Is Viral Marketing that Important?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 4:53 pm

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Is Viral Marketing that Important?

I’m going to be posting a couple part series on viral marketing and just how important creating your own report is in your internet marketing efforts, no matter what your niche. So let’s get started…

I personally think that viral marketing is one of the best tools in anyone’s internet marketing endeavors. I’m going to show you how to create a short report or eBook (don’t worry, it’s not going to be difficult, and you don’t even have to write any of it yourself if you don’t want to), let it loose on the net, and watch as it generates highly targeted traffic to your websites for years to come.

Just give away your report for free, with resell rights, and it will then be picked up by other marketers in the same niche, passed on, sold, and generally distributed and read by people all around the internet. Inside your report will be links, perhaps affiliate links or links to your websites, and everyone that reads your report will see them.

This is how it’s possible to make money directly from your report. You can use it to send traffic to your own products, affiliate products, your newsletter, membership site, or any site you wish!

In the past I’ve generated enough traffic from a single viral report to build a mailing list of a couple hundred subscribers in about a week and a half. It’s not difficult, but it does require a bit of effort.

This sounds good, right?

You may be thinking “why not sell the report instead?” And, yes, you could, but the whole point of viral marketing is the links which will be in your report. Yes some people will come along, take your free report, and sell it themselves, but that’s fine. That’s what you want. Sure, you could probably make some money by just selling the report yourself, but it’s not the best way to do it. You want the report to be seen by as many people as possible in order to gain maximum exposure, and that’s why the report should be free. Make sense?

But there’s another issue to consider first…

Why Being Free Isn’t Enough…

Many people believe that just because you’re giving away your report for free then it will become viral on it’s own. I believe this is a mistake, and here’s why: When we unleash our free report on the internet we’re looking for as many people as possible to resell it, give it away as a bonus, etc. As we just discussed, this is how the viral effect is created. But many free reports are very low quality. They contain poorly written, outdated or just plain wrong information, and they are stuffed full of links.

Think about it from another internet marketer’s point of view. Someone comes along and offers you a new report for free, and tells you that you’re free to resell it and distribute it as you please. Great. If you’re anything like a lot of internet marketers then you’ll be delighted that someone wants to give you a new product for free. But then you check it out and find that the book is only 6 pages long, contains 26 links, and is full of irrelevant or incorrect information. Would you be happy to sell that or pass it on to your subscribers? Me neither.

Which is why as well as being free, your report needs to contain high-quality, useful content that you’d be happy to give to a member of your own family. Your report doesn’t need to be particularly long, but it does need to be high quality. This is essential if you want your report to go viral. It isn’t difficult to do though, and we’re going to get to that in another post.

One other thing to consider is that people are essentially lazy, including other internet marketers Maybe lazy isn’t the right word, but I see many reports being given away which are very high quality and could do really well virally, but they don’t come with a sales letter. If someone wants to grab your report and resell it themselves (or give it away in return for opting into their mailing list, etc) then they would have to write their own squeeze or sales page. And while some people do this, the vast majority can’t be bothered. If you give them a ready-made sales page you’ll vastly increase the number of people who will want to resell or give away your report. You need to give them everything they need, and make it as easy for them as possible. The more people that distribute your report the better.