March 20th, 2010 by Mike

In order to achieve optimum visibility for your website it would be unwise just to focus on basic search engine optimization (SEO) as although crucial for the success of your site, it represents a narrow idea of what the internet actually is; i.e. users now are not only getting there information filtered via a search engine, but increasingly they are going straight to social media. Therefore, to achieve actual dominance your brand should not only be king of the search engines, but it must also be a social media tsar!

The current social media trend is defined by its diversity, and I’m sure your aware of its many incarnations, from video hosting to forums, therefore creating a ubiquitous social media presence can be a logistical nightmare, and can involve achieving a difficult balance between good quality postings and efficient social media marketing. For new businesses especially achieving social media ubiquity can seem a goal to far; there is, however, a way to achieve global dominance with minimum effort – with viral marketing.

Essentially a viral campaign is a self-replicating piece of content that spreads by word of mouth (or mouse!) alone. In marketing terms, getting a viral campaign just right represents the Holy Grail for an online brand as it can lead to an untold level of brand awareness, and can essentially send your SEO backlinking into the stratosphere. Unfortunately if viral social media marketing was that easy then traditional forms of marketing and SEO would be defunct – which they certainly aren’t; it is therefore unwise to invest everything in a viral marketing campaign. With the right tincture of luck and creativity, on the other hand, anyone can reap the benefits of viral marketing in conjunction with other methods of good internet reputation management.

So, What Makes an Effective Viral Marketing Campaign?

Unfortunately the key to world dominance shall always remain a mystery and a what exactly make a successful viral marketing campaign shall is a persisting enigma; there are, however, definitely some factors and techniques you can employ that will make any potential viral social media marketing campaign more likely to succeed.

First of all any potential viral content that your going to offer should be entirely free; there is no point trying to milk users for every penny that you can as profit making from your online presence is about strategy and patience. Also free content is more likely to spread like wildfire.

Related to the above point, your content should perhaps be something of obvious value that you are prepared to give away, this could be a game or an ebook, for example, something that a user would be grateful for.

Whilst viral marketing is self replicating it needs a suitable medium in which to relicate, which is why you should carefully choose through which avenue you wish to spread your content, for example if you’ve got a great idea for a video, youtube is the place to put it.

Finally a viral marketing campaign is worthless if it lacks the creative spark, and therefore before rushing into a campaign on the back of a lame idea, you should wait into your muse really hits, remember that good ideas go everywhere, bad ideas go nowhere.

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