Viral Marketing: Choosing a Topic For Your Report

Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 12:08 pm

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Viral Marketing: Choosing a Topic For Your Report

A viral report will only do well if it’s on a subject people want to read about. There’s no point researching and writing (or outsourcing) a report only to find your market isn’t interested in it and I also think it’s important to select a topic that you are really interested in and something which is related to what you want to promote. Of course all this goes almost without saying, but then…how do you actually go about selecting a hot topic for your report?

You should first consider what sites/products you want to promote…

Let’s say I want to promote an eBook on “how to make money from blogging”. In this case a good viral report might be ‘How to Set Up a Blog’ or ‘30 Important Blogging Tips’. These titles aren’t the best as I’m just throwing them out there and I’m sure that you can think of really great titles, but you get the idea…

What if there’s no obvious topic for your report? A great place to start is getting involved in forums. Browsing forums related to the topic of the product/site that you want to promote are a wonderful place to get information, see what people are discussing, and get to know what’s hot.

Let’s say you’re operating in the internet marketing niche. I regularly browse through internet marketing forums, and from that I know that the following are pretty hot topics:

Blogging
Twitter
Social Network Marketing
Viral Marketing
Product Creation
Article Writing

Each of these could easily form the basis for a good report.

You can use a viral report as a complete money making system in it’s own right. I’m not currently involved in the gardening niche, but I could start making money from it today. All I’d need to do is find some gardening related products which I could promote as an affiliate, insert some links to those products into my report, and begin distributing the report.

So, you might already know what’s hot in the niche you’re operating in, but if you don’t it’s very easy to find out.

Go to Google and type in “your niche + forum” and “your niche + blog.”

This will locate forums and blogs in your niche. Make yourself a coffee, and spend an hour or two browsing through the forum discussions and blog posts looking for what people are talking about. It usually becomes pretty apparent what might make a good report topic.

I’ve never gotten into the dog training niche, but two minutes spent browsing one of the forums in the screen shot above gave me several ideas for a free viral report – ‘training an older dog’, and ‘preventing dog travel sickness.’

Look for the problems or questions that people seem to be having in that niche. If a particular topic or issue seems to crop up regularly then it’s a good sign, or if you find a particular thread has five pages of posts then that’s a great sign too!

Next post we’ll get into researching and creating your report…

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