By Ernest O’Dell
It used to be that whenever companies wanted to advertise something, they’d take out a commercial on TV or the radio, or an ad in magazines. Then, when the Internet came out, along came banner ads… but the principles were the same.
Blast your ads at your customers, hope it works. Throw enough money at it and see how much of it “sticks to the wall.”
That’s the old way of doing things like they did back in the “Brand Builder” days of early television. (If you’re not old enough to remember when television came out, then anybody talking about the 50’s will probably sound ancient.)
As I’m sure you’ve noticed though, if you haven’t read about it already, the effectiveness of all those types of advertising has been going down. Banner ads, classifieds, safelists, “free” ad sites, FFA (Free For Alls), are just about dead.
Then along came RSS and blogging. And those are almost dead, too.
And then, along came social networking, Web 2.0…
That’s not to say that all of the aforementioned are “dead” yet—I’m not going to throw around gross exaggerations like that and expect you to believe them. But, they aren’t working as well anymore, that’s for sure.
People fast-forward through TV commercials now with their TiVo’s. Browsers nowadays come with built-in popup blockers. People have just been more conditioned to ignore advertisements. You know what I mean, since you probably do your best to ignore advertisements, too.
Enter viral marketing, also known as “word of mouth” marketing. It’s been happening all the time, but because all the other forms of marketing have been declining, it’s becoming more and more important.
Word of mouth advertising has been one of the best, if not THE best, forms of communications since the cave man dropped his clubs and started walking upright. When he finally figured out a way to grunt out the words to describe the pain his knuckles were having by dragging them along the ground, word of mouth became viral—probably about 10,000 years ago.
You see, when a web site is REALLY good, people just tell each other about it naturally. And then those people who just found out about it by word of mouth like it so much, then they in turn start telling their friends about it. And so on, and so on…
Before you know it, Piltdown Man has learned how to keep from scraping his knuckles on the ground and learned to walk upright.
Ah! Evolution! Such a nice concept!
When word of mouth gets out about your business, and your web site, and before you know it, you’ve got so much traffic, you’re struggling to keep your web server alive because there’s so many people visiting it every second.
I know: it has happened to me. It has happened to my brother, too. He sells a little video screen saver at RAM-Shock.com that nobody else has figured out how to design.
I was talking to him on the phone the other day and he was telling me that he was getting so much traffic that his bandwidth shot up and he got a whopping bill from his hosting company. But, he will still let you download it and try it for free.
Well, that’s good! More traffic is good. Good copy is better, and more sales are the best. But, for now, more traffic is a good start.
The real power of viral marketing, though, lies in the fact that people trust it as a reliable source of information.
And they should!
Think about it: One of the biggest reasons people are ignoring more and more ads nowadays is that it’s turning out that what the ads are saying isn’t really true!
So, why should people waste their time reading and watching things that may not be true? It’s kinda like watching a political campaign speech! You can’t believe a word of it anymore!
On the other hand, if your friend, or your family member gives you a recommendation, you’re much more likely to check it out, since you trust the source.
So, in an age of information overload, and declining advertisement effectiveness, there seems to still be one method of marketing which will never go away.
No matter how bad it gets for “conventional” marketing, people will always respect the recommendations of people they know. This is why social networking, or “Web 2.0,” is doing so well.
So the real question is, then, how do you get people to recommend your site to their friends?
Well, that’s all explained right here: http://www.viralets.com/?t=info2
P.S. Inside the free member’s area there’s a really interesting article about the 3 mistakes that can cause a viral marketing campaign to stop working. There’s just too much information to put into this article, so head over to http://www.viralets.com/?t=info2 and read about it there.
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It’s not about subsisting off of the momentum of an industry. It’s about being worth more to the marketplace and as a result getting more response from it.
And when you have something good to say about your business, your product or your service, then you WILL dominate.
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Ernest ODell – Guerrilla Internet Marketing
Dominant Marketing Strategies
(a subsidiary of DMS Group)
Email: GuerrillaInternetMarketing@gmail.com
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