How To Conduct Exponential Listbuilding Using Viral Marketing Techniques
Filed under E-mail Marketing
Of all the most successful online businesses which have grown exponentially using viral marketing, Hotmail was the first, in 1997. In the time since, many companies have cruised and burned with viral marketing but the facts are clear: When it works, it is spectacular: Google, Youtube, Skype, for example. And when it doesn’t, it isn’t a risky, or expensive, exercise to undertake.
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.
Hotmail’s use of viral marketing was simple. It had a clickable link appearing 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!”
Every time someone used Hotmail’s email service to send an email, they were advertising the service at the same time. Looking back, when Hotmail was the only web-based email service, it was a no-brainer for people to sign up and get a free hotmail account. The advantages and convenience of it by far outweighed the process of obtaining an email address by normal means.
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.
With a rebrandable ebook, you can have your readers literally “rebrand” the links inside it so that when they pass it on to someone else, it carries their affiliate link for your product. Therein lies their motivation to pass it on.
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.
The combination of viral factors contained in MVS provides a good way for anyone to grow a list from scratch without the need for costly fees for traffic and hosting. Its inherent 3-dimensional rebranding functionality means there are two methods by which members can make money from each signup they get.
MVS is often miss-understood. Many people think it is an affiliate script, like Butterfly Marketing or Launch Formula Marketing. Its not, its a system which automates the front end and generates traffic automatically using the energy in the list itself. It that way, it multiplies whatever traffic you feed it.
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 record – apparently – is 1,200 new members in five days.
Perhaps the most likely key to success with this system is to run it alongside a blog – preferably Wordpress. Then, using regularly updated keyword-rich articles and posts, the site can expect to draw every-increasing levels of targeted visitors 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.
