Internet Viral Marketing

Despite having a cool looking website with all the flashy bells and whistles, if people don’t know about it – it just doesn’t matter how great it is. Being online might just be a waste of your time, money and resources unless you can market your site effectively – and that’s where Internet Viral Marketing comes in.

While there are a plethora of methods and schemes used by so many websites today, especially e-commerce sites, there are still some tricks that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings and one of the easiest to use is Internet Viral Marketing (IVM).

The word viral brings to mind the ‘virus’, a dreaded word known and experienced by almost all computer owners, those two words are not related at all in this respect. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business.

So What Exactly is Internet Viral Marketing?

Internet Viral Marketing is a marketing technique used to build and gain public awareness of a product or company by using many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product or company. This is achieved by using ‘must see’ elements like games and videos that get a person hooked and is then compelled or amused enough to actually pass it on to others. Although the IVM piece shouldn’t be a blatant advert for it to work there should be product or company advertisement passed along with it.

Internet Viral Marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it is relatively inexpensive to produce. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, this form of viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass it on. If the recipient knows the sender on an email it will get through spam blockers or black listings, thus getting past the Gate Keeper.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates to help spread their IVM. They also use intrigue – which you can read about in our next post where we will discuss methods for using Internet Viral Marketing to your company’s advantage. You do not want to miss it!

Using Viral Marketing to Your Advantage

The greatest advantage of Internet Viral Marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your website and your company. You can generate a flow of traffic that brings in masses of potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your website’s existence as more than just a drop in the Internet ocean.

Most up-and-coming online businesses are catching on to the effectiveness of Internet Viral Marketing and advertising. By ignoring the importance of IVM your website might just languish and be relegated to nothing more than a glorified online brochure of your company, as opposed to an income generating success. Along with other schemes and methods for promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization, Internet Viral Marketing could easily push you ahead in the ratings game.

The beauty of Internet Viral Marketing, and why it is so successful, is that it is subtle in its delivery of who actually created it. It really is simply a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company – you get them to do the work for you while passing your advertisement along.

All it takes is a great idea, an addictive game, ebook, text message, or a funny story – there are many ideas still out there, maybe you have a few yourself already. All you have to do is create a buzz – many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossip to make them more popular.

Many big companies have tried Internet Viral Marketing and had success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it worked wonders for them. But not all Internet Viral Marketing needs to be on a big budget like Microsoft’s.

In August 2008 the fashion designer Adam Lippes used this simple yet highly effective piece of viral marketing incorporating offline and online seduction and intrigue: Clear inflatable beach balls were places in NYC cabs bearing the message “How far would you go for true love?” printed on them. An attached card (for easy portability) read www.iwentthisfar.com with the password ‘fortruelove’. The promotion turned out to be a t-shirt and the chance for a $1,000 prize.

In summary then: Internet Viral Marketing is when companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a fun flash game, funny video, or an amusing or compelling story, which a recipient may pass on to another person. The media contains the company brand, or logo, or the product’s description, or any other content to help promote the company, or its product.

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