• Tweet

• Tweet

Viral Marketing is devastatingly simple and effective marketing method. One that I touched on in my previous blog. Viral marketing is also the least used of the marketing methods. This type of Method usually have TWO uses. If you are lucky you can combine the TWO, that is when you will have hit the jackpot. Though this kind of methods takes time and certain degree of resources to get right. The benefits of it are simply astronomical, I will try to focus on this from an affiliate marketing point of view.

Viral Marketing :- Real world Example

One of the best examples of viral marketing was the Thresher coupon. Those not familiar with it, in 2006 they “leaked” a 40% off wine and champagne coupon (just before Christmas). The result was just mind blowing, I remember experiencing it first hand. Towards Christmas of 2006 I was 2 months into my first job, as an  Oil and Gas Consultant, in Woking Surrey.

Our CEO was a typical “boozer” everyone loved him, Friday afternoons meeting would be in the pub with a pint (my case a coke can!). I digress, when I arrived on that day I found the coupon on my desk.

I was told at that time that we could take the morning or the afternoon off (as long as we made up the time later on) and go and use this coupon. He in his usual hastily almost drunk voice told us that they (Thresher) HAD to honour the coupon, and they were going to go out of business soon. Almost half of the staff duly decided to get in their cars and go down to the Local shop.

The result of the leaked voucher was SO huge that the staff were STILL in the que, to get in when I went out for lunch in the afternoon.

I remember thinking this is a fantastic marketing technique. Of course Thresher never went bankrupt (they did few years later lol), and they miraculously found all the necessary stock but the entire campaign was just a master stroke. Containing all the KEY ingredients to make a LOT of money. Looking at the campaign what can be learnt, what did they get right and how did they do it? Is  it applicable in 2011 onwards? Is it scalable to an affiliate business. These are the points that I will try and address.

What Did they Do?

Any good viral marketing technique will appear accidental. Threshers, brilliantly managed to:-

How did They Do it?

The coupon was originally leaked on Money supermarket forum? (I could be wrong on this, and might be money saving expert). These are the best places to get the ball rolling, people on these types of forum already have one thing in common they are looking for deals. They are tec savy enough to go onto forums and look for stuff (ideal as they are also then tech savy enough to e-mail the offer around).

In today’s world its not enough to have a great idea, if this was released locally then chances of it going national are REMOTE, it would have been the same as many local shops advertising 40% off. Releasing it in an environment where it has every possible opportunity to develop and get passed around is essential. The other way of doing this would be media coverage (please note I DO NOT mean advertisement, but mean news ) In thresher’s case they did one and they in turn also ended up with media coverage.

Once the coupon was released they then added fuel by doing the following:-

1) Allowing few hundred people to come in and BUY

2) Closing the offer, saying this was only meant to be released locally and they could not cope/afford to sustain the offer.

These both points combined created a “sensational” element to the story, thus increasing the curiosity even further.

Afterwards they appeared to give in envoking yet another sensation in their prospective buyer (victory!). These buyers were now not only going to spend the money, but also feel good doing it.

They felt (as in case of my office workers) that they had a real bargain on their hands. Some, I kid you not stocked up for next Christmas! going a couple of times under a different family members name!

How To Use Viral Marketing TODAY in your Affiliate Marketing Campaign?

That is really the question right? Many of you would have thought its a brick an mortar business and it worked for them, but there are so many elements to actually think about and adapt from here that  if implement in a correct way, will give you repeated success online.

Viral marketing can work in almost any sector, I mentioned earlier on that Viral marketing has TWO uses. One is obviously to make money, the second less understood one is to GET LINKS. Carefully selecting a trending topic, which is not yet saturated is the KEY.

Say you run a fashion site, dont worry about giving out the ultimate code, worry about giving a code and making it appear as its going to be limited and gets you GREAT savings (wherever possible get an exclusive code, as then even if it get published elsewhere you will get the credit)

When USA was doing the presidential candidates thing I did a test experiment. I created two “sniper sites” one was for first female USA president (something like that), the other for first US black president. Stuck biographical type content on there, put in an e-mail capture form there. Made each site rank for about 25 different terms, competition was non existent.

Sites were similar to  help us elect X. This experiment then resulted in my domains getting close to 10K in links each (1 k of which were built by me), and almost 25K in e-mails PER SITE (the e-mail list still just sits here but it was an experiment!!). The domains are now redirecting onto some of my other domains.The domain appeared as the actual campaign domain.

To do a Viral marketing for an affiliate site the key is to appear as a non affiliate site and be precieved to offer value. Create and look for sensational stories, look for what is the hot and trending topic. A great way for spotting trending topics is twitter, but that will be on another blog post lol.

Being rude and obnoxious can also help. I have currently got one site that literally picks on one celebrity, and just destroys them, their clothes comparing them to other celebs and animals. This site ranks amazingly well for all sorts of terms for that celebrity. In turn I get a LOT of traffic organically and from other sites, and 90% of my links are completely natural.

I also get loads of hate mail.  Which also gets published lol..(unique content is unique content after all). Most importantly I get lots and lots of links, naturally. that particular site has over 15K in facebook likes.

Pictures and Videos are a really good viral marketing tools, a picture with a watermark links goes a long way to establishing your site. Videos if done correctly are simply mind blowing, I have admittingly until very recently avoided doing videos as did not have the setup for that, but now that I do I have one hopefully big viral marketing campaign going live now.

The key to begin any affiliate based viral marketing campaign is to get your user base right. I would take 200 highly motivated (good or bad) users over 1000 semi interested users any day. Highly motivated users will result in actually help bring your site to the front.

I dont have a site on cycles, if I did I would have been all over tour de france. Making several sites, some eulogizing certain riders, and others lambasting them! some times even creating a cross site argument to help distribute my users, and maximize my exposure. I would have picked up the celeb gossip, the sleazy and the sensational. I would have had one site that would have just been about the reviews, giving it exposure and a loyal following. This kind of project for me would have taken two years, one year I would have established the authority of the site get a few dedicated users (say 300 or so) THEN next year I would have been rude, targeting all the sleazy elements every mistake and that would have been my attempt to get other bloggers talking about it. Hence giving me links.

I would have visited the forums offer counter productive remarks, and some productive remarks under various names. If possible got a small competition going (even if the competing sites are all mine) I would have done this to get people to talk with the hope of getting ONE site picked up mainstream. It only need one high power blog, one social medial journalist, or one crazy fan (the best kind) to get the ball rolling.

Viral marketing in my humble opinion would make readers feel like they have a big zit on their face, they can’t help but look at it or press it. When it is popped it is usually bad but they feel good none the less..

No related posts.