. These are inherently viral since the viral marketing message
gets spread automatically due to using the product. It doesn't require
any participation or opt-in by the user.
-
Graphics, i.e. templates for websites or
animations
- videos
In return for the free viral marketing product,
the
level 1 product (L1), one strategy is to require the
customers email and build an email list that you target when promoting
level 2 products (L2) that you charge money for.
The L2 products are
typically but not necessarily similar to the free L1 products but more
comprehensive.
For example a more in depth e-book or the upgraded version of a free
program.
Furthermore the free viral marketing product (L1) or service ought to
be unique
or of
such good quality that it overshines the cheapest similar
product/service of the competitors. If a much better product can be
purchased for very little, the advantage of "free" dissapears as does
the incentive to pass on the viral marketing message.
If you can't come up with any free L1 products don't despair. There
exist
many L1 products that you can purchase with private label rights,
meaning that you can label them with your own brand and edit them as
you please.
However
"homemade" is best. If you are a specialist in some field you can write
a book; writing is easy and can be learned. If you can develop
applications, do that.
Even the L2 product could be a
bundle of purchased E-books presented with a twist of your own or
combined with a product you created yourself.
What is important is to target
a niche market using niche marketing
and that the product is so good that it gets spread virally since
webmasters, bloggers or social networkers want to share it with their
own visitors/blogging pen pals/friends.
Do remember to check the quality and functionality of the viral
marketing products
before you launch your
viral campaign.
Build
a viral product
Don't just try to market a product virally:
The use of inherently viral marketing products for the viral campaign
is number 2 of the 9 Viral
Marketing Success Criterias.
Some discussions evolve around whether a product can be called viral if
it contains a few features that lend viral characteristics to it.
However just having a "Recommend to a friend" option on one of your web
pages doesn't make your website viral.
How come? Due to the many factors determining the results of this
strategy, it more becomes kind of a contribution to the increase in
website traffic, than it becomes really viral.
Thus several steps need to be completed
before the customer actually agrees to click on the "Recommend to a
friend" button:
- the customer tries the product or reads the
informing article
- the customer finds it useful
- the customer decides to recommend it to
a friend
So first of all the customer needs to be positively surprised by the
quality of the L1 product. If so he also needs to agree to forward an
email containing the viral marketing message.
For the product to be considered really viral the replicability rate
has to be higher than 1 to 1 meaning that each new generation of
transfers results in more users than the previous generation.
To achieve this, the replication
has to be made as automated as possible and so that it takes place as
early within the above steps as possible and ideally without requiring
the decision of the user.
The goal is to get the viral message passed on with maximum 2-3 clicks
by the user. Some websites even attempt to squeeze it down to one click
by requesting the import of the Gmail/hotmail/ Y! contacts during the
log on to the web site itself. Check out the forum
Tagged.com or Flixter.com to see for yourself.
Hotmail is the first famous example of a viral product that works. Thus
no
decision is required from the user to spread the message which is:
"Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com". It simply
sticks
on the product, that in this case is free emails, spread onto the
market due to the product's functionality.
So instead of attempting to market a finished product virally, you need
to come up with a product inheriting virality. One suggestion is to
build a piece of free software according to the 9 success criterias of
viral marketing.
Examples of free products built
for viral marketing:
- Plaxo taking over your Outlook and making
it easy to spam 50 people at
once
- YouTube giving you the code to easily
copy-and-paste videos to other
sites
- Slide.com asking for your social network
credentials to make it easy to
embed slideshows
- Tagged.com and Flixter.com who request the
address book info upon log on
- Another great free viral products you will
benefit
highly from is this superb and legitimate TrafficDigger Free Viral Advertising! The
advantages are that it's already been developed, it's fast and
extremely easy to use. All you have to do is place an ad on the website
you want exposed to lots of traffic without spamming.
Actually all the huge successful companies, such as those
above and Facebook, MySpace and Flickr are socalled Web
2.0 sites, based on the Web 2.0 internet platform,
making them
viral
from birth.
As explained under point 5, this
web solution, previously restricted to large and rich
companies, is now
finally available to small businesses for a small price. See
how Content
2.0 ("C2") allows small businesses
to finally have the Explosive Viral Power Of Web 2.0 sites
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