Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Exponential Integration. How To Implement Viral Marketing Online

By James Botham

Is it really possible to generate exponential list growth online? It has been attempted many times with varied success. Perhaps the very first membership site to grow exponentially (like compound interest, at double rate) was Hotmail which, following launch in 1996 grew to 8 Million users within 15 months. At which point it was aquired by Microsoft for $400 Million.

When the financial inspectors saw how Hotmail had grown so fast, they came up with a new term to describe it: "Viral Marketing".

Viral marketing is best described as the modern form of word-of-mouth marketing. It delivers exponential growth to online businesses by generating its signups and sales through its own existing customer base. As the base grows bigger the message spreads faster and exponential growth, at sometimes more than double-rate, is seen.

The wonder of good viral marketing is its simple and inexpensive. Sometimes even free. Hotmail's deployment of viral marketing was done simply by placing a clickable line of text at the bottom of every email it sent for its customers:

"Sent from my free Hotmail account. Get your own free web-based email account Here!"

In order to use hotmail's email service you have to agree to advertise it to everyone you send an email too. No exceptions. So it is a free service. But in 1997, it was also new, and at the time, having an email address was considered quite hip and modern. It was fast becoming a craze in the same way text messaging did a few years later.

So what can we learn from the way Hotmail leveraged the Internet to invigorate viral growth this way? Well, the first thing to note is that if your product's message is to spread fast and wide, then the method people use to spread it must be easily tapped into. With Hotmail that was easy. They couldn't use the product without spreading it virally at the same time. And, I believe, with varying success, it is transferable to other industries and products aswell.

There are numerous ways which have been used since to invigorate viral growth on the Internet. One of the most effective recently has been to use rebrandable (sometimes called 'viral') ebooks. A rebrandable ebook does more than a single pdf file can do.

Rebrandable ebooks enable your readers to stamp their own affiliate links for your product within the pages of the ebook. By doing this, they are the ones who will earn commission on any sale their copies make so they are motivated to rebrand and pass-on, rebrand and pass-on etc.

Viral growth with rebrandable ebooks is the method of automated growth that has been systemised with My Viral Spiral (MVS). This is a membership site script with inbuilt functionality for uploading and rebranding unlimited numbers of ebooks. When you use this software to create a membership site alongside your other web properties or affiliate programs, you are granting your members the ability to grow independent lists of their own using your in-built autoresponder, whilst at the same time, they are growing yours.

It provides an ingenious method for anyone to grow a list from scratch without having to create their own website or pay costly fees for traffic and hosting. Plus, with 3-dimensional rebranding of affiliate links, it means there are two methods in which members can make money from each signup they get.

Some people think MVS is an affiliate marketing script, like Butterfly Marketing, or Launch Formula Marketing. But they are mistaken. There is nothing else like MVS. Its purpose is to automated the traffic-gathering front-end of any website. It is a script which generates and accumulates more traffic by using the activity of its members. Basically, it multiplies whatever traffic it is fed to increase signups and sales.

Yet people have had mixed results with MVS. Some say their members haven't been active enough, while others say their lists have been so active that their lists grew very quickly.

The most success reported by MVS site owners is 1,200 new members in five days.

Key to success with MVS, it seems, is getting a constant flow of traffic and for that, the best method is to have a blog on the front end which carries regular fresh content to keep a flow of visitors coming from the search engines.

Then, with the signup widget from MVS installed in the sidebar of the blog, a percentage of this organic search traffic will join, rebrand their ebooks, and pass them on by driving their own traffic to the squeeze pages they are given by the system.

After reviewing many methods which might be deployed for engineering exponential growth, MVS has stood out as the favourite. It contains an energetic mix of viral motivators, viral triggers, viral slip and viral seeds. Working in combination, these factors work startlingly well to invigorate viral list growth and sales on auto-pilot.

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