Viral Reports – Effective, Low-cost Promotion
In the Online Marketing world, the term “viral marketing” has been around for a few years now. It’s a slightly strange name really, because the words “virus” and “viral” usually have such negative meanings.
Nobody likes to contract a virus or a viral infection. We talk about computer viruses – programs that make copies of themselves and transfer them to other computers on a network. There’s a whole industry centred around Anti-Virus software.
Despite the negative uses of the words, Viral Marketing is popular, effective, and ultimately very low cost.
Whether it’s a clinical virus or a computer virus, the underlying “viral” principle is that something is duplicated and passed on to another person or computer. The payload could be anything. In the case of a clinical virus, a person recieves some bacteria. Shortly after this, the recipient displays symptoms of illness. In a computer virus, the computer receives a small program. Sometimes damage is caused to the contents of the computer’s disk, although many viruses are completely benign.
When it comes to Viral Marketing, a person typically receives a free report, ebook or software, which they are then free to duplicate and pass on to as many people as they want. Free gifts are often used as an incentive to get people sign up to a mailing list, and marketers are always on the lookout for new items that they may give away for this purpose. As each person who receives it gives it away to yet more people, the number of people who have copies of the item increases exponentially.
So, you the author, write a report and give it away free to say, 20 people. Maybe 10 of those people are interested in using it as a gift to pass on to other people. If they each give it to 10 people, that’s a further 100 people who have your report. Then those 100 people might also give it away to 10 people each, adding a further 1000 to the number of owners. This can continue on and on as more people give it away.
Now what if each person gave the report away to 20 other people? or 50? or 100? The number of people who own the report after a short time could reach several thousand.
So what is the benefit of unleashing this free report on the market? Well of course, the report contains appropriate links back to your website or sales pages. So for each person who reads the report, you have a potential customer. Of course, not all recipients will read the report – they’ll just pass it on to other people, or forget about it. But those who are generally interested in the report’s contents will read it, and may follow the links back to your website.
The beauty of this system is that you might have given the report to a very small number of people, but the potential to receive a lot of traffic to your website is huge. You have effectively employed other people to promote your website without paying a dime.
This sounds like an ideal marketing solution, but there is a further stumbling block. Having received the free report, what incentive is there for anyone to give it away to other people? Some will welcome it as a free gift that they can use to get their own sign-ups, but many will think “What’s in it for me?”.
This is where Brandable reports come in. Your report contains links to your website, or affiliate links to other products. The Branding process allows the recipient of your report to change one or more of those links to their own. So when they pass the report on to other people, they too can see the benefit of it. Your report would be designed that only a limited number of the links are brandable, so that at least one of your own links remains. Then everyone who receives your report will be able to access your link, regardless of which other links have been changed.
A PDF file is made brandable by inserting special bookmarks into the file when you write it. The branding software that you use then locates these bookmarks and replaces them with the link or text that you enter. It’s an incredibly simple process. If you can create PDF files, you can create a brandable report.
There are many programs available for branding PDF files, but the one which I prefer by far is PDF Power Brand. It has recently been rewritten and updated so that it works properly on Vista systems as well as Windows XP. It is so simple to use, and is totally FREE. It lets you brand as many reports that you want. So go to PDF Power Brand, download a copy and start making those brandable reports.
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