The Secret to Successful Viral Marketing: Stop Trying and Start Inspiring

If I were to rank the effectiveness of each marketing avenue for most businesses I’ve worked with, here’s how they stack up.

1. Word of mouth
2. Email Marketing
3. Organic SEO
4. Paid Search
5. Display Advertising

In many ways, items 2-5 are easy. They have well-established best practices to follow. Word of mouth advertising, or viral marketing, is a different beast. How do you stimulate this activity among your customers? Is it possible to create this type of genuine buzz, or must it come organically?

This question reminds me of the in-house debate among SEO’s over the most effective link building strategy. Do you build, buy, or beg for links or do you create powerful, unique, and engaging content that transforms your site into a natural link magnet?

If viral marketing was as simple as throwing up a YouTube video or creating a Tell-a-Friend page, everyone would drop traditional paid advertising methods such as search, email, or display ads. Obviously, a truly successful viral marketing campaign depends requires more.

Simpleology gives a brilliant break-down of the 2 main types of word of mouth marketing.

Incentivized Word of Mouth

This type of WOM marketing attempts to stimulate viral marketing through incentives, usually monetization. An example would be a refer a friend program that allows customers to earn store credit by getting friends to buy.

Inspired Word of Mouth

Inspired WOM marketing, in contrast, occurs naturally and without incentives. This can be as simple as one soccer mom telling another about the great experience she had at a hair salon, or an influential blogger who reviews a product he or she had a great a experience with.

Customers who engage in inspired WOM marketing typically aren’t just customers, they’re raving fans. Their passion may be based on the product, service, or the entire experience. In all likelihood, the customers that are engaged in this type of WOM are your top 1,000 fans.

So how does a company create genuinely inspired WOM?

Back to the Basics

In reality, I believe the most successful viral marketing comes as a result of only 2 things:

1. Creating products that are actually worth talking about and or…
2. Providing legendary customer service that consistently exceeds expectations

The simplicity of this formula is great news for many e-tailers, who will never be able to create a successful viral marketing campaign. For example, how does a website selling printer cartridges stir up viral buzz? Simple, they just do what they know best. They run their business with excellence and by providing an outstanding mix or products and service.

Why do so many viral marketing campaigns fail? Because they’re trying to create something from nothing. They’re attempt to create buzz results in hyped up, blatant, and sometimes tacky advertising tactics.

In contrast, consider Starbucks, who recently closed their doors for 3 hours in order to refocus on customer experience by learning to make better coffee.

Like Starbucks, many online retailers need to get back to the basics, take a “coffee break”, and refocus on what they do best. When this happens, inspired word of mouth will follow.

Seo Friendly Guidelines to Design SEO Friendly Website

If you are planning to design a search engine friendly website you need to take some important points into consideration. Designing your web site as per these SEO search engine friendly tips and Guidelines will help your site in good ranking and efficient web promotion and also provide and easy crawling for the spiders.

What is SEO friendly website: - A search engine friendly web site is a web site rank well in the search engines and can be easily found in the search engines. In simple words it should be formatted and designed in way that provides easy understanding for user and easily indexed by the search engines.

Use Div Layers instead of HTML table: - use of div layer in palace of old html table is more search engine (SEO) friendly that provides and easy crawling to web spiders and crawlers.

Researching for the keywords: - Search for those targeted keywords search by the net surfer
most. But keep in mind the traffic of these keywords. First try to search out least competitive keywords that are mostly searched out.

HTML as well as XML Site map: - Submit html sitemap as well as xml site map which enables visitors and web spiders to understand the changes you have made on your web site.

Validate web site pages: - Html and CSS validation is very essential for a search engine friendly website.

Remove any broken and dead link: - Remove deal or broker link from the web site as they reduces your web site credibility. These links are not goods for search engine friendly website.