Tips From Rand Fishkin On Social Media Marketing And How To Make Content Go Viral

Rand Fishkin is the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org).
Here are his tips on Social Media Marketing and how to make content go viral

• Research. Find out who in your industry has had success in this area, and of course who has failed. How have they made it work? Talk to your peers to find how they went about launching viral content and discuss it with marketing professionals who have experience.
• Brainstorm. Getting ideas together at this stage will be a lot easier because you already know what works. Pick some of the best ideas, execute them and show them to a sample audience such as a group of friends, or people you think can be critical of you.
• The Big Push. If your audience is ready to spread it then you have to come up with a strategy that will push the content out. This can be done by emailing bloggers, submitting it on social media sites, talking about it on your own blog, posting a Twitter on it, emailing influential friends. If you can take a campaign wide once or twice, the next time you produce something you won’t have to push it as hard because the audience already recognizes you. It will spread naturally.
• Only kill content if you are getting negative feedback or a lot of criticism. Not all publicity is good publicity. You don’t want to become an online laughing stock.
• Even if nothing is happening, leave it out there. Sometimes a year later it will go popular for no particular reason. That’s the great thing about the web - you can put something out there, think it has failed, and a few months later it turns out to be a big hit. It can be down to bad timing, or the right person not seeing it first time round.
• Keyword Research. One of the things you should always advise your clients is to execute their campaigns intelligently from a search perspective. The links they provide must have the right keywords, and the same thing has to be said when they're optimizing their viral content - such as videos, pod casts, blogs etc.
• Make sure that it’s easy to link to your URL, that you have a link to it, share this, here’s a banner, here’s a badge - ie a piece of content you can talk about. It has to be easy to share and easy to spread.

Make sure the content is kept on your website so that people are linking to your site rather than going to YouTube for videos. Do this to make sure you are earning all the link benefit.

Source - Rand Fishkin Interview

ONLINE MARKETING DICTIONARY ( K - Z)

16. Keyword --> Keyword is the term used for words included in a web page that would match words used by web surfers in finding that web page (via a search engine). Identifying appropriate keywords and using them on a web site is important for search engine optimization. Keywords can simply be words included in the body text of the document, or added to the header using meta tags to increase the number of keywords. Using keywords in the title tag is also important. Selecting keywords, that match your target audiences' use of the web when searching your product, is a critical marketing tactic.

17. Marginal Costs --> Marginal costs are the costs associated with creating an additional unit of product. This is similar to variable costs, which are the costs that increase directly with the increase in production (unlike fixed costs). Digital products typically have very low marginal costs, when compared with traditional goods (materials, labor etc.) and if the product is distributed via a web site, then the marginal costs can be zero. The consumer is bearing the distribution costs, and there are no packaging costs. This is why companies are able to market their products for free on their web sites, in order to try to entice further purchases at a later time (in the hopes of creating lock-in perhaps).

18. Marketing Mix --> A Marketing Mix is the combination of product offerings used to reach a target market for the organization. The marketing mix comprises the Product (what the actual offering comprises), Price (the value exchanged for that offering), Promotion (the means of communicating that offering to the target audience, promotional mix) and distribution (also known as Place, the means of having the product offering available to the target audience). The marketing mix is also known as the four P's.

19. Opportunity Costs --> Opportunity costs refer to the costs associated with giving up an opportunity. They are relevant in the marketing of digital products when one considers the value lost to the company when giving away a product for free. Since digital goods primarily consist of fixed costs and often have zero marginal costs then marketing strategy often dictates to give-away a version of the product to encourage consumers to upgrade at a later time (assuming lock-in etc.) The only cost incurred here would be the opportunity cost of the lost revenue from the consumers that would have paid for this version of the product in the first place. To avoid this situation, companies typically segment their markets, and offer a free product, with limited functionality (and no customer support or documentation) to a casual user group, and an upgraded version, at a price, with customer support etc. to a more sophisticated customer. The company will hope the casual users will upgrade to the upgraded version as they become more sophisticated users and more reliant on the product. They also assume the sophisticated user will not be satisfied with the free version, due to its lack of functionality. Eg: blogger and jot.

20. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) --> SEM comprises SEO and search engine advertising. Search engine advertising, in its current model, typically uses text-based advertisements that the marketer bids on based on the keywords the marketer wants to associate with the advertisement (contextual advertising). The business model is typically PPC. Goto.com pioneered the PPC model for search engine advertising. Goto.com was purchased by Overture which was ultimately purchased by Yahoo! Google's Google Adwords is the main competitor.
Both these networks supply advertisements for other sites.

21. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) --> SEO refers to the art of designing a web-site for better listings in search engines. This includes ensuring you have the appropriate keywords in the body text of the site, in the title tag and the meta tags. Google's PageRank algorithm also rewards sites that have inbound links, and even considers the anchor text of the inbound links. Search engines also reward sites with fresh content. Regularly updated blogs therefore serve as a good SEO tool.

22. Shopping Cart Abandonment --> Shopping Cart Abandonment refers to the loss of a customer who is going through the check-out process of an online transaction. Some statistics suggest that this can be as high as 75%. It is principally caused by poor usability of the site and the check-out process (too time consuming, too many clicks), and hidden shipping charges.

23. (Web) Spider --> A spider (also known as a crawler) is used by a search engine to
identify web pages in order to be cataloged in the database of the search engine (web site designers can also submit web pages to be cataloged in a search engine). Spiders therefore help search engines to keep up with the evolution of web content by crawling through the web seeking new sites. To control spiders in terms of cataloging a web site, a designer can include a robots.txt file that instructs a spider to exclude pages that are not to be cataloged.

24. Text Advertisements --> Text advertisements are text links that are paid for by the sponsors of the target page of the advertisement. They are a form of advertisement that can be considered more contextual (assuming the text link is relevant to the subject of the web page), and less obtrusive than other forms of advertising on the web. Text advertisements can also be used for affiliate advertising and the emerging search engine advertising programs from Google Adwords and Overture.

25. underdelivery --> delivery of less impressions, visitors, or conversions than contracted for a specified period of time.

26. Viral Marketing --> Is a marketing technique that takes advantage of a marketer's
customers in promoting the product. This technique was pioneered by Hotmail. Hotmail
launched its free web-based e-mail service with the tag line (at the bottom of each e-mail) "Get your free e-mail at Hotmail." As customers used this e-mail service, and were e-mailing others, they were effectively sending an advertisement for the product. This attracted new customers, who repeated the process. Once a critical mass of consumers were using Hotmail, a tipping point was reached, where the number of new users started to increase non-linearly. Hotmail soon became the fastest growing media company in history.

27. Web 2.0 --> Web 2.0 comprises technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasting and RSS. It is a term that tries to embrace a participatory web; a web where all can now participate in content creation and consumption. It thus presumes that Web 1.0 was a 'static' environment.

28. Web Analytics --> Web Analytics is the field of data mining the data that is generated from those navigating a web-site. Web Analytics allows a site designer to understand the flow of those going through a site, essentially measuring the behavior of the site's users. Which pages are most popular, which are the entry and exit points, and which are the referrer URLs. Metrics used include page views, hits, sessions and impressions. There are a number of software providers who provide web analytics tools, and a host should also provide this service to its clients.

29. Weblog (blog) --> A blog is a website that is updated frequently by its author, in a standard format, with the most recent entry at the top, and older entries archived. Each entry is a unique URL, a permalink. Entries also include trackbacks and the option for allowing comments. Blogging software (such as Blogger.com and typepad.com) allow anyone the opportunity to be a publisher on the web (no need to know html), thus truly democratizing the process of publishing information (a potential threat to traditional media organizations). Blogs are used to annotate and collect news sources across the web; used as personal journals and for sharing experiences; and used by businesses to reach out to their customers and engage in conversations.

30. Word of Mouth Marketing --> Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) refers to the marketing that can be gained by actively engaging customers to share insights with each other (create buzz that goes viral). WOMM has clearly been around since the inception of marketing, but has gained more prominence with the evolution of the internet, and the ease with which customers can share their stories. Web 2.0 technologies such as Blogs and News Readers are enabling WOMM. Discussion Boards have helped customers form communities. Good WOMM relies on great products that customers willingly evangelize. Marketers have been prone to try to 'effect' this by incentivizing 'fake' customers to talk about their products. This can backfire.

Tips for building success

5 Useful Tips for List Building Success

Tip #1 - Use Forum Postings to Your Advantage - If you are a member of any forums, take advantage of them and add your website address as part of your signature file that is included with every post that you make. This gets your name out there and will enable others in the forum to click on your link.

The link should lead to your webpage where they can sign up to be on your email list. For those who are not members of a forum, it is definitely worth your while to join a forum that is related to your product or service so you can take advantage of using a signature file with your postings.

Tip #2 - Get Writing - Writing good articles is another great way that you can work on building up your list. People like to read helpful and informative material. At the end of your articles, you can include some bio information along with a link to your site. When people read what you have to say and like it, they are more likely to click the link to your site and sign up for your emails to hear more of what you have to say.

Tip #3 - Include a Web Signup Form on Every Page of Your Site - It is imperative that you have a signup form on every single page of your site.

Many people may enjoy what they are reading, but they may not want to have to go back to the main page of your site to sign up for your emails. Make it easy for them to sign up and provide a form on each page of your site.

Tip #4 - Use Viral Marketing - Viral marketing is also a great way to build up your list. Viral marketing is when you offer something of value to people in return for them signing up and providing you with their email address. You may want to offer a helpful e-book or even a special report to get people to sign up.

Tip #5 - Encourage Email Forwarding - You can also use the people you already have on your list to help you build up your list even more. In your emails, encourage your readers to forward on your emails to friends and family members.

They may be able to reach some people you would have never come in contact with otherwise. If they send out your emails to others, more than likely new people will be coming back to you to sign up for your emails if they are filled with excellent information.

Viral Marketing Online - Why it Works

The dawn of Web 2.0 and the flourishing social networks and online communities it has spawned has, for many, upped the stakes in the marketing and advertising world. More than anything, online social networks make it possible for people to communicate - whether this is on a social or a business level. In particular, the technique of viral marketing benefits from using social networks as a platform, as is made clear from the success of the world's most popular social sites. Today, new and upcoming bands need no longer seek a record deal in order to gain fame and popularity: MySpace's rapid word-of-mouth circuit ensures that any band across the world that's gaining attention does so by appealing to a core group of MySpace users and waiting for them to tell their friends.
The recent launch of the Facebook Marketplace platform also suggests that marketers are becoming increasingly tuned to the benefits of viral marketing via social networks. Facebook Marketplace allows users and businesses to post free classified ads on the site, while Facebook Platform is an API that allows for the development of applications to be placed on the website.
Moreover, online marketing communities can be a great place to make new contacts within your industry and, if you're looking for a new job, can provide you with invaluable sources of information about the best companies to work for and who's recruiting right now. After all, viral marketing can work on marketers too!

Gingerly Viral

Definition

Marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message. It is better if any product has to be sold, or any information needs to be broadcasted, it must have a good viral marketing. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of funny video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even SMS text messages. Viral Marketing depends on the person who does the Viral Marketing, because it depends on how the information is spread, and the healthy structure of the information. If done effectively, message can pass to many people; else there are major chances that the message chain can stop arbitrarily. This also relates WOMM to the kind of marketing strategies.

An example :

1. An example is provided of how viral marketing is done through e-mail. Here an email request for joining the ginger community.

Hi,

I have created my network on mGinger.com & thought I'd invite you to join as well. I believe it's a cool, fun way to be informed about new products and discounts in your city.
mGinger.com is free to join, you shouldn't miss out.

By joining mGinger:
You will receive discount coupons and offers based on your interests.
You get SMS ads of only those products that you want to buy (no spam!!)
You get ads at your convenience (only in the time you specify)

And to top it all, you will make some pocket money too.

If clicking the above link does not work, you may type or copy and paste the link below into your Web browser. Make sure you copy the link exactly and do not add extra spaces.
http://mGinger.com/index.jsp?inviteId=369316

2. If I have a e-book, and I send it to 5 people, and they in-turn do that, it gets to 25 people, and if the same is repeated, it goes to 625 people and so on, the e-book is circulated.

3. The simplest incentive based viral marketing is making a referral to a friend; if they purchase or join, you get a premium of either money, product or a discount.

* One important point to be noted in viral marketing is that, we can’t control the reach of the information. The information can reach any number of people and there is no way to force them to propagate the process, or to inhibit them in doing so, as it all depends on the content and the depth and interest it creates.

* A very important point that most of the people miss out is that, they don’t mention the source of the message and the company who propagated the message.

1-18-08.com

Do u have any idea what this is?? Its the viral for J.J. Abrams, co-creator of ‘Lost’, new viral campaign promoting an untitled movie to come out January 18th, 2008. A preview clip being shown before screenings of the new “Transformers” movie, begins with the Bad Robot logo (Abrams’ production company), and shows a bunch of raucous 20-somethings at a going-away party in New York City. Abruptly, the lights go out and fiery explosions and a monstrous roar go off in the distance. The partygoers run to a rooftop and then a chaotic Manhattan street amid the fireballs and chaos when -- right before the trailer ends -- the head of the Statue of Liberty crashes into the pavement.

Now i'm not trying to promote the movie or anything like that, but what u see here is an awesome viral concept. Within hours of the "Transformers" premiere July 3, camera-phone movies of the clip started appearing on YouTube, which naturally gave Paramount Pictures (which has a production deal with Bad Robot) the publicity coup of having the clips removed.

The seed has been planted, and now Bad Robot will see if this project can ‘go viral.’ When it works, you can have a ‘Blair Witch Project’, when it doesn’t, you can end up with “Snakes on a Plane’. As production companies shy away from traditional movie commercials, outlining the entire plot and every joke, and move toward more engaging (and hopefully more lucrative) campaigns, online marketing efforts are sure to be at the forefront.

The Momentum Effect

What is the momentum effect? The "Momentum Effect", is a term created by Marketing Revolution that measures the effect of a brand within a social network and examines consumer -to- consumer communication.

A marketing ROI measurement firm, examined the impact of social interaction on advertising campaigns within MySpace. They found that brands such as adidas and Electronic Arts attributed over 70 percent of their marketing return on investment to the "Momentum Effect."

The study found that 40 percent of social network users visit the sites to learn more about a product or brand they like, and 28 percent said a friend has recommended a brand or product to them.

Social networks are more popular than other forms of communication and entertainment according to the study. When asked what free-time activity they would prefer, users chose interacting on social networking sites over TV but equal with cell phone usage. For more on this you can read David Utter's article here.

Social networkers spend on average over seven hours per week on sites such as MySapce, which increased the growth of overall time spent online. More than 31 percent of those who use social networks report that they spend more time in general online after starting to use a social network.

"Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives", said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace.

"Smart marketers know how to tap into the passion and energy of individuals who care about their products to vastly multiply the impact of their campaigns."

The study included approximately 3,000 U.S. Internet users, as well as MySpace clients for in- depth case studies.

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

“Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence.”

Viral Marketing is like a virus; it rapidly multiplies and spreads the message to thousands and millions. It can be referred with other terms like “word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz,", “networking marketing” etc…

The classic example for Viral Marketing is hotmail.com. it is one of the first free-web based email services. Their strategy was simple, they:

• Gave away free e-mail address and services
• Attached a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out. The message was: “Get your private email at http://www.hotmail.com”
• Then they stood back watched while people emailed their own network of friends and associates, who see this message and sign up for their own free email service and then,
• Push the message still wider on their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Viral Marketing depends on how you go about it. Some viral strategies may work better than the other. Viral Marketing strategies need not contain all the elements but the more elements it contains; more powerful the results are likely to be.

• Gives away products or services - "Free" is the most powerful word. Most of the viral marketing campaigns give away products for free in order to attract attention.

• Provides for effortless transfer to others - The message which needs to be transmitted has to be Short, Crisp, and Convincing. The best example for this would be "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com".

• Scales easily from small to very large - The message needs to be spread gradually rather than rapidly, because it should not fade away before the word is spread.
  

• Exploits common motivations and behaviors - Just spreading the word is not enough, spreading it in such a way that it would leave an urge to produce millions of websites and billions of website and billions of e-mail messages.

• Utilizes existing communication networks - Each of us will atleast have a network of 10-12 people in our close network of Family and Friends. We in the online industry, develop a network of relationships by collecting e-mails, URLs, etc... Spreading the right message in the right place through the right people would easily multiply your spread.

• Takes advantage of others' resources - The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resource to spread the word across. The best example for this would be Affiliates program, which places text links and ads on other's website.

To get more insight on this article please click on "Read more" below.

Read more

What is Viral Marketing?

Creating a viral campaign is difficult, if not impossible. Virality is a goal, not a guarantee. The simplest definition of 'viral marketing- is word of mouth or telling someone else about a product or service via e-mail, fax or phone. Viral marketing is currently one of the most powerful marketing tools on the internet and a blessing for small businesses of all types. Branding is an important aspect of viral marketing.

One example of viral marketing is encouraging current and potential customers to tell others about the company's products and services, and in turn encouraging those others to tell even more others.

In simple Viral is a piece of information which goes out as propaganda for any product or service.