What exactly is Viral Marketing?
When you make a purchase of a service or item and recommend said service or item to a friend who purchases, you are practicing a form of viral marketing. Expressing your satisfaction with a product or service by telling everyone you know is viral marketing. Essentially, you’ve advertised through word of mouth.
That is the whole deal behind viral marketing. It’s an advertising strategy that gets people to pass on a marketing message that easily spreads out, exponentially, like a virus.
Now, the concept behind viral marketing isn’t a new one, in fact, it’s been around for centuries. However, there wasn’t a name for until 1997 when a venture capitalist came up with the term in reference to Window Hotmail’s marketing practice of appending an ad to each email message of all their users. To put in simply, a receiver of an Hotmail email clicks on their link in the email, the receiver signs up and advertises Windows Hotmail each time he/she sends out an email. And so on and so on it goes. Growth, like this, is referred to as an exponential curve.
Who me? An Internet Marketer? No Way!
Take a minute or two and think about that.
Really think about that.
Because whether you know it or not, you’re marketing yourself with your blog, be it personal or professional, just by virtue of having a blog. Do you leave comments on other peoples blogs? Are your blog posts automatically tweeted? How about participating in forums? Are you into social networking sites, like Facebook, Stumbleupon or MySpace? Every time you leave a comment, tweet something, or are active in your MySpace account, you are marketing yourself. These are all forms of passive marketing.
If you include specific keywords (i.e. words that you’ve included in the meta tags of your blog) to what your blog is all about in the content of your posts, you’re marketing yourself. You may not even aware that you are doing it, but by including these keywords in your posts, you are using a search engine optimization technique that helps to boost your ranking in search engines. Although there is much more to SEO than just keywords, just by using this relatively simple technique of including your keywords in your content can be of great significance.
