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Other Added - Viral Marketing
Being a successful entrepreneur takes tenacity, perseverance, and courage. There is a movie playing in the theaters right now that I believe exemplifies this spirit and should be watched by all inspiring entrepreneurs.The movie 300 tells a great story about the battle at Thermopylae between the Spartans/Greeks and the Persians. While the producers readily admit the movie is not entirely historically accurate, it does draw attention to an incredible time in history when 300 tough guys stood up against an army of thousands and fought ot he death.This movie was filmed entirely in a studio with a blue screen backdrop, then used computer imaging to create the scenes. While it sounds kind of fact, the animation and imagery is very relaistic. Go see this movie.How does all this relate to creating wealth or being a su
If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.
You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:
'Help your friends out!
Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing'.
3. Offer a Free Service on Your Website
Offering a useful service for free on your website is a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.
For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping, offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.
If you're a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.
4. Create an Entertaining Game or Video
This option takes a
There is no quick and easy answer to the question of what to do with all of our throw-away electronics, but one thing is for sure – it is an ever-growing issue and we all need to act responsibly with the disposal of our E-waste.According to Stateline.org an online publication and independent element of the Pew Research Center: There is no precise estimate of how much E-waste is piling up in the nation's landfills, but the National Safety Council estimates that 500 million defunct computers and monitors will be discarded by 2007. California's environmental protection agency estimates 6 million monitors are stacked in state homes and offices waiting to be tossed.We cannot just toss these items into the garbage and forget about them, and here is why. All of our electronic components contain varyi
The reality couldn't be further from the truth. Viral Marketing simply refers to a marketing message that spreads quickly from one person to another.
Like the offline world, the idea is to get your message to reach as many people as possible. Viral Marketing adds fuel to the fire by exploiting the speed and reach of the Internet.
In the music world, an artist can go from being an unknown to having his or her song played on radio stations all around the world within a week.
A good viral marketing campaign works just as quickly. It can start with just one person and quickly spread to millions via email.
Example 1 www.hotmail.com
Started in 1996, Hotmail is considered the grandfather of viral marketing.
Although free web-mail is now commonplace, back in 1996 the idea of getting a free email account that could be accessed by anyone was a groundbreaking concept.
In its first 18 months of operation, Hotmail signed up over 12 million users giving it the fastest growing subscriber base in history.
The genius behind Hotmail was the viral marketing effect of the service.
When the two founders, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia approached a venture capitalist firm to raise money, they also got some good advice.
The venture capitalists suggested attaching a small message at the bottom of every outgoing email to promote the service. And that's exactly what they did.
Attached to every outgoing email was a message that read:
'Get your own free Hotmail email address'
This meant that just by using the service, every new user was in effect endorsing and promoting Hotmail. Starting with a small amount of users, the ripple effect quickly grew Hotmail into the largest email provider in the world!
The effectiveness of this idea is highlighted by the fact that Hotmail spent less than $500,000 on marketing, while a competitor (Juno Online Services) spent over $20 million on traditional marketing to gain a fraction of the users.
Example 2 www.amazon.com
Amazon also implements viral marketing by encouraging their customers to send gifts to friends.
When the receiver gets the package, they also get a discount flyer promoting amazon.com and encouraging them to visit the website.
Example 3 www.citroen.com
French car maker Citroen recently released a viral marketing campaign with a video that features one of their cars transforming into a dancing robot.
The video clip is very entertaining and has spread throughout the world via email.
You can view the video clip here: http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg
Citroen Media Release http://www.citroen.com.au/cms/default.asp?action=article&ID=8031
Viral Marketing Techniques
Obviously not all of us have access to the funds required to hire a professional animation studio to build a dancing robot.
The good news is that there are many cost effective ways to take advantage of viral marketing.
1. Start a 'Tell-a-Friend' Program
One simple way to encourage viral marketing is to add a 'tell-a-friend' link on your website.
If a reader finds something interesting - they simply click on the link and enter their friend's email address to forward them the web page link.
2. Encourage readers to forward your Newsletter
If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.
You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:
'Help your friends out!
Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing'.
3. Offer a Free Service on Your Website
Offering a useful service for free on your website is a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.
For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping, offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.
If you're a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.
4. Create an Entertaining Game or Video
This option takes a
When marketing your practice, as well as designing your brochure, website, business card, flier, advertisement, or other marketing effort, I recommend investing the time and effort needed to effectively address the following:Tip #1: MARKET FOR YOUR DESIRED PROSPECTS, NOT YOURSELFWhat looks good to you is not necessarily effective for your desired audience. Do your market research and test your strategies on your target market.Tip #2: CREATE A SYSTEMDesign a system for external and internal marketing that you can implement over and over again. Leverage your efforts. Don't waste your time, effort, and money with one-shot deals or fragmented marketing activities.Tip #3: FOLLOW UP, FOLLOW UP, FOLLOW UPWork your marketing system, especially your follow up activitiesAlways have the next s
In its first 18 months of operation, Hotmail signed up over 12 million users giving it the fastest growing subscriber base in history.
The genius behind Hotmail was the viral marketing effect of the service.
When the two founders, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia approached a venture capitalist firm to raise money, they also got some good advice.
The venture capitalists suggested attaching a small message at the bottom of every outgoing email to promote the service. And that's exactly what they did.
Attached to every outgoing email was a message that read:
'Get your own free Hotmail email address'
This meant that just by using the service, every new user was in effect endorsing and promoting Hotmail. Starting with a small amount of users, the ripple effect quickly grew Hotmail into the largest email provider in the world!
The effectiveness of this idea is highlighted by the fact that Hotmail spent less than $500,000 on marketing, while a competitor (Juno Online Services) spent over $20 million on traditional marketing to gain a fraction of the users.
Example 2 www.amazon.com
Amazon also implements viral marketing by encouraging their customers to send gifts to friends.
When the receiver gets the package, they also get a discount flyer promoting amazon.com and encouraging them to visit the website.
Example 3 www.citroen.com
French car maker Citroen recently released a viral marketing campaign with a video that features one of their cars transforming into a dancing robot.
The video clip is very entertaining and has spread throughout the world via email.
You can view the video clip here: http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg
Citroen Media Release http://www.citroen.com.au/cms/default.asp?action=article&ID=8031
Viral Marketing Techniques
Obviously not all of us have access to the funds required to hire a professional animation studio to build a dancing robot.
The good news is that there are many cost effective ways to take advantage of viral marketing.
1. Start a 'Tell-a-Friend' Program
One simple way to encourage viral marketing is to add a 'tell-a-friend' link on your website.
If a reader finds something interesting - they simply click on the link and enter their friend's email address to forward them the web page link.
2. Encourage readers to forward your Newsletter
If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.
You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:
'Help your friends out!
Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing'.
3. Offer a Free Service on Your Website
Offering a useful service for free on your website is a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.
For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping, offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.
If you're a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.
4. Create an Entertaining Game or Video
This option takes a
Every business has its up and its downs. The business ebbs and flows from time to time sometimes because of things that are out of the sales leader’s and even his/her company’s hands.For example, in the residential construction market a business slowdown maybe driven by unexpected jumps in interest rates and/or an industry wide new housing inventory adjustment downward driven by home purchase cancellations and reduced speculative building by large national and regional builders.Somewhat sudden and unexpected soft markets can and almost always translate to sales problems in any or all of the following areas; increased competition (for less volume), price erosion and share loss. Those three things equate to lower revenue and lower gross margin results…revenue and gross margin the leaders of your company are counting
The effectiveness of this idea is highlighted by the fact that Hotmail spent less than $500,000 on marketing, while a competitor (Juno Online Services) spent over $20 million on traditional marketing to gain a fraction of the users.
Example 2 www.amazon.com
Amazon also implements viral marketing by encouraging their customers to send gifts to friends.
When the receiver gets the package, they also get a discount flyer promoting amazon.com and encouraging them to visit the website.
Example 3 www.citroen.com
French car maker Citroen recently released a viral marketing campaign with a video that features one of their cars transforming into a dancing robot.
The video clip is very entertaining and has spread throughout the world via email.
You can view the video clip here: http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg
Citroen Media Release http://www.citroen.com.au/cms/default.asp?action=article&ID=8031
Viral Marketing Techniques
Obviously not all of us have access to the funds required to hire a professional animation studio to build a dancing robot.
The good news is that there are many cost effective ways to take advantage of viral marketing.
1. Start a 'Tell-a-Friend' Program
One simple way to encourage viral marketing is to add a 'tell-a-friend' link on your website.
If a reader finds something interesting - they simply click on the link and enter their friend's email address to forward them the web page link.
2. Encourage readers to forward your Newsletter
If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.
You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:
'Help your friends out!
Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing'.
3. Offer a Free Service on Your Website
Offering a useful service for free on your website is a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.
For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping, offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.
If you're a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.
4. Create an Entertaining Game or Video
This option takes a
In early years of this decade, companies had started realising the benefits of outsourcing the activities to the experts that provides them competitive advantage. With more and more companies outsourcing their software activities, the global market for offshored IT services and business processes has nearly tripled since 2001. In bid to take advantage of this fact, players are now diving in this industry.Offshore software development has now become the battlefield with cutthroat competition. The existing players are making it difficult for new players to enter in custom software development market and new players, like new IT ventures and contries, are trying hard to get themselves identified as software service providers. In attempt to increase the market share, companies are shifting their focus towards local opportunitie
You can view the video clip here: http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg
Citroen Media Release http://www.citroen.com.au/cms/default.asp?action=article&ID=8031
Viral Marketing Techniques
Obviously not all of us have access to the funds required to hire a professional animation studio to build a dancing robot.
The good news is that there are many cost effective ways to take advantage of viral marketing.
1. Start a 'Tell-a-Friend' Program
One simple way to encourage viral marketing is to add a 'tell-a-friend' link on your website.
If a reader finds something interesting - they simply click on the link and enter their friend's email address to forward them the web page link.
2. Encourage readers to forward your Newsletter
If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.
You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:
'Help your friends out!
Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing'.
3. Offer a Free Service on Your Website
Offering a useful service for free on your website is a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.
For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping, offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.
If you're a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.
4. Create an Entertaining Game or Video
This option takes a
There is more politics in business than there is business in politics. It is hard to tell what came first, but in both areas you need supporters for you plans.In the case of a business – a somewhat larger firm – you’ll often encounter different groups (parties), different opinions and every now an then there is this new idea. Now, the challenge for this organization consists of getting this new idea into practice. The situation is not quite like this; normally there are many ideas and the different groups value each idea in a certain way.To tackle this issue, the initiator of the idea requires a majority of support before it will be executed. The question is where should he or she start? One approach could be to collect support in the easy way. This is done by starting with the people -– managers, specialist, etc -–
If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.
You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:
'Help your friends out!
Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing'.
3. Offer a Free Service on Your Website
Offering a useful service for free on your website is a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.
For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping, offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.
If you're a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.
4. Create an Entertaining Game or Video
This option takes a little more work, but when implemented correctly, it can generate a ton of traffic to your website.
Insurance giant Zurich recently created a little Flash game called 'Parking: Battle of the Sexes'. The aim of the game is to answer the age old question 'who's better at parking, men or women'.
Players have to use their keyboard arrows to successfully manoeuvre their vehicle into the parking spot without hitting the other cars.
These types of games or funny video clips tend to circulate through the Internet very quickly. If you do a search on Google, you can usually find a Flash designer who can produce something for you starting at a few hundred dollars.
Ingredients of a Successful Viral Marketing Strategy
- Offer an incentive
When online payment processor PayPal launched their service, they offered you a free $25 credit when you referred a friend to sign up. Offering an incentive answers that question we all have - 'what's in it for me?'.
- Make it funny, entertaining or controversial
If you want your message to reach as many people as possible, it has to be catchy in some way. It has to get attention, make people laugh or generate controversy.
Search engine Lycos publishes a list of entertaining email campaigns at: http://viral.lycos.co.uk/
- Encourage recipients to forward your message
Once you've done the hard yards of creating your viral marketing piece, you need to encourage users to forward it via email.
You need to include some form of call-to-action like 'click here to email this to your friends'. Don't rely on your users to do it of their own accord - most people respond better when they are prompted to do something.
Final Thoughts on Viral Marketing
All marketing mediums have one thing in common - they're all competing for our limited attention.
Because consumers are now being bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages a day, we simply filter out a lot of conventional advertising.
Viral marketing works because it relies on a relationship between two people. When you receive a message from a friend, you're much more likely to give it attention then an unsolicited promotion (i.e. spam).
Another bonus is that compared to traditional advertising, the costs of implementing a viral marketing campaign are very little and the snowball effect can be huge.
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