Increase Market Share - Viral Marketing Techniques

Viral marketing has become enormously popular over the last couple of years. If you haven’t yet incorporated viral distribution techniques into the marketing plan for your website, now’s the time to start. Viral marketing is an effective and low-cost way to get your customers on board and working for you – by leading you directly to new prospects, and increasing your market share.

What Is Viral Marketing, Anyway?

When you think about it, a “virus” is usually a bad thing. After all, viruses invade our bodies (or our computers), and once they get inside, they grow.

Now let’s turn this negative image around. Imagine a virus that is carrying your most important marketing message. You want that message to grow, and to “infect” as many people and computers as possible. In fact, the more successfully your message spreads, the easier it will be to pull in new site visitors and expand your business.

Viral marketing is based on the linked-in social world that is today’s Internet. People love finding great things online, and they love telling their friends. When planned correctly, viral marketing can increase the “buzz” about your website, and help you penetrate markets you’d never reach by other means.

Spread the Wealth Around with Viral Marketing

Viral marketing campaigns are all about passing the message on. Whatever you’re promoting, the news can be spread through straight advertising copy built into emails, videos, or RSS feeds. To get in through the back door, this same message might also be embedded in applications, games and contests.

Whatever medium you choose for your viral marketing campaign, however, you have to make sure your message motivates people to share. Campaigns that give back to the sending party, through some incentive, have proven more effective than simple “tell-a-friend” forms.

So, be inventive about your incentive. For example, you might want to offer a sweepstakes entry, or a coupon for services, to people providing five new contacts for your mailing list.

On the other hand, some of the most successful viral marketing campaigns offer no financial kickback at all. Instead, they rely on emotion – the compassion or laughter that motivates people to say to themselves: “Hey, I gotta share this!”

Revving Up Viral Marketing with Conduit

Conduit community toolbars help website owners access the social networking world, so they can make the most of the Internet’s viral marketing potential. Configured for easy sharing via popular hubs like Facebook and MySpace, Conduit toolbars add plenty of momentum to independent, friend-to-friend recommendations.

Customized Conduit toolbars are designed to incorporate fun features that fit the tastes of specific niche markets. With Conduit, satisfied subscribers are transformed into a marketing street team that avidly distributes the toolbar-based “goodies” that point back to your site. This transforms your subscribers’ contacts into potential customers, at no cost to you.

Conduit also allows toolbars – as well as their individual features – to be shared among all members of the Conduit network. That’s 38 million Conduit toolbar subscribers – with more joining by the minute.

So if you’re looking for a way to experience the power of viral marketing, Conduit is a great place to start.