Three Steps To Building A 50K Email List In Less T

Three Steps To Building A 50K Email List In Less Than 90 Days

by: Melvin Perry

One major asset that every internet or affiliate marketer needs is a big email list. There is a saying in the marketing world that states that ขthe money is in the listข. This is very true because the bigger the list, the greater the potential income. But a common concern amongst many people marketing online is:

ขHow can I grow a huge gurutype email list and how long will it take?ข

What many of us know in the internet marketing world is that it can take a very long time to build a list of 10,000 subscribers. And building a list to this size is a lot more complicated than sending hundreds of visitors to your website. I currently have a website that averages over 500 visitors a day. Out of those 500 visits, I will be lucky to get at least 15 subscribers per day to my list. With these statistics it will take me about 2 years to build an email list to 10,000 subscribers.

So what can you do in order to get 10,000 subscribers very quickly?

Well, the focus of this article is to show you how to easily build a 50,000 subscriber opt in list in less than 90 days. What I am about to show you really works, and if you follow these steps precisely, you will see tremendous results.

Step 1: Get a Virus To Build Your List

In order for you to build a 50k opt in email list in 90 days, you need to spread your marketing message over the internet like a wild fire. The method that is best capable of doing this is known as viral marketing. Viral marketing, in its simplest meaning, is getting others to market your product or service for you and spreading it to others so that they can do the same also. I also call this wild fire marketing because as soon as your marketing message starts, it will be very difficult to stop it and to keep it from spreading across the internet like a wild forest fire. This is the type of response you want when you begin to grow your email list. And the only way for you to generate this type of response is to partner up with hundreds of other marketers that will help you promote your email list in return for something. This is known as joint venturing and it is one of the better strategies for building a huge email list. Located below is a free service that will help you combine the viral marketing component with the joint venture marketing component in order to rapidly grow your email opt in list.

=> http://www.workingonyourown.com/traffictool3.html

Step 2: Start Promoting Your Viral List Building Machine

The next step is to promote your viral list builder so that you generate a minimum of 50 partners and fellow subscribers. There are multiple ways of promoting your viral list tool, but the easiest way to do this is through ezine solo ads. I know from experience that sending solo ads is a sure way to jumpstart any internet business. Just one solo ad mailing to a good newsletter or ezine can easily generate up to 85 partners and fellow subscribers that will help you promote your email list. Listed below is a series of ezines that provide excellent results every time I use them.

http://www.probiztips.com/advertising.html

http://directprofit.net

http://ultimatetrafficsystem.com/advertise.php

http://www.superpromo.com/optadorder.html

http://www.theaffiliatereview.com/advertising.php

http://www.christiantimesnesletter.com/advertising/

http://www.hitoverload.com/advertising.html

As soon as you receive your 50 partners that will help promote your email list for you, you will slowly begin to see your list virally grow on its own. But the growth that will be taking place is not rapid enough to generate the 50k subscribers in 90 days. You need to create tremendous momentum in the beginning in order to see rapid, exponential growth of your email list. This is where step 3 comes in.

Step 3: The KEY To It All

The last and final step for creating a large email list in a short amount of time is the most important step out of all the 3 steps. In this step, it is crucial that you motivate and train your partners/subscribers to do the very same things you are doing to build your email list. Out of all the people marketing on the internet, less than 3% of them know how to market properly and build a nice subscriber base. The key to getting around this problem is to show them the exact steps you took to promote your very own list. This is known as duplication. This concept is so powerful that it is the key for experiencing exponential growth with any online business. The reason why most online businesses fail is because they do not know how to train their partners to market effectively online. If you do this, you will gain the trust of your partners and you will grow your list exponentially.

Conclusion:

Building a 50,000 subscriber opt in email list can take a very long time if you do not know what you are doing. As revealed, you can actually generate a 50k email list in less than 90 days by following steps 1 3. Step 1 explains how you must build your list virally by allowing hundreds of other marketers to help you build your list. Step 2 shows you a very easy way to get your first 50 partners/subscribers to help you build your email list for you. This is done through solo email ads. The final and most critical step is to motivate and train your partners to actively do the very same steps you are doing to build your email list. If you follow these steps precisely, you will build a 50k subscriber email list in less than 3 months. So you should really start on this as soon as possible. Here is a free resource that will help you get started:

=> http://www.workingonyourown.com/traffictool3.html

About The Author

Melvin Perry is an internet entrepreneur whose been marketing online since mid 2002. During his marketing journey online, he has created various ways of sending tons of targeted traffic to websites. To find out more about his traffic generation methods, visit http://www.workingonyourown.com/real.html

This article was posted on October 13, 2004

by Melvin Perry

Get More Links With a Viral Marketing Campaign

Get More Links With a Viral Marketing Campaign

by: Syd Johnson

Viral Marketing

So you want to setup a viral marketing campaign, but where do you start? A viral marketing campaign is simply a strategy that you can use to get people who like your website and web materials to consciously or unconsciously promote your site while they’re going about their business online.

What to promote The first step in your viral marketing campaign is to identify what you want to promote. Is it your main URL, your newsletter or your web products? The most successful viral marketing campaigns are consistent and promote one thing at a time. You might think that it is useful to put all 20 of your website URLs in your email signature, but it would be more effective if you used one and made it memorable.

Identify your tools – You can use email signatures, ebooks, free software, paid advertising, newsletter subscriptions, assorted freebies and privileged information, members’ only sites and more in your viral marketing campaign.

Start giving out your free goodies – advertise your freebies in free information directories or by giving away your articles to the many online article directories. List your free products on strategic web pages. You don’t want to list it on every page because you don’t want your free items competing with ขfor saleข items. The freebies will probably win most of the time. Whatever you give out, make it easy to download or transfer. Stick to quick downloads, secure ebooks and other items that are available directly from your website.

Give others permission to distribute your products – For the viral marketing to succeed, you must give other people permission to distribute your products. Free ebooks for example, can be posted on a website as long as the links remain in tact. Rebranding is also a good option. Customers can rebrand your product by adding their domain name and logos to the product, but an active link back to your site must be maintained on every page.

Be prepared – If you are creating your campaign to build up traffic, can you scale up quickly and add more bandwidth if your campaign is effective. If you are using multiple methods and multiple products in your campaign, traffic can spike or surge unexpectedly. Do you have the email capacity to handle the requests for more information? Is your site copy updated with FAQ’s to answer some of the most common questions that you will receive? Do you have a reliable shopping cart application to handle orders around the clock? These are just a few of the items that are necessary for you to take advantage of the resulting traffic and orders that you will get from a successful campaign.

Collect contact information – always have a way to collect contact information from each prospect that you gain. You can require a valid email address, for example, before a customer can receive a free item. This method is increasingly popular among internet marketers because it’s a great way to build up your mailing list and it’s an optin list. You can also reuse the list over and over again as you create new products or create subsequent editions of existing products. It’s a way to get more money from the same subscription base without investing the same amount of marketing money each time.

These are just a few the tools and strategies that you deploy to create your own viral marketing campaign.

About The Author

Syd Johnson

You can use and distribute this article as long as you include an active link back to http://www.rapidlingo.com.

This article was posted on February 03

by Syd Johnson

5 Explosive Tactics To Multiply Your Traffic For F

5 Explosive Tactics To Multiply Your Traffic For Free

by: Ewen Chia

How would you like to exponentially increase your traffic without investing an extra cent on advertising?

Yes it is true and you can do this through a powerful principle known as LEVERAGE.

Using leverage is really about creating momentum. Your ultimate aim should be to create selfsustaining *traffic systems* which pay you over and over again for a onetime effort.

Whether the traffic source is completely free or not doesn’t matter. You can invest time and money and still multiply your results or you can start with a zero budget and build a steady stream of traffic that outperforms any payperclick campaign.

กWhat then is the secret to leverage?ก

The secret to leverage is in the setting up of efficient, selfperpetuating systems. In other words, the foundation is viral marketing.

You invest your time to create a traffic generation tool, set it loose on the world and then let OTHERS do the work for you. You work only once but the system continues to grow and multiply your results.

So, what qualifies as leverage?

Essentially, any system you set up which allows your links and your sales message to propagate online in กword of mouthก fashion. This can be a free report or ebook, an article with your byline and links, a ‘refer a friendก feature on your web site and even your affiliate program.

However, for these tools to work their magic, you must include one important feature: incentive.

What is the incentive to downloa.d your ebook or become your affiliate? It will come down to either PROFIT or VALUE. You’re either paying someone in commissions for their effort or you’re offering them valuable information for free.

Understand this one principle and youกll succeed: give first in order to receive later.

With this in mind, here are five nocost explosive viral leveraging tactics you can put into action immediately:

1. Viral Report Traffic

If you sell information products, itกs almost a requirement to have at least one freebie report to give away from your web site. Free reports are common these days, but many are actually doing it wrongly. So you will need to pay extra attention to your incentive to stand out from the crowd.

Allowing others to rebrand your report with their affiliate links is the basic incentive. The advanced incentive comes through increasing the reportกs inherent value. Your potential customers may find กfreeก to be incentive enough. However, your real army of traffic multiplication is made up of other webmasters.

Meaning, the more value you put into your report, the more likely they are to earn commissions by giving it away. Itกs a simple matter of impressing the potential customer enough to give you the sale.

Hereกs a powerful resource to have if you want to create explosive viral reports fast: http://www.miniebook.com

To rebrand your reports, the best tool Iกve used to date is กViral PDFก. You can find more information about this powerful software here:

http://snipurl.com/8vfr

2. Viral Article Traffic

Youกve likely heard of this a dozen times alrea.dy, and Iกm a VERY big fan of this tactic simply because it works. There are actually TWO potential traffic sources built into reprint articles.

Obviously, the first source comes from redistribution of your articles and clicks on the link in your byline. The other source comes from the search engines themselves.

Think about it for a moment. Every article you write has a theme which is naturally optimized on certain keywords. Yet, rather than wait for your site to rank on these keywords, your article can rank higher than your entire web site on those keywords.

Why? Because the distribution sites you send your article to already have high ranking in the engines! They get more traffic, period, simply because they’re larger but, and this is important, they serve articles similar to yours with similar keywords, creating a greater overall keyword density which the engines reward with a higher ranking.

Iกve recently created a 17 page report กLifetime Trafficก that walks you through the entire process of article marketing quickly and easily. Get it from the below link if you haven’t yet:

http://instantmarketingsecrets.com/lifetime.htm

3. Viral Subscriber Traffic

Howกs this for a clever use of resources: leverage the traffic and leads you already have. Youกve done the work to build your email list to the level itกs at now, so why not put it to work for you?

Again, all you need to do is offer an incentive. For example, you could set up a กpseudoaffiliateก program or some form of tracking system and announce to your list that one lucky member can receive a high ticket item from you for free if they can refer X number of new subscribers to your list. All they have to do is sign up and promote a special link you provide to them.

4. Viral Referral Traffic

Consider implementing a ‘refer a friendก feature on your home page. All you need is a referral script to accomplish this. Youกll need to provide incentive to those visitors, however. You might do this by offering a special bonus (separate from what you distribute to newsletter signups) in exchange for the referral.

You could also approach this from an entertainment angle, and offer electronic greeting cards or games. It will depend on the theme of your site.

An easy to customize referafriend script can be found at

http://www.allthescripts.com/page457105.htm

5. Viral Affiliate Traffic

Affiliate programs are tried and true traffic generators. The profit incentive is built in and you pay nothing for the publicity until an actual sale is made. However, to super charge your affiliate program, you should provide extra incentive to your affiliates. If you can afford to offer a higher per sale commission, then do it.

Allow your affiliates to get the inside scoop on your products before anyone else. Offer them the support and education they require to better market your product and boost their own bottom lines.

Hereกs another tip, you should consider implementing a multitier affiliate program with an attractive incentive plan. This will build your affiliate base like crazy and generate traffic on steroids for your site. This model typically works best for residual programs like http://instantmarketingsecrets.com/pbp.htm

Another ingenious example of viral affiliate traffic is Stone Evansก PlugIn Profit Site. His is one of the first and probably most successful replicable traffic model that rewards people just to give away free moneymaking sites. You can find Stoneกs site at http://turnkeymoney.com/plug.htm

The five tactics covered here are relatively simple to set up and implement, but then most marketers do not use them.

Remember to place value and incentive at the center of your campaigns, and watch your traffic multiply on autopilot like an unstoppable explosion!

Copyright 2004 Ewen Chia

About The Author

Ewen Chia has been marketing online since 1997 and is the owner of Instant Marketing Secrets Inc. For a limited time, discover how you can access $6,997+ worth of million dollar marketing secrets, interviews and audio recordings free:

http://www.InstantMarketingSecrets.com

This article was posted on September 21, 2004

by Ewen Chia

Viral marketing revisited….

Viral marketing revisited….

by: Richard Grady

If you have spent any time at all studying Internet marketing, then you are bound to have come across the term กviral marketingก. In fact, it is one of the first things that most people learn about when starting their Internet journey and very often it is a subject that is quickly forgotten or discarded as being an unrealistic way of generating traffic. However, I did something this week which made me look at viral marketing in a new light and proved to me that it is incredibly effective.

For those that don’t know, viral marketing is used to generate traffic and it works by getting other people to spread the word about your website. Because of the fact that you are using other people, your กmessageก can spread across the Internet very quickly just like a virus, hence the name.

One of the most common ways of using viral marketing is by writing an eBook that contains links back to your website and allowing other people to give the eBook away or resell it to their own customers. If you manage this process correctly, you can end up with hundreds or even thousands of people distributing your eBook. Because of the fact that every eBook has a note of your website link in it, a fair proportion of the ultimate readers can be expected to click through to your site (and hopefully a few of these will buy something from you).

Of course, viral marketing doesn’t have to be based around an eBook another way of using this technique is to create a site that is very unique or amusing. The sort of site that you look at and กjust have to tell your friends aboutก. These sites can generate huge levels of traffic in a very short space of time as each person emails their friends to pass on the website URL.

Now, the reason that I say that people often give up on viral marketing as being unrealistic is because it can seem like an incredible task to write or design something that is going to have mass appeal AND then get the word out to enough people and persuade them to start passing your eBook/link/whatever on to even more people. Also, viral marketing doesn’t always happen quickly it can take several months or even longer for the traffic to start flowing at a reasonable level. To be honest, I am pretty much an กI want it nowก kinda guy and for this reason, I haven’t really relied on viral marketing that much for my own businesses (or so I thought!)

So what happened this week?

Well, nothing superexciting really I simply did a search on Google for the following term: กUKTraderกs UK Wholesale Guideก. As many of you will know, this was the first eBook I ever published back in 2001. I also issued resale rights on the first version of the eBook (again in 2001) but quickly stopped selling the rights as I was spending too much time policing those that chose to sell it in breach of the resale rights conditions.

Anyway, my Google search revealed over 2,000 search results for the above term! Now, whilst some of these results related to my own websites and those of my affiliates, a massive number were in respect of sites that were selling the ‘resale rightsก version of the eBook or that were acting as an affiliate for someone else that had the resale rights.

Considering that I had only issued resale rights in limited numbers, during a period of just a few months and over three years ago, I found the number of search results quite incredible. Just imagine what sort of numbers I could have generated if I hadn’t stopped selling the resale rights and had allowed my viral marketing to continue.

Even if each of the above references/links generates only one visitor to my websites each month, that is still over 2000 free visitors every single month. In addition, not only do these visitors not cost me anything but I don’t have to do anything to get them 🙂

I was so surprised at the above results that I am planning on releasing resale rights to the latest version of my wholesale guide in the near future and if you have a product to which you can apply a viral marketing technique, I strongly recommend that you give it a try. What have you got to lose? More importantly, what have you got to gain?

One other thing to bear in mind is that once the word is out กvirallyก, it is quite literally impossible to stop the traffic that your marketing virus will create. So to sum it up, if you get it right and create the perfect viral marketing campaign, you will end up with FREE traffic every month that you don’t need to DO ANYTHING to receive and that would be IMPOSSIBLE to stop, even if you wanted to! Sounds great to me 🙂

Copyright 2004 Richard Grady

About The Author

Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: http://www.thetraderonline.com

Free wholesale search engines: UK http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US http://www.thewholesaletrader.com

This article was posted on September 03, 2004

by Richard Grady

Viral Marketing…Is Your Website Infected?

Viral Marketing…Is Your Website Infected?

by: Bret Forster

Viral…Viruses…Infections…not pleasant subjects for most situations. Unless you’re discussing Viral Marketing! Viral marketing techniques can help you create huge increases in both targeted traffic and customers for your website. In this article we’ll briefly discuss some of the most effective methods of Viral Marketing.

Before we discuss the different Viral Marketing Techniques, let’s clarify what Viral Marketing is. Viral Marketing has nothing to do with computer viruses, causing damage to someone’s computer or property, or using deception to create traffic and customers. Viral Marketing includes using legitimate techniques like viral optin email, viral ebooks and reports, viral ecourses, and many more!

Let’s discuss some great examples of Viral Marketing…

Free Viral eBooks and eReports

Jimmy D. Brown, the Master of Viral eBook Marketing, has created an Internet Business Empire using free and paidfor viral eBooks and eReports! He creates eBooks and eReports and then allows his affiliates and customers the ability to brand them with their own website and affiliate links. His website, Profits Vault Monthly, offers a monthly membership where he creates a great new eBook product each month. He then allows his members to brand the website links with their own affiliate program links. You can find out more about his program at:

Creating Viral eBooks and eReports and distributing them to your affiliates and website visitors is one of the most effective ways to create viral traffic explosion on your website!

Free Viral Optin Ezines –

Viral Optin Ezines are another great Viral Marketing technique that uses a very powerful combination. Optin Email newsletters or ezines combined with wordofmouth marketing. The ezine can be HTMLbased, emailbased, or website or BLOGbased. The key element that makes the ezine viral is getting your subscribers involved. Allowing your subscribers to participate in discussions, creating content, etc. can create a viral wordofmouth traffic stampede to your website!

Free Viral Reprint Articles –

Viral Reprint Articles are short articles that you allow other webmasters, affiliates, and ezine publishers to reprint or use on their website for free. The only rule for the use of your viral article is that they have to leave your resource box at the bottom of your article. This resource box includes your website link. This creates a viral effect because your viral article gets passed around the Internet on websites and ezines.

Free Viral eCourses –

Last but not least, there’s Viral eCourses. Viral eCourses are divided into a series of articles and lessons and are published on an autoresponder. When a person emails the autoresponder address, he will receive his first lesson via email within seconds or a few minutes. Then usually every one or two days they will receive the another lesson until the ecourse is complete. Iกve seen ecourses that have ranged from one lesson clear up to 52 lessons long. The most common are 7 lesson or 7 day ecourses. Viral eCourses are extremely popular! Allow other webmasters to use your viral eCourse full of useful information, and watch the highlytargeted web traffic epidemic occur.

In this article, we have covered several Viral Marketing techniques. But we haven’t even scratched the surface! Use your creativity and come up with some other great ideas. Just don’t discount the power of using Viral Marketing!

About The Author

Bret Forster has been doing business online for over 4years. His website, WebTrafficVirus.com offers the Secrets of How To Unleash Your Own Marketing Virus That Generates More Traffic, More Customers And More Money In Record Time Or Your Money Back Guaranteed! Visit his website at http://www.webtrafficvirus.com/ for details and get a FREE 5Day eCourse on Creating Your Own Web Traffic Virus!

[email protected]

This article was posted on April 16, 2004

by Bret Forster

The Power Of Viral Marketing

The Power Of Viral Marketing

by: David Bell

You certainly know by now that the term กviral marketingก is not just another dotcom cliché. Quite the contrary, it describes the incredible, unmatched power of the Web to promote your business by marrying email to the traditional concept of กwordofmouth.ก

Viral marketing, the concept of making each customer a marketer by encouraging wordofmouth referrals, is indisputably one of the most effective mediums of ongoing selfpromotion a site can employ. It gives Internet companies a costefficient, proven tool to increase traffic and lower advertising costs.

Hotmail originally broke through the mold by proving that companies no longer needed to spend millions on flashy advertising to become the best and biggest in the business. With a simple viral marketing campaign they effectively cornered the market with a budget that spent money on original customer acquisition and not overthetop Super Bowl ads.

However, instead of just standing by idly and hoping it happens, you can actually กdriveก viral marketing by crafting an extremely effective viral marketing program targeted to your audience. This article will provide you with the key steps to create a viral marketing program that will power your business to new heights of success, and do it for a fraction of the cost of other promotional efforts.

DO EVERYTHING RIGHT FIRST

Your potential customers now have the power to tell colleagues, friends and family about great web site experiences in greater numbers and far faster than we could have imagined just a few years ago. Think of the power of a dense email address book and a few mouse clicks. In fact, that is the กfuelก behind viral marketing. The downside is they can do the same thing regarding bad experiences with the same efficiency and speed. Research has shown that people share bad experiences up to 5 times more often than they tell about good ones. Before you post a site to your server and invite people to visit it, everything should be quality tested and in perfect order. While software makers can sometimes get away with shipping buggy software, you can’t issue a กpatchก to a site that has already turned off your target audience because in this market, your audience will go somewhere else, fast. And instead of gaining customers กgeometricallyก, youกll be losing them exponentially.

TWO TOOLS: Buttons and Links

There are two basic tools in your viral marketing arsenal: buttons and links. The idea is that with a single click a visitor can share your site with others, and those people in turn can do the same. The goal in designing and placing these buttons and links is to make them obvious, easytouse, and perhaps even rewarding to use. By making your buttons more obvious, you give the visitor a visual cue to pass your site on to a friend and take an active role in the creation of your own viral marketing campaign. You can take an even more active role and move beyond mere suggestion by actually offering your visitors an incentive to pass something on.

ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS

The analysis is pretty straightforward. For your buttons and/or link to work, youกve first got to get it in front of your target audience of potential customers. Second, your potential customers have to be able to readily tell what it is that has been artfully put in front of them. Itกs that old threeclick rule if you can’t find what you want on a site in three clicks, you’re going to surf elsewhere, and if you can’t understand what you’re reading immediately, you’re going to tune out. Part of what needs to be clear to potential users is what they need to do and exactly how they can do it. If you fail in any of these elements or if you confuse your message with unnecessary complications, you’re potential customer is gone, and youกve blown your possibly one shot at a few seconds of their attention.

Your referral tool needs to, at the minimum, accomplish seven critical things:

Stand out from the clutter of the page.

Be instantly understood

Embody a clear call to action.

Give clear instructions on how to act.

Be placed effectively.

Offer an incentive.

Make the offer simple, clear and obvious.

BUTTON VS. LINK

Button: Eyecatching, can be graphical. Link: Line of blue text. Both viable, both serve their respective purpose. The tool you choose will depend on two factors: 1) what you want your visitor to share with others, and 2) the context in which your visitor will be sharing. If you want people to share content items such as articles or white papers, you can use either a button or a link, although a button is more appropriate as itกs more attention getting. Also, if the context is your site as a whole or a specific product or a service on your site, then a button is preferable because eyecatching buttons can be designed and placed by using simple code that will load almost regardless of browser or bandwidth. However, when the context is email, whether mailing to your own optin list, doing a targeted promotion, or simply sending ‘thank youก emails when customers submit an order, you are better off sticking with a link. Many of your potential customers don’t have email that supports HTML, and even if they do, a button can easily get chewed to bits in cyberspace when moving across platforms and programs. A good rule of thumb is site = button and email = link.

OPTIMIZE YOUR BUTTON

To optimize the design of your button, look back to the seven elements of success. To fulfill the first rule, and to stand out from the clutter of the page, the button needs to be small enough not to take up too much abovethefold real estate, but not so small that it won’t be seen. Simplicity is the key here your button should have a pleasing and eyecatching design, not one that will give the viewer a headache from Flash overkill or frightening color combinations. If your user doesn’t know what your aesthetically pleasing button is for, they’re probably not going to use it. This is where you need to do what your elementary teacher always admonished you to do: use your words carefully. Clearly spell out in straightforward terms what the button is for, why you want your user to use it, and finally, how they go about using it.

PLACE YOUR BUTTON

Now itกs time to place the button, and there are multiple placement options depending on what you want your visitors to share and in what context the item to be shared appears. Remember that your button is a call to action, so the best placement is at the point in your process where your visitors are the most engaged, and motivated. The number one location for a product referral is the page where the product appears and appears by itself or differentiated from other products. Not only will your visitor not yet be preoccupied with billing addresses and credit card numbers, you also do not run the risk of losing a referral opportunity because you placed the button deeper in the ordering process, where the likelihood of an abandoned shopping cart rises.

If you provide a referral tool for an article or white paper, the best spot for the button is at the beginning of the article or white paper for shorter pieces and at both the beginning and the end for pieces more than a page in length. Like most surfers do not read every line of text on every site, it is likely many of your visitors will also not be reading every single sentence and paragraph of what they might send on, especially if they’re doing preliminary research or idly surfing.

Other prime locations for referral buttons, depending on your site and on your needs, are your home page, your product or service pages, and on any special offers. Ask yourself what it is you want visitors to your site to pass along and place buttons accordingly. Place the button close to names, icons, or logos that you expect to catch attention, while also keeping the important basics as close to the top of the page as possible. Web sites, like newspapers have a กfoldก (i.e., whatกs seen before the user has to scroll) and anything considered of paramount importance should be placed above the fold.

OPTIMIZE YOUR LINK

A link is a link is a link. Not exactly a lot of design flexibility, is there? The best you can do, and what you should do it if you can, is to create links that carry at least a part of your message. A very simple example would be http://www.xyz.com/share. The real key with links is to accompany them with a short, clear, and compelling message. Also, underline or color the text of your link so that it is obviously a link.

PLACE YOUR LINK

Again we go back to our earlier point that the call to action works best when the visitor has been fully engaged. If you want people to share an article or white paper, the link goes at both the beginning, when they’re first interested about the material, and at the end, when theyกve read it. If itกs in an email, you put it at whatever point in your message that youกve given your reader the strongest incentive to act. Place it too early in the process, (before that special offer or promotion), and it is like suddenly demanding money from your customer when they are only halfway through the purchasing decision process. You not only won’t gain a customer, you will lose one customer with exceptional wordofmouth potential.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT

Consider Three Scenarios:

People love your site, but you don’t give them any tools, much less any incentive, to share it.

People love your site, and you give them an easy and obvious way to share it.

People love your site, and you not only give them an easy and obvious way to share it, but you actually reward them for doing so.

Which scenario will result in the most referrals? Which scenario would you yourself respond to best? Adding referral tools is a great start, but when you also add an incentive, youกve given your visitors no reason not to act, and your response rate will skyrocket accordingly. As esales guru David Weltman, successful CEO and former IBM advisor, says, กWhat you get is referrals on rocket fuel.ก

But before you start handing out incentives, consider what your target audience will value and appreciate. To a techsavvy audience, an offer of a free กOuthouse Construction for Numbskullsก manual will be less compelling than, say, free shipping or entry in a contest to win a new monitor.

IN CONCLUSION

When used properly, nothing can match the power of viral marketing. It is so effective because it is based on personal opinion, much the same way an editorial carries more weight than an advertisement because itกs coming from a trusted source. You trust your friends and colleagues to send you material that is interesting, useful, and pertinent to you personally. Trust will always be more powerful than flashy design and expensive ad campaigns, and when information comes from someone you trust, it is much more powerful.

You can employ a team of designers and programmers and copywriters to build you a beautiful and functional site. You can pay for content, buy advertising, and even purchase lists of email addresses. The one thing you can’t buy when growing your business is the trust of your users and the recommendations from current customers to potential new ones. Thatกs achieved only with viral marketing.

About The Author

David Bell

http://www.wspromotion.com/

Advertising research and development center

This article was posted on August 19, 2004

by David Bell

Viral Marketing Tips: Greeting Cards

Viral Marketing Tips: Greeting Cards

by: Richard Lowe, Jr.

When we speak about viral marketing, we are not talking about the newest disease. We are not talking about a Mad Cow Disease variant or something that you need to be vaccinated for. In fact, we are not referring to a disease at all.
What we are talking about is literally the most powerful traffic generation technique available on the internet. Viral marketing is so powerful that it makes the search engines look small and insignificant in comparison. Even link exchanges, as powerful as they can be, wilt into oblivion in comparison.
What you do with viral marketing is create something, anything, that visitors will want to give to other people. This thing, whatever it is, contains a link and perhaps a short advertisement for your website, ezine or ebook. So far so good, this is just good marketing. The viral part comes in because the people who receive these items want to give them to other people, who in turn want to give them away also.
So you see? What you get is an explosion of marketing for a very small price. Itกs actually kind of like an avalanche, in that you throw a snowball down a slope and it just grows and grows until the whole mountain of ice and snow is tumbling down.
One very cool viral marketing technique that any web site can take advantage of is greeting cards. Iกm sure youกve run across these all over the web. You select a graphic (a drawing, photo or other image), perhaps a sound file and add some text. This is sent to one or more people via email. These people open the email and click on a link to view their card. They, of course, have the option from here to visit your web site and perhaps send additional cards to other people (or back to the sender).
If your cards are good enough, you can find this technique alone will generate an incredible amount of traffic. Of course, you have the same problem with greeting cards that you have with your web site you have to get people to it to begin with. Once you do that, however, you will find that it becomes more or less self maintaining. The more traffic you get the more you generate. Just make sure that all of your greeting card pages are listed in the search engines, well displayed on your page (and perhaps all of your pages) and advertised elsewhere as much as practical.
In fact, itกs a good idea to spend as much or more time marketing the greeting cards as the rest of your site, since these tend to create visitors exponentially, while your site is linear.
How do you put greeting cards on your site? First, pick a theme or two. If your site is about model railroads, for example, you might get some photos of trains and train sets; you could include vacation photos, cute animal pictures, scanned drawings or anything else that you feel would make a good card. Just remember to honor copyrights make sure you have the right to make copies of the materials before you use them.
Once you have a theme or two, you need to find a greeting card service. Iกve experimented with a few options. Iกve tried hosting it entirely on my own site, and what Iกve found is it is difficult to maintain. Iกve also tried it completely hosted on another site and found it is too restrictive.
The service that I settled upon is called CyberGreeting Network http://cybergreet.net/. This company, in my opinion, provides the best of both worlds (local and remotely hosted).
The pages, images and sound files are stored on your own web site. You can tailor these all that you want so they blend with your pages perfectly. This is the perfect freedom, and as long as you set up the form properly all will work fine.
How do you do this? You download a template file (as explained in their instructions) and modify it to suite your needs. This may require a little effort on your part (as well as some skill with HTML) but the end result will be worth it.
The remote part of the product (which is free, by the way) is the piece that actually formats and sends the card. You see, on your page you get the visitor to supply the answers to a series of questions in a form. The form data is submitted to a CGI routine which puts everything together into a greeting card. Your visitor simply answers the questions and presses submit. You pass all of this to the routine, which then sends the card to the destination.
I was able to get half a dozen pages of greeting cards working perfectly in an afternoon. These remain on my site, and serve me well by creating a steady, growing stream of traffic. I think you would do well to take a look and determine if this will work for your site as well.

About The Author

Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
Web Site Address: http://www.internettips.net
Weekly newsletter: http://www.internettips.net/joinlist.htm
Claudia ArevaloLowe is the webmistress of Internet Tips And Secrets and Surviving Asthma. Visit her site at http://survivingasthma.com

This article was posted on February 4, 2002

by Richard Lowe, Jr.

Moving To The Top Of The Pile, Increasing Viral Di

Moving To The Top Of The Pile, Increasing Viral Distribution

by: Gregory Bendickson

You hear it all the time. Get viral by distributing info products that advertise your other offers. The main key of course is getting others to distribute your material in the first place.

And even more, getting those distributions to produce results.

A few years ago it was almost automatic and assumed that as long as your information was somewhat useful then others would beat a path to your door to redistribute it.

Not so today. With all the membership sites offering hundreds of downloads and some resellers practically giving stuff away and ignoring suggested retail prices now you are not only not guaranteed of viral success but in fact many factors are against you from the start.

There is good news though. With the growing problem of people devaluing the price and quality of products it has got much easier to get noticed above the crowd.

Just like the affiliate who creates his or her own sales page for a product (especially one that had no sales material in the first place), the would be viral distributor can also do a few things to ensure that more people distribute their products.

Tactic 1: Get people to actually WANT your product first.

I know, it sounds so obvious but then why do so many of us push the brandable aspects of it instead of focusing on the readerกs value they will get from the information itself.

You do have real usable value in your info products, services and software, right?

Tactic 2: Go the extra mile

Don’t just throw together a quick ebook and leave it at that. Add extra value by providing articles or maybe an rss news feed. Give more tools to promote your product than the average guy or gal.

The extra 20 percent of time and effort you put into your project will bring you 80 percent better results. Think of the person distributing your material not what you get out of it.

Tactic 3: Reward your distributors for consuming the words

Just imagine how much more dedicated your people would be to redistribute your info product if they actually understood it themselves first. In other words, encourage them to be a reader first and then allow them to distribute it to others.

There are several ways you can do this but one example is to hide certain codes throughout your text copy. For example you could capitalize a letter every now and then like thiS and if they add up all thE letters they Can get the Results they asked for whEn They have read Through all your textS.

(do you know what word I just spelled out above? Sorry itกs a secret.)

About The Author

Gregory Bendickson is a computer programmer and writer specializing in helping businesses get more done in less time and build bigger lists faster. Check his latest sites:

http://ViralListBuilder.WynPublishing.com/?tc=ar003

http://ViralMagnet.com/?tc=ar003

[email protected]

This article was posted on April 07

by Gregory Bendickson

The Power of a Referral Script

The Power of a Referral Script

by: Glen Hopkins

The key to the success of ecommerce is in the combination of the power of viral marketing, permission marketing and one to one marketing.

Have you ever heard of Amazon.com, Bluemountain Cards, or Hotmail? Of course you have! Why? Because the all use varying degrees of the above mentioned marketing techniques. In particular, they use viral marketing.

How can you use viral marketing?

With referral scripts!

First of all, you need to make sure that your ezine has a referral, ‘tell a Friendก link in each and every issue. You can say something like:

กIf you enjoy our newsletter a think a friend might also benefit from it, please click here.ก

or

กPlease help us share our message with others by telling a friend. Itกs easy, just click here.ก

The กclick hereก should be a hyper link to a web page with your referral script. You can find free referral scripts on various sites such as http://www.bignosebird.com or http://www.hotscripts.com. I use an amazing script that I had put together by a programmer. It cost me $1,600 but you can use it for free and make money while doing so no kidding. It is easy to implement. You can see how it works by visiting http://www.listopt.com and clicking on the ‘tell a Friendก link. If you want to use it too, go to: http://listopt.com/affiliate_taf.html

There are other third party referral services out there such as http://www.recommendit.com that are VERY easy to use and offer your readers incentives of $10,000 to tell a friend. The down side is that it is not as professional looking when you use a third party.

So get out there and set up a tellafriend script now and get those word of mouth referrals via one of the best viral marketing techniques available.

You have permission to reprint this article provided you include the following resource box:

About The Author

Glen Hopkins is the director of ListOpt Publications Inc. If you’re looking to build your newsletter subscriber base quickly, easily and inexpensively, visit Glen at: http://www.listopt.com and learn what hundreds of other publishers are saying about ListOptกs amazing List Builder service.

This article was posted on October 14, 2004

by Glen Hopkins

Viral Marketing has Left the Building

Viral Marketing has Left the Building

by: David Badurina

Viral Marketing as a forwardthinking กbuzzwordก is missing. Gone are the days of catchy buzzmarketing that you could just let loose upon the world and watch take off. Now, with users getting more knowledgeable and opportunities getting slim, you need to take advantage of using your knowhow as part of the reason Viral Marketing campaigns work.

Now, Viral Marketing is all about information, and the information has got to be good. One effect the Internet has had, is that itกs teaching people how to be effective searchers, and savvy surfers. Just like coffee beans and oranges, information online has become a sort of commodity. One site may charge you for a piece of information that you could easily get elsewhere for free. This means that when it comes to your Viral Marketing campaign (or any marketing campaign) the better the information you distribute to your users, subscribers, and website visitors, the better your chances for success.

Newsletters are a perfect example of informational marketing. You’re giving something of value for nothing. That value could be hardtofind knowledge, or it could be you after all, individuality is something that can never be a commodity. Knowledge is power, and if itกs free, well then itกs free power and thatกs pretty darn cool. No matter what, You have to rely on what you have and what you know to move that Marketing Virus along!

Newsletters can be used as a Viral Marketing technique. Fill it up with great information exceed expectations and deliver information that hooks onto a feeling like prestige or drive your hosts with something like a contest or giveaway. While the luxury of กonline noveltyก has worn thin and become very hard to find, you can still use certain traits of a good Viral Marketing campaign to move your message along. Generally, plaintext newsletters lack a significant amount of Charm, but if the information is truly stellar and you spell out a benefit to forwarding the email, it can work quite well. The main thing is to know who your target is. Is your target market largely impatient, nononsense business owners who want everything they look for immediately? Stick with plain text, cut the fluff, and give them what they want. Is your target market crossstitching grannies who love cute little periwinkle bunny rabbits? What do you think would happen if you sent the granny newsletter to largely impatient, nononsense business owners? Now you’re getting the idea …

Viral Marketing has really taken a much different shape than what it used to consist of. Itกs much more กgrassrootsก now than itกs ever been because delivery methods have changed and people have gotten accustomed to some of the standard formats. Always remember that itกs your market that defines whether itกs going to work or not. Know what they consider contagious, then your only task is to figure out a way to deliver it!

About The Author

©2005 ViralMarketingTool.com

David Badurina is President of http://www.ViralMarketingTool.com and the creator of VMT Viral Marketing Software. VMT is being used by more than 20,000 people in over 160 countries and is the premier RelationshipBuilding Viral Marketing Tool available online.

To sign up for The VMTzine A truly unconventional newsletter with equal parts humor, reality, and sound advice for your business, just visit: http://www.ViralMarketingTool.com/articles.html

This article was posted on March 19

by David Badurina

Viral Marketing with a Powerful Twist

Viral Marketing with a Powerful Twist

by: Floyd Tapia

What would you do with 500, 1000 or more additional visitors each day? Imagine how your web business will grow with an extra 2000, 5000 or MORE leads each month . . .

Okay, Iกll stop teasing you. . . But what IF those extra leads and visitors cost you NOTHING? Let me tell you a story a friend of mine named Paul Galloway shared with me…

The Brilliant Webmaster

Once upon a time, not too long ago in a nearby web land, there was a business owner looking for a way to increase visitors to his website AND a way to increase his subscribers. (Sound familiar?)

He and his webmaster came up with a simple but brilliant idea. They had some software developed to help them implement this viral idea, and then they launched the new campaign.

In just a couple of months, his website had received tons of visitors (including lots of REPEAT visitors) and almost 49,739 subscribers from this promotion.

In fact, by setting it up properly, your persubscriber cost could be ZERO. Zero cost? What a beautiful end to this story. What was this powerful secret?

Surprisingly, this wasn’t a กnewก concept like all the gurus brag about with their brand new, super secret, monumental discoveries.

No. Interesting enough, youกve almost certainly seen the กcomponent partsก of this system in other places.

What made this idea so brilliant was to combine two existing traffic devices and add a ‘twistก and this powerful twist is where the super viral effect is born.

Okay, itกs almost redundant to say this but everyone knows that they should try to build a list of customers to be truly successful. But try this…

The two กcomponentsก are a ‘tell a friendก program and an online contest. What? Is that all? Well try this on for size. Oh, Iกll get to the ‘twistก in a second…

Viral Marketing with a ‘twistก

Start an online contest, drawing, etc.

Let the contestants know that by entering the contest they’re also subscribing to your publication.

On the contest form, put a referral or tell a friend box where contestant can enter friends and business associates so that they will be sent an invitation to enter the contest.

But here comes the really good part… NOW we’re going to add a ‘tWISTก to maximize your results.

Let the contestant know that every person they refer to your contest, they will get an additional entry as well. This is part of the powerful twist.

Second part of the twist: After they submit the form, give them a URL where they can check to see the กfront runnersก in the contest.

These last two items are what makes this so powerful. You give your contestants an extra incentive to refer more and more of their friends and a way to track their standing in the contest.

Do you see how this taps into your visitorกs triggers of greed and competitive nature? Hereกs an example of a real contest:

http://contestofthecentury.marketingvault.net

If you take the time to set this up properly, you too may cause an avalanche of quality traffic and subscribers to your site.

I can’t say enough about the importance of putting this unused, yet lucrative marketing technique into action. This IS viral marketing with a powerful twist at its best.

To get additional information on how you can create your own traffic tidal wave using this simple but brilliant super viral feeding contest. Send an email to: [email protected] Do this before your competition jumps all over it.

About The Author

Floyd Tapia is an author, business consultant and Internet marketer. His critically acclaimed newsletter: The Tapia Report offers clear cut answers and provides the latest information on the Internetกs newest and sometimes controversial marketing techiques. http://ultimatetrafficjam.com/tapia_report.html

[email protected]

This article was posted on September 22, 2003

by Floyd Tapia

The Swank Meter What Does Hilary Swank Have To D

The Swank Meter What Does Hilary Swank Have To Do With Page Rank?

by: Mike Makler

Some of the Top Internet Marketers will tell you that Name Branding is key to earning Money online. We all can’t be Oscar Winners like Hilary Swank so we need to find other Methods to Brand our Names and Increase our Page Rank. The Swank Meter is a fun and simple Tool you can use to easily measure how well your Name Branding techniques are working. We even throw in 5 Simple techniques anyone can use to brand there Name.

Recently the wife and I were watching Million Dollar Baby. After we were done watching the Movie my wife went on the Internet to see which Karate Kid Movie Hilary was in. It turns out that doing an MSN search on กhilary swankก came up with 190,231 Web Pages, Doing an MSN Search on กmike maklerก brought up 2,737 results. So 190,231/2,737 is 69.5. My Hilary Swank Rating or Swank Meter is 69.5

After Looking up other Popular Internet Figures who Brand there Name and calculating there Swank Meterกs it seems that any Swank Meter under 19 is fairly good.

Name Branding is Important because it sets you up as an Expert in your Field, Lets Do a Word association if I say Golf, what is the first thing that Pops in your Mind. I Bet it is probably Tiger Woods. Likewise if I say Hotel Conrad Hilton or J. W. Marriott are 2 Names that have been branded to Hotels. For a long Time A. L. Williams was Branded with Life Insurance. Wouldn’t you like to be Branded to your Niche Market Like Bill Gates and Computers.

The Best way to become branded to a Niche Market is to raise your Swank Meter. The More places online your Name appears the better your branding efforts. The Question now of course is how does one raise their Hilary Swank aka Swank Meter rating? The Power of Viral Marketing is the best way to raise oneกs Swank Meter. Below are 5 Viral Marketing techniques you can use right now to Brand Yourself

1 Article Submission

One Popular Author Claims by writing a few simple articles and submitting them to 20 or so popular Article Directories he Achieved a Swank Rating of about 10. For Over 50 places to submit articles go here. http://ewguru.com/articlesubmit

For Tips on Article Writing go here http://ewguru.com/write

2 Give Testimonials

Another Great way to go Viral is by giving Testimonials. Many of the places my name appears and often a link to my web page is in a testimonial.

3 EBook Give Always

Free EBook Give Always are Another great Viral Marketing Tool. You can Turn your article Collection into EBook(s) and give them away as an Incentive for someone to subscribe to your newsletter. Of Course to make it Viral allow others to give them away too. It is fairly easy to convert an Article or set of article to a PDF (EBook) Using this Free Online Tool. http://ewguru.com/freepdf

4 Software Give Always

Free Software is yet another Twist on Going Viral. If you can’t create your own Software there are plenty of places on the Internet that offer Free Software for redistribution. http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/freeswtop10page.html

5 Forums

Forums are also a great way to Go Viral. Simply find a few Forums on Topics that interest you and respond to posts with useful feedback, Some Forums will even allow you to post a Link.

As you have seen the Swank Meter is a Fun Tool to see how your branding efforts are doing.

For more Ideas on Viral Marketing look in the Various Article Directories. Here are a few I found recently http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/viraltoc.html

Copyright © 20052006 Mike Makler

About The Author

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001, When he built his first Sales organization of over 100,000 Members. Subscribe to Mikeกs Newsletter here: http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/listsignup.html. More Articles by Mike http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/listsignup.html.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 05

by Mike Makler