That's what you got to do if you need to cater your messages to "n" number of people - just get your messages infectious by taking full fledged advantage of the "viral factors" to your marketing efforts.

Viral Marketing relies on the natural behaviour of humans. Just like the mainstream networking, the contact who gets to know you is hoped to pass along the information to others who in turn passes it along to yet another bunch of people, thus creating an exponential growth in the message's visibility. But don't simply "hope"; you need to be "proactive" (Thanks to Aufait HR. You got this clicked on me!).

Success is often measured by people propogating the message as a side effect of the benefits gained from the product/service that is offered (Inspired Word of Mouth).

Several strategies could be employed to get your messages viral. Here goes the list of a few Viral Tactics:


Email Signature

Well, this free marketing tool offered by every email service provider, can fetch you results to a surprising level. Maximize your exposure potential through this viral method.


Branding

Branding your site is very important if you want your site or product to be noticed and talked about. Make sure you have the company brand and logo on your website, products or any material coming out from your business.


Articles

An excellent tool for viral marketing. Write articles pertaining to your niche and demonstrate your expertise through viral content. Include a resource box at the end of each article with a link back to your website, requesting the visitors to include the same if they wish to reproduce the article.


Using Forums and Discussion Boards with Signatures

Using forums and discussion boards of your niche can help you get exposure and demonstrate expertise to a wide array of potential buyer from specific target group.


Ezines and Newsletters

If your newsletter contains information of value, tips, news, tutorials or anything intriguing for that matter, you'll find the subscribers forwarding it on to others without being prodded.


Podcasts, E-books and Whitepapers

Podcasts, ebooks and whitepapers are your viral salesmen. Offer free ebooks as subscription incentives and sales bonuses.


Desirable Products/Services for Passing Around

People love to forward on amusing, entertaining or informational items. Flash games, amusing images, jokes etc are loved to be shared via email (a peep at your inbox will vouch for that!). Your company name/brand identity embedded in it will sweep through millions of eyes.


Give Away Products/Services

The word "free" elicits interest in anybody and everybody wants to avail of that free item, be it product or service. Though the benefits are never immediate, if the company gets to build a strong customer base by offering free products/services, it will soon bring the results.


Word of Mouse (online version of Word of Mouth) Recommendations

Install a Recommend-It or Email A Friend referral system and make it easy to print, email or fax your webpage to a friend. Adding a sentence like "if you found this article/website, product/service helpful let your friends, family and colleagues know about it" at the end of each copy would be a good idea.


Encourage Links to Your Site

Encourage links to website by writing articles for free (with live links of course), participating in boards and forums of business interest, setting up Affiliate Programs and sending out news releases concerning free service or product available on your site.


Viral Software

Handy and useful desktop products like e-calenders, organizers, link checking software etc can often be very viral, passed on and downloaded by thousands each day. Display company logo, brand and contact email with live links within the products.


Viral Video

An interesting entertaining video is cheerfully passed on to friends and other loved ones. Anybody does that. A business could leverage such videos to its marketing advantage by adding company logo and URL, marketing message or business contact details etc to the video footer. Social networking websites play a strong role here.


Viral Content

Public members and journalists will value your contribution only if it has a strong content. And if you have one, you will get the traffic flocking and genuine one way links to your website. If your content is not worthwhile, distributing viral releases will only lead to people devaluing your online presence.


Social Networking Websites

These websites allow you to create your own customized profile, where you could choose to display your company URL, post a viral content or deliver a marketing message you choose to present. Just have your say.


Exploit Human Behaviour

Since people love popularity and incentives, motivation will drive them to communicate to more and more people. Build a marketing strategy to exploit human behaviour for viral transmission of your message (Incentivized Word of Mouth).


Remember, Viral Marketing doesn't stop online. A pdf file printed and which has your company URL in the footer can go a long way towards accomplishment. Low cost, high response rate from targeted users and ease of execution are the most adorable part of Viral Marketing. It helps increase your link popularity, website traffic and build brand recognition. The formula for the success of Viral Marketing is a combination of free, outstanding and groundbreaking web resource (e-book, informative articles, blog entries, hilarious/educational videos etc), a network of people to spark and take on the buzz, and links enticed through viral factors that makes it easy to share and disseminate your messages and content around.



While there are no regulations set for Viral Marketing tactics, a company with creative and thoughtful ideas could leverage them to find popularity and success on the web.

Tags: Viral Tactics | Viral Content | Viral Marketing | Marketing | Viral Traffic

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Most of us like a cup coffee(or tea) in the morning. The thought of which itself will bring  an energy in us. (Let us forget about the taste of the tea supplied in our office by our local tea vendor which is consistently inconsistent).This blog entry is some what a similar to my previous entry "Juice".This time it is about another Firefox plug in "Morning Coffee".  But this is not a techie plug in but useful for anyone as a daily utility. Actually this plug in is there for quite a long time. I just thought about sharing it for those who are not heard about it.

Just like a morning coffee helps us to speed up daily routine,this plug in helps to simplify our online morning routine.It helps you organize websites in a daily format for quick viewing.

 

Normally,all of us start our daily office work by visiting at least a couple of websites- Checking official mail, personal mail, visiting some news site,logging into some social networking site,checking share market status,marking attendance in a time sheet application to name a few. This free extension will open your daily favorite sites in separate tabs so that you can get your morning web surfing started in a single click.

You can get the plug in from here.

Once you download and install the extension, you can add sites one at a time or as a set and specify which days they should be opened.For those who wants a different flavors in each day it gives enough customization option. You can even choose different sets of sites for Monday/Wednesday/Friday, Tuesday/Thursday, weekdays, and weekends, so you can keep tabs on sites that update less frequently or skip over workday sites on Saturdays and Sundays.

Another advantage is that by configuring these utility is that you won’t forget to check the sites you need to.

Drawback

Although there is an option "Open Morning Coffee instead of your home page" in the settings, I recommend not to use it. It is really annoying as it will come up each time when you open a new browser window. Hope they will improve it as it is still in beta stage.

Tags: Browser plugin | Firefox addon | Morning Coffee Plugin

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My last blog on NoFollow just kicked me up to sum up on PageRank Sculpting and thought would be a perfect compliment for the topic.

There is unequivocal agreement among Search Engine Optimizers that it is important to control how the search bots view your site, which is achieved through quality site and information architecture. However strong your IA is, you are most likely to lead away the crawlers through some possible cracks in your IA into undesired portions of your site (because less important for search indexing) only to distribute the link equity earned to areas that are just meant to serve the on-site users with no purpose on search engine rankings. To achieve that optimal configuration of the internal linking structure and be wise to spend the resources (link juice) earned, it is important to plan how you spend the link juice bestowed on your site through the much-deserved hard earned inbound links. And that's where PageRank Sculpting comes to aid.


PageRank sculpting is the act of optimizing your pages to flow PageRank from your highest PR pages through to your most important internal pages while blocking PR to unimportant or irrelevant pages by hindering Google from crawling or indexing them.

Google engineer Matt Cutts refers to the tactic of selectively "nofollowing" internal links as "sculpting your PageRank" and was quoted as saying:

"The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g., a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level."



Methods of PageRank Sculpting

NoFollow attribute: Using the nofollow tag on links to unimportant or irrelevant pages. To understand better, take a peep at my blog on NoFollow.


Robots.txt meta tag: You can control bots on the site wide level through robots.txt file, on the page level through the Meta Robots tag, or down to the link level through HTML attributes. See what Vanessa Fox has to say about REP capabilities.


Using Javascript: Search bots can't follow them. Using multiple tools for PageRank Sculpting is always the best idea as you do not want the Search Engines to recognize your extreme efforts in optimizing your website.


Content Siloing: An advanced method of grouping content into categories that render them easy to be crawled, allowing the PageRank flow through related content. To simplify, you only link to pages on your site with the same theme, to accomplish ranking for certain keywords.


Begin sculpting PageRank from the home page such that the most important pages on the site get a larger slice of PageRank than the less significant ones (e.g. Privacy Policy, Testimonials, Email Us etc.).

PageRank comes in from multiple sources, therefore sculpting the flow from the homepage alone isn't going to get the job done complete.

PageRank Sculpting is also valid for low value outbound links such as "Click to Verify" VeriSign and HackerSafe seals, so that a larger share of PageRank is preserved for the remaining more important pages (e.g. Product category pages).

PageRank Sculpting is not meant for new sites as there is no need to control PageRank when you are not yet in the good books of search engines.

This technique is most effective on sites with hundreds of pages of content and a reasonable PageRank. If your website has under 100 pages of content, PageRank Sculpting is not for you and you have better things to consider.

PageRank Sculpting is best used on sites that are already fully search engine optimized; this technique should be the last one in your checklist.

Spend time wisely and be attentive to while implementing this SEO tactic. It is not as casual as leaving a blog comment for the sake of a backlink. It is a valuable tool when you actually know what you are doing and have a lot of link juice to play with. So invest in your best concentration, abilities and stay focused.

If you are inexperienced or not so confident on your SEO knowledge, PageRank Sculpting shouldn't be your cup of tea. It is best left to professionals.

It is vital to remember that the key essence is whether you can improve your position with search engines by changing the internal linking structure of your website and get more important pages indexed. It is not to be considered as a compensation for bad site or information architecture. The game is to figure out how to get as much conversion driven traffic as possible.


Install SEO for Firefox to help you see what links are nofollow on the various blogs and sites you visit.


Let me conclude saying that there is nothing wrong with sculpting your PageRank unless you get obsessed with or overdo it to cause a negative influence.

Tags: SEO | PageRank Sculpting | PageRank | NoFollow | SEO Tactics

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