Viral Marketing Works
by Desmond Mantor
http://www.havetraffic.com

But for the unflattering connotations of its name, viral marketing is a sound and effective way of generating traffic to your site. Viral marketing, in the world of the Internet, is an equivalent of word-of-mouth  advertising. Although the experts tried to give it a more appealing name, viral marketing has come to stay as the virtual term for word-of-mouth  advertising that creates traffic flow and business. A successful viral marketing campaign has five basic elements, which are not always utilized but you can certainly enhance the chances of success if you include more elements.

The first of the five elements is to offer free products or services.  People like a bargain, but they love free. This is kind of like the saying, "It takes money to make money".  You give something away to gain a customer. The second element is that your virus, or message, must be easily transferred to others.  It doesn't get much simpler than hitting a forward button within your e-mail program so this component is a part of any viral marketing campaign.

Your viral marketing campaign can be successful if you direct your efforts to offer people popularity, love, or emotional gratification of any kind. All marketing attempts seek to take advantage of the needs and urges of people. For instance, many businesses send e-mails promising to make people millionaires overnight. They continue to thrive upon the motivating power of greed, although on the face of it, it looks absurd and the odds are heavily against it.

The fourth component of any successful viral marketing campaign is to make use of the existing networks of people. On an average, an individual has an inner network of around 10 people and many more in their business or familial networks. Viral marketing penetrates into the inner network initially, and then spreads like a real virus in all directions. Essentially, just 5 people from the inner network are enough to forward your offer on to 5 more of their friends and so on. The only difference between word-of-mouth advertising and viral marketing is the medium, not the principle.

Finally, of course, you need readiness to service customers if your viral marketing campaign becomes a success. So, you are offering a free service or product that will emotionally gratify potential customers and you even got enough mileage from people's inner networks. Now, you have all this web traffic heading to your website. Do you have the ability to efficiently process those many orders? You need to have a way of quickly bringing enough servers online as and when required to eamlessly and efficiently process orders. If there is a glitch on your site, disillusioned customers are unlikely to return and the campaign will fail. But, if you have a plan that takes into account all these factors and an effective selling point which gratifies your customers, then viral marketing will work for you!

Desmond Mantor is the Marketing Director of Have Traffic which offers a unique web site traffic generation service for commercial web sites. Recent, independent, split tests have proven their double qualified traffic more effective than the major pay per click sources. For further information on how to drive highly responsive traffic to your site today visit: http://www.havetraffic.com