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Now that you have built that
great website, joined the perfect affiliate program, created the most
sort after product, how do you get others to know about it?
Well, let's begin by reviewing some of the things we know about advertising before talking about viral advertising.
What actually is advertising? According to one definition by
Dictionary.com, It is "the act or practice of calling public
attention to one's product, service, need, etc., esp. by paid
announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on
billboards, etc.." Notice how it says, "by paid announcements." But
does it have to be paid always? Not when we introduce the viral element of advertising. Remember, we want advertising for free!
Actually,
there are quite a few things you can do to get others to know
about your site or business or product using viral advertising .
Before going viral, lets talk about some of the things you can do
with your advertising generally to start gaining some traction. You
could start by telling your friends about your service or product, and
have your friends tell their friends and so on. That is advertising by Word of mouth
advertising and there is a kind of viral element to that. If you have a website, you could make your
site in such a way that the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the rest of them would love it. You could put a lot of unique content
on your site, use meta tags to do on page optimization and build
related links to boost your relevance and ranking with the search
engines. This is called Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). And because the search engines love
your site, they will send you free traffic as a reward.
You could immediately go to any of the search engines such as Google,
or Yahoo, or Miva and set up an advertising campaign, where you pay
only when searchers click on your ad. This is called Pay Per Click
or PPC advertising. You could even do the more recent
variation, a kind of pay per incident called Pay Per Play, where you
pay when searcher listen to your ad.
There are also traffic
exchanges and article
directory sites that you can use to bring traffic and
attention to your site or product. The later is called Article
Marketing and is a very solid and profitable form of
adverting. This is simply the art of crafting unique articles about
your brand, or service or product and creating a webpage for the
article on your site and then submitting a variation of the article to
the article directories with a link back
to your website. If your article is great, other webmaster pick it up
and republish it on their sites with your back link, bringing authority
and traffic to your site.
But these all cost time and or money. No advertising is really free or
is it? Well, No and Yes! No because it will cost you time or money or
both time and money to get your momentum going. And yes, because once
you get your momentum going, you can add a tweak to your advertising
that can really make your ads
free.
What are the quickest and
simplest ways to get your advertising momentum going?
Some of the simplest, easiest and most cost-effective ways to get your
momentum going is by running solo, sponsored or classified ads.
Solo
Ads: Solo ads are ads sent to an email list or
a list of ezine or newsletter readers with no other ads on it. Solo ads
when sent to a target audience are very effective because there are no
competing offers on the page. The reader is presented with your ad and
your ad alone. That is why they are called solo ads.
Classified
Ads
When placed at the right place and worded carefully, classified ads are
also pretty effective. Because there are other competing ads, they are
not as effective as a solo ad. By merely tweaking your headline, text
format and duration of ad placement, you can improve the performance of
your classified ad.
Sponsored
Ads
In-between solo ads and classified ads are sponsored ads. Sponsored ads
are placed at the beginning, middle or end of ezine or newsletter
articles. By reason of their placement and size, they tend to perform
better than classified ads but not as well as solo ads.
Pay Per Click
Campaigns are also quick and effective, but they can be
expensive if you don't know what you are doing. You could loose your
shirt with runaway campaigns.
Adding a viral twist to your
advertising
There a few ways you can add a viral
advertising spin to your advertising
campaign. But what actually is viral advertising? It is simply a way of
bringing attention to your products, services, brand or campaign by
leveraging the help of others.
Article Writing, as mentioned earlier is one way to bring a viral effect
to your traffic. As you gain prominence, and other webmasters pick up
your articles for publication, there is an element of viral-ness that
kicks in and brings you additional traffic at no extra effort.
Once you begin to bring some traffic to your site or product, you
can use tell a friend
form on your site, with incentives to leverage the help
off of the help of your visitors. Hotmail did it and exploded their
subscription base. Recently, we have witnessed the explosion of social
sites such as Myspace, Facebook and several other go from obscurity to
notoriety in no time. But these are just social sites and they can
provide you leverage if you just want to promote your face.
But there are also sites that provide a platform for you to put a viral
spin to your business for free. A quick search on Google will turn out
a truck load of such sites. But how many of them actually produce the
results they claim is know from actually participating. Without doubt,
the way to go with your advertising is to go viral. Why? Because viral advertising
quick, it is free, and it is self-sustaining. You can see author
resource area for more information.
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