Stop Shooting Viral Marketing Blanks, Stupid.
“Social media this”, “social media that”, “web 2.0-ify your site”. If you’ve been marketing online for even the shortest amount of time, you’ve surely heard that the web is social, and that your marketing efforts should be social too…to the point of viral marketing.
An internet marketers goal is to create downright viral content, right? Wrong. Content going Viral isn’t necessarily the goal, it’s often a byproduct of well positioned content. The goal is to create well positioned content and prep it for at least some viral success.
How to Prep a Blog Post for Viral Success - Your Viral Marketing Plan:
Success is not instantaneous for most marketers.
Not everyone can gain thousands of eyeballs to their content. Fewer can make their content stick long enough to achieve backlinks. Instantaneous success often comes from careful planning and calculated steps towards achievable goals. Receiving hundreds of visitors to new content from del.icio.us, mybloglog, or any social site often comes from successful marketing of yourself and your blog generally. If you haven’t begun these basics, instantaneous success in making content viral is unlikely.
Improve your chances for instantaneous success.
Carefully plan and take calculated steps towards achievable goals, such as becoming a Digg user and amassing 20 friends who actively promote their own and other’s content and can be reached by IM, email, or your favorite form of communication. Join networks. Spend time developing your profile, then use the system. Come back tomorrow and use it some more…repeat. Engage regularly. Make friends on the social sites by digging, plugging, sphinning, and stumbling. Spend time developing your del.icio.us bookmarks into a resource for yourself AND others.
Identify your targets.
Is Digg the best place for your content? Or is a traditional, laser-focused forum a better idea? BTW, one of my greatest marketing successes came from a forum.
Prepare content with multiple titles and descriptions.
Digg and Reddit users like different things. You can’t just write one title and description and expect it to be acceptable everywhere. I’ve seen it happen where users of both see the duplicated effort and vote down content. Study and practice copywriting.
Pre-launch content, if possible.
Mention to your friends that you’re going to be posting something that you hope they’ll comment on. Mention in a blog post that you’re excited about upcoming content.
Launch!
1. Title sticks out in a crowd.
If you’re writing titles like, “Internet Marketer’s Viral Suggestions,” which this post could have been called, you need to rewrite your title. Try some action words, and think about using “tips”, “tricks” or “toolbox.” Aim at viewers emotional needs and desires, if possible.
2. Content that can be easily scanned.
Write for someone with the attention span of a gnat.
3. Posted on a blog which has been claimed in Technorati.
Help others find your blog. It’s easy as pie with Technorati, and it’s a humongous database of blogs where people actually search and surf for blog posts by topic.
4. Post is tagged with appropriate words for Technorati.
Your blog can be found, but take some extra steps to have your blog post tagged for the right keywords.
5. Bookmark it with del.icio.us and/or similar bookmarking services.
Like Technorati, bookmarking services categorize their content according to tags and relevant keywords.
6. Stumble it on stumbleupon.com.
Submit your blog post to stumbleupon.com and let others stumble upon it and vote it up or down. This can drive a slew of traffic some of the time, and people are more likely to stumble through than actually vote you down.
7. Submitted to citizen/mob voting sites like Digg, PlugIM, etc.
The more eyeballs to your content, the better. Just remember, not all audiences are equal. If at all possible, avoid submitting your own content.
8. Comment on other blogs.
If someone has a higher profile than you, and often talks about the same things you do, become a regular commenter on their site. Similarly, link to their content and get into their trackbacks.
Have any of these launch steps helped your content go viral? How much preparation do you estimate it took to go viral? I’d love to hear in the comments. Free backlinks when you comment because I follow.
7 Must-Do Opt-in Email Marketing Techniques.
1. Don’t be verbose. If it takes you 8 kilobytes of email text to try and sell me something, you’ve taken too long. If your autoresponder emails are regularly this long, you’ve likely lost my attention. Enhance your emails by taking some copywriting courses, or just reading what feels influential to you, and then shorten your emails. Let your sales letter be long, but keep your emails short.
2. Repeat yourself. It’s okay to hit me over the head with one offer, especially if it’s good, and you can discuss the benefits in a clear, concise fashion. The CMSInfusion content management system offered as part of the MarketingMainEvent3 had a great “Advanced Notice Subscribers” email list. They hit me over the head with the MME3 event and CMSInfusion for about three weeks, every single day! But those emails drilled into me the benefits, and the original video was quite fantastic, in my opinion. While I didn’t buy, it’s one of the only times in over two years of receiving autoresponder messages, that I recognized why you, me, and everyone should have bought CMSInfusion at the introductory price.
3. Put the unsubscribe options at the bottom. Don’t tell me upfront that I “can easily unsubscribe from a link at the bottom of this email!” I know it’s easy to unsubscribe, don’t make it too easy. I don’t even know what you’re about to say, and my time is limited, so don’t give me a reason to unsubscribe by inadvertently telling me that you don’t think your content is worthy of my staying on your list.
4. Give me free information that I may not have thought of. You can still promote products and services, especially if you tie them into the free information. Just remember, the free information should be able to stand on its own. A recent email I received said, “8 Ways to Increase the Perceived Value of your Freebies.” It was a great read because it took just a minute, and mentioned things I hadn’t already written down in my internet marketing notes. Brian Simpson regularly emails “feature articles” that are worth far more than a million internet marketing products out there.
5. Update your autoresponder emails. It’s easy to get caught up selling new products, writing up new autoresponder messages for them, and broadcasting messages to old list members who have exhausted the autoresponder, but don’t tell me 2006 is the year of video when we’re halfway through 2007!
6. Cloak your affiliate links. Aweber, and many other autoresponder systems automatically cloak your affiliate links and give you statistics to how many people clicked through. But just because aweber creates links for you doesn’t mean they’re the best links to get clicks. Which looks better to you? clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/54378q5433fd3 or hopurl.com/45332 or http://www.wolftrust.com/recommends/adwordsmiracle/?
7. Know what you’re talking about, and clarify. If you’re not sure how to set up an AdWords campaign, or what can be set in the process, but you’re going to tell potential customers to set up a campaign, do everyone a favor and triple check the setup process so you give accurate information. A recent email told me to set up an AdWords campaign with my budget and click rates. If you could set click rates, don’t you think I’d set it to 100%? So they probably meant setting max CPCs on keywords. Don’t make your potential customer’s guess.
Check out 4 more opt-in email list marketing tips.
Grand Central and Free Phone Numbers.
One of Google’s newest acquisitions, GrandCentral is slowly beginning to open up with invitations. I like invitations. The free phone number space has been expanding slowly for at least a couple of years, and it’s nice to see that Google recognizes the value in having one, centralized phone number, and unlimited storage of voicemail messages. Other free phone number services I’ve used or am familiar with include PrivatePhone, Kall8, AIM Phoneline and Lycos Phone, amongst others.
This is likely a large step towards integrating a phone number with Google Talk to compete with the likes of strong offerings from Skype and Gizmo Project.
It is very important to give out a centralized phone number to all of your contacts for reputation management. If you ever change your cell phone, home phone, or work phone, everyone who needs you in all personal and professional areas will be able to reach you.
