Will My Traffic Business Increase Through Viral Marketing?

29 Dec 2009

If you ask the question of how to get more website traffic, you’ll often get this response – ‘go viral’.

Sounds great, but do you know what the term actually involves? How does it work, and is it effective?

That’s three solid questions that need answering, so let’s get started…

A virus, in medical terms, is something that is able to self-replicate and duplicate it’s genetic code to grow and spread. Once it does this, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. Hence the term in the marketing world ‘viral marketing’. Offline businesses have used the concepts behind viral marketing, even before the internet was around.

Here’s the basis of how it works … you give something of value to other people for free. Whatever it is you give away has links to your website, or needs people to use your product. Through the giveaway people enjoy the product and are encouraged to pass it on to more people that they may know.

The chain of people passing it on self perpetuates, all the time with your website being a core element of the giveaway. It means your marketing message or website can be seen by a number of people that you cannot predict, and cannot control.

An effective viral marketing campaign will bring a huge amount of visitors back to your product or website, which is virtually impossible to stop!

So this all sounds good, but can it really be effective?

The simple answer is that yes it can (and does) work, and work very well – for some companies, viral traffic is the main source of traffic to their business websites.

You may choose to give away a product, a report maybe on the subject matter of your market. You may choose to give away a service, maybe providing a neat twist to a software application. You may choose to use a video, and this can really be exciting.

On the biggest and most well known video sharing site, YouTube, they give you magical help to make your video go viral. Their videos are easily shared to other users either online or through email.

You could make a short video about your subject, or even screen shots, and once you’ve uploaded it to You Tube, people have the chance to make comments on it. If you can start an argument, you’ll have people falling over themselves to watch your video!

The video is free and easy to put on other websites, which all encourages people to share the videos in anyway that they can.

After watching the video, the user is also presented with a simple button that they can click to instantly share the video with as many of their friends as they want.

This is almost too good to be true, but it is all there, and crushingly simple, quick and free to do, it just takes some of your time. Let’s not make any false claims, the first few times you do it, you’ll make mistakes and take a bit longer to produce your video, but once you get the technique sorted, you can use video to go viral, and get a huge amount more website traffic.