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.
Article Site Goes Social
It has long been recognised that submitting articles to any of the many article sites on the Internet can be an effective way low-cost marketing. In fact, all it costs is the time it takes to write and submit the article.
Most people use article marketing to get themselves a number of backlinks to their own sites to help promote their rank in the search engine results pages. However, Article Marketing is, and can be, a lot more than just backlinks.
By submitting excellent quality articles, you are not only promoting your products, you are also promoting yourself. After reading a few of your articles, some people will begin to regard you as an expert in your field and will trust you. In any kind of marketing, Trust is probably the most important thing. A customer is more likely to hand over their hard-earned cash to somebody they trust than to anybody else.
Trust is based upon good experiences, but can also be reinforced by recommendation. If a friend recommends a plumber to you, will you follow their recommendation, or just pick on the first plumber you find in the Yellow Pages?
When you follow your friend’s advice, you have effectively been a participant in “Social Networking”. The plumber did a good job for your friend, and he was then recommended to you.
The term “Social Networking” is very popular today; used to describe sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg etc. These are sites that allow the members to interact with eachother.
Now when you read an article on an article site, how do you know whether what it contains is honest, accurate or truthful?
The guys at Article Content King have been hard at work adding “Social Networking” aspects to their article site. Articles that are submitted undergo moderation by a minimum of 5 members before they appear on the site.
Articles of poor quality can be rejected along with recommendations on how they can be improved.
Articles of excellent quality achieve a higher profile on the site.
And as an added bonus, by moderating articles on the site, you earn advertising credits enabling your own advertisements to be displayed on the article pages. You even earn advertising credits when your articles are viewed, and when articles belonging to your downline (to 10 levels!) are viewed.
So by adding social elements to their site, Article Content King are also improving the quality of their article content. This in turn generates trust of the article authors.
Whether you use Article Marketing or not, why not add Article Content King to your arsenal of marketing tools?. Not only will your articles become part of a high-quality article site, you’ll be earning yourself advertising credits at the same time.
Article Marketing to Promote Your Products
Whatever you’re selling, whether online or offline, you should choose a variety of different ways of promoting your business. That way, you can reach the largest number of people possible.
To the beginning marketer, knowing where to start, and how much to pay for marketing can be daunting. In fact, many beginning marketers don’t have much spare money to spend on marketing.
And therein lies the problem. You won’t sell anything if nobody knows about your product. Putting up a web site and hoping that people will find it in the search engines just doesn’t work. You need to actively promote your site to your target audience.
Article Marketing is an excellent way of getting started in marketing. In its most basic form, it cost nothing but your time, but can be everlasting.
So What is Article Marketing?
In a nutshell, it is the publication of articles about your subject of choice on popular article directory sites. These sites usually rank highly in the search engines, so anyone looking for information on that subject is quite likely to come across the article. An article usually consists of a Title, Summary, Body Text and a Resource box.
The submission of articles to article sites has several beneficial effects both for the author and the owner of the article site. The additional content on the article site increases its rank in the search engines. This helps to promote any article that you submit. At the same time, it increases exposure of the article site and the owner will receive more revenue from the advertising he places on his site.
By including hyperlinks in the Resource Box of the article (or in the article body text if it is permitted by the article site), the author gains a high-profile, one-way link back to his own site, which helps his own site to achieve a higher rank in the search engine results pages.
Writing an Article
The Title should be meaningful, but interesting so that it catches the attention of people looking through search engine results pages.
The Summary is an introductory paragraph that gives a general overview of what the article contains. Some article sites don’t require a summary.
The Body Text is the actual article. Each article site has specific rules about articles, including the minimum and maximum number of words, whether hyperlinks are allowed etc. Articles are typically between 500 and 1500 words in length – check the requirements of the site to which you’re submitting.
Many beginning article writers make the mistake of writing a sales page or press-release about their website. This is the wrong approach, and such articles will probably be rejected. An article should contain an informative text about your subject. For example, if you sell fishing lures, you might write an article about fly fishing, or the type of lure to use for a particular type of fish.
The Resource Box is the final part of the article and typically contains information about the author, and a hyperlink back to the author’s website. Continuing the example above, the resource box might say something like “George B Hackenbush has been a keen angler for over 20 years. He runs Hackenbush Angling where he sells top quality fishing lures.”
In this case, the name “Hackenbush Angling” would be a hyperlink to his website.
When submitting to an article site, always take care to read the submission rules, and stick to them. If you break the rules, your article will be rejected, or worse – your account may be deleted.
Multiple Articles
By submitting several articles to the article sites, you will gain more “backlinks” to your website, improving its exposure to your potential customers. Do, however, write about different aspects of your subject in different articles though. Repeating the same old stuff soon makes your articles boring and tiresome.
Advanced Article Marketing
There is a new wave of Article Marketing that takes all the benefits of Article Marketing and magnifies them to an unprecedented level. At the same time, it provides a further income stream.
At Article Content King, you can submit articles just like any other article site. But if you pay a small monthly fee, the power of your article marketing expands dramatically. Your article doesn’t just get posted on a site, but it is also automatically syndicated to an actively promoted network of blogs, each of which will provide you with a high-profile backlink. All of the blogs are on different servers with different IP addresses, so all of the links will be recognised as unique by the search engines.
In addition to getting your articles syndicated, you will also have control of the advertising space on your article pages. This means that you can supply your own advertisements, and prevent your competitors’ advertisements appearing alongside your articles. You can even sell this advertising space and make even more money. Whatever your approach to the ad space, you are more than likely to make more profit from it than the monthly fee that you pay for membership.
It’s definitely worth checking out Article Content King. It has already boosted the search page ranks of several of my web sites.
Article Marketing
