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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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Here’s Your Article Marketing Traffic Formula
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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.

Next time we’ll get into choosing a topic for your report.

In the meantime, feel free to check out this Niche Marketing report.