Go Hyper-Viral: Make Contacts and Cash

Viral marketing has been around for thousands of years. It’s nothing more than word of mouth marketing (WOM), but with the advent of the world wide web (W3), viral has taken on a nuanced cachet of subversion – exploiting the system. How cool is that?

Through the centuries, WOM was just that. One person told another who told another about this book or that technology and word spread. It was self-perpetuating. As the band of “in-the-know” individuals expanded, naturally WOM expanded with it.

'Slinger Goes Hyper-Viral

 

 

Today, within the ferocious sphere of e-commerce, viral marketing has changed tactics but the premise is still based on word of mouth. Today viral marketing includes:

• blog posts on topics of a site owner’s expertise with a back link to the poster’s site

• uploading product “how-tos,” movie trailers and endorsements to YouTube and other sites that rely on user-generated content

• syndicating articles to other web sites, providing a back link

• creating connectivity within a smaller, niche market (building a weblet; see below)

• posting to Wiki sites to establish authority within a market or commercial sphere

There are other viral tactics. Create a billboard on MySpace and Facebook pointing to your site; sign up as an expert on Yahoo Answers; list services on sites like Craigslist; make your site book-markable by providing visitors the option to ping you at sites like digg and other social book marking sites. Digital technology has changed the tactics of viral, word of mouth advertising, spreading the news globally in just seconds. We’ve come a long way fast.

Hyper-Viral Marketing
Hyper-viral marketing employs new technologies to expand WOM exponentially. It’s taken a few years for the technology to catch up with demand but today, web site owners have a number of tools and tactics at their disposal to simplify and automate the process of building word of mouth webuzz.

When blogs got hot at the turn of the millennium, posting to one blog at a time wasn’t efficient, though site owners who recognized the viral aspects of this marketing tactic did, indeed, take the time to do just that. Cut and paste. Cut and paste. Over and over.

Now, software tools, like Feedburner are available to automate the process of blog posting. Using this tool and others like it makes it simpler to post content on remote sites, to measure readership and placement of syndicated content and blog posts, to maintain metrics on subscriptions to newsletters, podcasts and other interest-generating content.

Google recently purchased Feedburner. As of the day of this writing, this software was feeding 870,764 publishers (site owners like you) with 1,549,103 distinct feeds.

Feedburner is an excellent example of a tool that has been developed to turn viral marketing into hyper-viral marketing – automatically.

Facebook Goes Hyper Viral
Ever since Facebook launched and social sites went viral, online businesses have employed the resources of these sites to create some free biz buzz. It’s easy to create a digital billboard for your business on Facebook, which makes it an ideal viral marketing tool.

The social website has recently gone hyper-viral with the addition of its “People You May Know” feature. This addition increases the utility of Facebook as a viral outlet by enabling users to search for quality contacts by geography, specialty, schools attended and so on. The idea is to create smaller communities within the larger Facebook universe.

For site owners, the addition of this feature to an already valuable viral marketing tool increases the utility of the site. However, your Facebook space may have to be revisited. New content to attract Facebook’s site search bots can easily be added to link up with old business acquaintances, classmates, neighbors and so on. The result? A higher quality of contact within the Facebook/social site model.

Blog Directories
Blogs are a great way to go hyper viral fast, especially if you post provocative, controversial and bleeding edge content. Getting your blog picked up, however, is another matter. You can submit to blogs but there’s no guarantee that the blogmaster is going to give you some space without something in return – a blog bribe in the W3 trade.

Blog directories build credibility and make it much easier to find your posts. To list your blog, visit toprankblog.com for an extensive list of blog directories. Using automated technology and current blog posting software, you can access dozens of weblog directories and list your blog with a few clicks.

As blogs take on a more significant role in reporting news, identifying trends and shaping opinions and buying decisions, their importance as a hyper viral marketing tool increases. That means good content. Buzz-worthy content. Sites like Spike.com provide a lot of provocative content. (Word of caution: Spike contains content that may not be suitable for all users so be forewarned. Some of the stuff on the site is crude, salacious and downright weird, but that’s the whole point of provocative content.)

Schemes, Scams, Disputes and Deceptions
Whenever a new technology is developed, there are schemers, scammers and other neer-do-wells out to subvert the process and take advantage of the unwitting so tread slowly in this new age of hyper-viral marketing. The snake oil salesman is knocking on the door. Make sure you know what you’re paying for, what you’re getting into and what kind of measurable results you can anticipate. Oh, and does it come with any kind of guarantee?

There are blogging services and press release syndicators that “guarantee” that you’ll get posted on 10,000 blogs within 24 hours. You gotta question the editorial judgment involved in posting to appropriate blogs. Your erudite musings on the Chaos Theory may end up on an anarchist site in Columbia. Be careful. These services are automated and the results aren’t always what’s anticipated.

Oh, and are you going to take the time to determine how many blogs really got your post. Any busy blogger has enough filters on the incoming chute to keep mass mailings headed straight for the DELETE FOREVER file. The finality of the deletion is indisputable. It’s gone without so much as a look. But the PR distributor delivered on its promise by delivering your release to 10,000 sites. What’s more difficult to measure is how many opened the PR and how many ran it on their sites or blogs.

Take care when writing a check for services that are amorphous and difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. If you don’t know how success is measured using a distribution service, man, you got the wrong service.

Also, be wary of “hyper-viral” software coming to market. Some early 1.0 editions are buggy, some over-promise and under deliver and some make promises that may not synch up with your site or server side software. For example, there are several software developers selling RSS to blog software. One of the things that has held back the explosive use of RSS on the web is the hassles of aggregating, monitoring and getting the collected feeds before the site visitor in a meaningful, useful way.

These software packages and associated support services make hyperbolic claims of instant wealth and fame by filling blogs with your RSS feeds. Google “RSS to blog” and enjoy the battle of what works, what’s a scam and what’s worth further exploration.

You Gotta Go Hyper But Not Be Hyper
There are hyper viral tools like Feedburner (and lots of other blogger distribution software; Feedburner isn’t the only one) podcast and webcast syndication software (growing quickly), automated PR software, newsletter software and a bunch of other spam to hit the fan as hyper viral goes hyper viral – starting now.

Take your time. Choose which outlets will deliver bang for buck, which can be measured with specificity and analyzed in a useable format, which players want your money and which want to help by providing a truly potent service or software that makes spreading the word about your site easier, more automated, more targeted and even more personalized.

Are You Blog Worthy? Get the Most From Your Post

If you don’t have a blog, build one. It’s easy using blog modules that plug in to your existing site. Then start posting content. Then get listed in blog directories. Then keep it fresh. Oh man, that’s a lot of work – especially when this is your second job!

Blogs build traffic and keep it coming back. However, too many site owners either don’t maintain a blog or don’t promote it for maximum benefit. So, here are some tips from your web host provider on maximizing the usefulness of a blog.

Post Your Thoughts on Topic-Related Sites
One way to get noticed, especially by those in the know, is to make posts on other topic-related blogs. You can provide your URL so that readers who find your astute insight are able to follow the trail back to your blog archives.

Blog Archives
And speaking of blog archives, keep a good one. Sort each blog post by date and general subject, i.e. conversion optimization. Unless you’re a great writer with plenty of time on your hands, good content is expensive to develop. Think of blog content as a commodity. An asset for you and others interested in what you have to say.

Stay Focused
And speaking of what you have to say, stay on topic. If your readership (whether 10 or 10,000) turns to you for certain information, meet expectations. If you occasionally go off on a tangent expressing your political views, for example, you’ll lose readership.

Keep It Unique
A change in the Google algorithm will be the topic of the week, and virtually every webmaster blog and forum will be crammed full of erudite opinions on the affect this change will have. In other words, they’ll be so much written on a major topic, you can afford to cover something else. And get noticed.

Make it Attractive
It’s human nature to become bored easily on the dynamic web where things change faster than you can say “keyword stuffing.” So, paragraph after paragraph of text is going to bore even the most dedicated reader or subscriber.

Add some relevant images. Charts and graphs. Eye candy to maintain the reader’s interest. Skip the endless pages of “just” text.

Perform Regular Blog Analysis
Good tracking software will tell you which posts are popular with visitors and which get passed over for whatever reason. Use these metrics to more specifically target the wants and needs of your readers.

The things you want to measure regularly are: number of page views, time spent on site and the source (link) and destination of the reader after leaving your site (do they go to the site or bounce off to another site?). Regular metrics analysis will provide concrete data to demonstrate whether your site blog is performing to expectations.

Write Like You Talk
This is the best advice any blogger or writer will ever receive. Something happens to people when they sit down at the keyboard to write the next blog entry. They become walking thesauruses. They use big, impressive words and long, run-on sentences. Don’t. That kind of writing is great for a master’s dissertation but it does nothing for the readers (except bore them).

Blogs as Linkbait
Some posts are better than others. Market your best posts only. Posts can be tagged and show up on human-based search engines like digg.com and del.icio.us – sites where readers determine how good you are. Don’t oversell every blog entry you write. You’ll start to pickup negative user feedback when readers have seen your post everywhere, or it’s a so-so post.

Blogs make great linkbait (a reason for another site to link to your site) but your efforts to “sell” your content to expand your presence may blow up and backfire with readers and search engines alike.

Use High Traffic Days to Build Your Reputation
When one of your posts is front page news on digg.com or reddit.com, you’re going to see a lot more blog traffic that day sniffing out this high quality linkbait. Use these days, when your traffic jumps 100%, to build on a good thing. Immediately follow up with top-of-the-line posts – as good as the one tagged by enough readers to make it to the top of user-driven search engines. This will establish you as an authority, and your site one worth visiting for the latest.

Don’t Hide Your Blog
Your blog is designed to create stickiness and/or to provide something to subscribers. So, make it easy for users to access your blog. All tags, of course, link to the blog. But, do you have a big, well-labeled blog link on your home page? Is there a BLOG button on the navigation bar? If not, there should be. Make it easy to find your blog and more visitors will find (and read and return because of) it.

Don’t Host Your Blog on a Separate Domain
Some site owners do this to keep things simple. Business side. Blog side. But they’re missing a critical benefit of maintaining a blog (in a subfolder) as a sub-section of their primary domain. Blogs attract all kinds of good stuff. Links, improved PR, “buzz,” new readers and customers (showing up as more traffic in SERPs) offers to contribute to other blogs and so on. Maintain your blog as a section of your main domain to get all of the benefits that come with maintaining a blog.

Start the Conversation
Blogs should generate discussion among readers. They should provoke readers to add a comment – good, bad or indifferent. But what if your posts don’t elicit any response? What should you do?

Shill. Fake it. Salt your posts with a comment or two. Many readers are shy about leaving the first post but will happily jump in once they see what other posters have said. There’s nothing deceitful in starting a conversation – one that grows your site’s popularity.

An up-to-date blog – one that contains useful information for a particular market segment – is a great way to build site traffic and to maintain customer or subscriber interest. But, there are certainly things that every blogger can do to increase readership and squeeze out a few other benefits from blog building. After all, it’s time consuming. You might as well get all you can out of the time you invest.