To spread your message faster and farther in easiest way possible, viral marketing combines extremely effectively with affiliate marketing. In case you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, it’s simply a way to get other people to sell your product and you just give them a cut of sale. You just provide your viral marketing tools to your affiliates and let them spread message from their web sites. The easier you make it for your affiliates, faster and farther your message will spread.

3. Make sure your servers can handle a “viral overload”

Just in case your viral message is extremely successful, you want to make sure your Internet hosting service can handle load. Jib Jab received over 10 million hits in one month, which brought their hosting service to its knees. You don’t want your virus to spread so fast that it kills host.

You also need to check on whether or not there would be any charge for a sudden increase in traffic to your web site. If your hosting service is going to send you a big bill, you need to consider that in costs of your campaign.

Getting Your Sales Message to Target Audience

One downside of viral marketing is that while you can drive a lot of people to see your message, not everyone is going to be interested in what you’re selling. This is why you need to tailor your message specifically to your target market. You really don’t want to drive a bunch of extra traffic to on your servers if it isn’t going to do any good (see number three above about viral overload).

Your viral marketing message should be carefully crafted from your main sales message. The same people who would take an interest in your viral marketing message should also be interested in your sales message.

Be sure transition from your viral marketing message to your sales message on your web site is a smooth one. You need to make sure that once a potential customer gets to your sales message that it does its job. Does your sales message convey core benefits of your product? Is your message substantial enough to have an impact on reader/listener/viewer? If your potential customer doesn’t get excited about your product, then your viral message may have been wasted. Unless, perhaps, you have another product they do get excited about. If customer does get excited about your product but your ordering system doesn’t work, you’ve also wasted your effort. This is why you want to make sure your product, sales message, and web site (including ordering systems) are working and effective before you start your viral marketing campaign.

Only when all pieces of your overall product, marketing, sales, and support systems are working well can your viral marketing campaign be a success. If all of these are working in harmony, then your bank account will also be happy.

Track The Results of Your Campaign

Just like with any other marketing campaign, you want to know how well your viral marketing is working. You can take steps to isolate your viral marketing campaign respondents from others. One way to do this would be to set up a different landing page (entry page into your site) for your viral marketing respondents and then use software tools to measure how many people are coming in to that page. You could even set up a completely different web site. You’ll also need a different order page so you can track your conversion rate (how many people who come to your landing page actually buy). Then you can compare your original customer orders with your viral marketing orders to see which ones are better performers.

Do it Over and Over

From now on, you should have an element of viral marketing in every email you sent out. Every one of your web sites should have a Tell-A-Friend script. You should continually create free e-books, articles, and reports that you allow people to pass around.

Make all your marketing campaigns viral in some aspect. Check out example below of a way you can quickly and easily create viral marketing videos.

Viral Marketing Example

Let’s look at an example of how you can put viral marketing into practice. Say you have a sales letter-type web site that is selling a single product (sales letter web sites are best way to sell a single product).

The web site at www.viral-video.com is a perfect example of using this technique.

1. First you bring targeted traffic to your new web site through pay-per-clicks or other search engine techniques. Or you can send an email to your distribution list if you have one. You can either advertise your site directly in your email or use a graphic display ad at end of email similar to way Yahoo! does it with their free email.

2. Place a link to a webpage on your site that has a video people can view. The video needs to be something related to your product. Perhaps it’s a demo or just something really entertaining that relates to your product.

3. You’ll place a link at end of video pointing to a Tell-A-Friend page on your web site. You’ll create video so at end of video a webpage with a Tell-A-Friend script pops up that easily enables people to send link to video they just watched to five or more of their friends. After they send email to their friends then you’ll have Tell-A-Friend script pop up your home page again.

4. Now when friends get email they are taken directly to your video (not your home page). Once they watch video they can send web address of video to their friends. Of course Tell-A-Friend script sends them to your home page.

5. In case someone doesn’t want to send an email to their friends, you’ll place a button on your Tell-A-Friend script that says “Click to Close This Page.” This button takes them directly to your web site. You could also create a pop-up on exit page that takes them to your web site if they don’t click “Click to Close This Page” button or send an email to a friend. So regardless they would be taken to your home page.

6. You’ll also set up an affiliate program so others can sell your product for you. You need to set up an affiliate web page that lets your affiliates download your video to place on their web sites. Of course, at end of video it redirects viewer to your web site. You’ll need a way that your affiliate can change “redirect” web address in video so it contains their affiliate identification number. Then when video sends traffic to your home page they get credit for any sales that result. You’ll want to make sure they can’t change entire address since you want traffic sent to your site. A product like ViralVideo at www.viral-video.com will enable you to set this up.

Once you implement viral marketing in your business, you’ll wonder how you got along without it. It’s a marketing method that most marketers really don’t understand or use very well yet. You now have a better understanding than most of your competition so you have an edge. With that edge you can propel your business to greater heights than you ever imagined possible.

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The one that I would not be without is: www.testmyfirewall.com As its name implies it will test your firewall for flaws and scan for open ports and any other security problems you may have. You do have a firewall, don’t you?

Another one is: www.pestscan.com This will scan for any nasties that are already on computer.

Lastly, I use: http://www.security.symantec.com This will run a security check of all my systems.

Don’t put of what you should be doing today. Make sure that your protection is doing its job. Check that you have latest version of whatever protection you are using. An out of date system is worse than useless. It gives a false sense of security and suddenly you find yourself in serious trouble with your ISP.

It is your responsibility to ensure that your computer will not cause problems for someone else. There are so many free systems out there that you have no excuse for not using one or more of them.

Be safe. Be happy. Be responsible.

All best. …Bob…

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