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Understanding the Power of Viral Marketing Online
The story of how Hotmail moved from zero to a couple of million subscribers in a few months is one that is often told in many sites all over the net. However it is a story that many do not quite understand. If they understood it, we would be seeing many more online success stories and fewer online failures. Because the word has also been over-used by hype peddlers, many times people associate the word viral with spamming and other online activities bordering on the illegal. Viral growth and marketing has always been with us. They fail to realize that viral growth and marketing is not something new to the human race. In fact it has been there since the beginning of time. The human race began with two people, Adam and Eve. Today the human race has filled virtually every corner of this huge planet. Many religions of the world started with a single person but were quickly "virally marketed" to reach millions. Even the now World Wide Web started off as a few computers, mainly used by researchers, linked together. But as they continuously enjoyed their experience and as new software and technology was made available for more people to join this small "web of linked computers" it suddenly started growing. The growth within a very short time has been explosive and it has all been viral. So let us be clear that viral marketing was not invented or created by the net, the net in fact used it to grow to what it is today. Viral marketing will only work with something useful. As many MLM and network marketing people have discovered, viral marketing will not work with products that people do not find useful. Some marketing experts have always turned to viral marketing in the form of MLM or network marketing to push and clear stocks of a product that has totally failed in the market. Where they think they have succeeded, they have only ruined their credibility and that of their businesses as folks have ended up with massive stocks of some useless item stored in their garage because they believed somebody who told them they would make a lot of money. This is the chief reason why Multi-level Marketing (which is pure viral marketing) has such a bad name with many people. The internet is a natural for viral marketing. The reason why Hotmail was so successful so quickly is because the net actually multiplies and speeds up the viral effect. In real life you may forget the name of the movie you liked so much when you are telling a friend about it, or the name of the book you read last year. On the internet, forwarding an interesting article usually involves a few quick clicks and even if you forget the title of the book, a quick visit to your favorite search engine armed with the few keywords or just the name of the author will yield the book for you complete with the current online specially offer price for it. If you want to succeed online you can't avoid thinking viral. Anybody who wants explosive growth and success in any online endeavour cannot avoid thinking "virally" in all their marketing plans. Failing to use this powerful marketing method, that has been successfully used since the beginning of time, will be a very unfortunate thing indeed. About the author: Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for Website Source, Inc. http://www.websitesource.com. Her established writing skills coupled with experience in the website hosting industry have provided internet professionals with marketing, product and service ideas for many years.
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The list of promotional tools and resources available to online marketer today is
very impressing, and new ones appear almost every day, each fancier and more sophisticated
than ever. Almost all of them however are touched (some will
even say "cursed") by a sort of the original sin. After all, after SPAM became criminal
offence and as the result direct email marketing became all-but-impossible, the only
people who see your offer are those who are also trying to sell something.
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sound perhaps, but not really applying to the real world. Other escape into "niche"
markets where you sell to "normal people" i.e. not-marketers. Which of course is
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Is it really not possible to sell to other marketers and be successful in that?
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It's simply different. And I often wonder why so little has been told about this difference
by the experts. Because to me it seems to be the most important aspect of your
marketing, the most important initial decision: "Will I be trying to sell
things to people at large? Or perhaps will I concentrate on selling tools, resources and
information to marketers?". And even the obviously important question of tangible vs. intangible
merchandises doesn't seem to me more crucial.
There are two main branches of Internet marketing. They are, as I will soon try to
prove, very different but none of them is "absurd", "stupid", or by definition unprofitable.
Of course, there are many more branches. Whether you're selling tangible or intangible
goods is perhaps equally important. I don't know. In any case it's much more
obvious and widely understood. (That's probably because selling of tangible goods is as
old as the humanity itself, and in it the tested methods of the post-order selling still basically rule,
though of course adapted to the virtual reality.)
Let's now give those two categories some short, simple names for the use of this text. How
about "X marketers" (from eXternal) and "N marketers" (from iNternal)?
The X marketers will be those selling to the "world at large", and N marketers will be those
selling to fellow marketers.
Now, an explanation is needed. When you start your marketing career you don't usually
"decide" whether you want to be X or N marketer. It's mostly determined by the promotional tools
you have access to at the beginning. If you start without any investments, or only with little
ones, you will be using opt-in lists, traffic exchanges, FFA pages and similar resources. Then,
by their very nature you start promoting to people who see those ads, and who are those people?
Of course they are other marketers using the same tools! You have become an N marketer without
even giving this issue much thought. (It can be noted that you are an N marketer trying to sell
to other N marketers. Selling to X marketers seems a much more difficult matter, for they don't
use the same promotional tools, or at least not in the same extent. You will need to be
somewhat of a Guru to start selling to those people!
No doubt there's lots of common between those two branches. After all "the money is in the list",
and the really big profits come from back-selling to people who have already bought from you,
are satisfied, trust you and therefore are willing to buy from you more. This part of your
business will be fairly similar, no matter if you send to marketers or non-marketers.
There are also important differences of course. If it wasn't so our distinction would have little meaning and
so the this article would have no meaning. But those differences are very visible. let's
start with the language itself. If you are an N marketer and are
successful, have a list of many thousands happy clients and so on -- then you will be soon called a "Guru".
If, on the other hand, you're enormously successful in selling let's say 2' x 3' stainless-steel widgets
(or ebooks on painless, well-fed & lazy slimming for that matter), which of course means that you are
an X marketer, then, even if you have thousands of faithful clients with deep
pockets, instinctively reaching for their credit Platinum cards whenever they hear your name...
Well, you will of course be admired and envied, not to mention rich, but you won't be called a Guru!
You might be called something like "a Great Salesman", which is not too bad of course, but it's not the same,is it?
Another difference is that
in N marketing you don't usually speak much about "niches". Selling memberships in credit based opt-in lists
from some external point of view can be seen as much "niche marketing" as selling, let's say...
polishing-wax for pet anacondas. Not true? But I personally have never heard this term used in this context.
The most important differences are however in how X's and N's find their clients in the first place.
Or sometimes how they let themselves to be found by them. This is not just a play with words,
as search engines do exactly that --
they let people find your offer, don't they? There are of course many different types of search engines
and similar systems ("normal" search engines, Pay Per Click search engines, directories etc.) but from
the viewpoint of the potential client they basically do the same thing. And for the X type marketer
they are nowadays one of the very few available means of promotion. Of course it's in large part because
they are very powerful tools, providing you with highly targeted hits. If you're
able to get high position on those search engines that really matter (and don't get bankrupt on the way, as they
tend to be costly) you're almost there. Add some off-line promotion and you're on
your way to become The Great Salesman. (Of course all other aspects of your business also must be
done right.)
If however you have decided that selling to sellers doesn't sound so absurd or pointless as it is often
presented, then your options are much more numerous. Which is a good thing of course, though your
competition also has the same options, so it's not an unmixed blessing. You must show your offer
to marketers, so you need to show it where marketers are looking for offers. Why should they be looking?
There are two main reasons.
The first reason is that they simply are forced to look at your offers. How? Why? By whom?
It's simply that many, if not most, of the methods of online promotion
available today base on the principle reciprocality. Which in this context means: "I will take a look at yours
if you agree to take a look at mine". Yes, of course, you don't always have to actually look at those offers.
Often you can pay the service to show your offers to others and ignore theirs.
Still, the people who will see your offer will be those who want
to show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devoted
to hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something rather
than SEE somebody else's offer.)
Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketer
trying to sell to sellers (N marketer in our terminology) have any advantages over the one trying to sell to non-marketers
(X marketer)? My answers would be: YES and YES. Why? There are a few reasons. Some of them pretty trivial though
not without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offers
from online businesses.
Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buying
things online. Two sorts of needs in fact. Firstly, the same needs that everybody else has. Secondly,
specific needs related to Internet marketing. By being rather more exposed to Internet ads and offers
than an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy more
things online. But the other type of needs is far more important here.
Now for the second type of needs. Marketer will need marketing tools, resources, information...
These things change and develop in an enormous pace. This is of course a truism but it's absolutely
true. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or information
on Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will not
plunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it is
exactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should be
less receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probably
much more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends on
those tools, information and opportunities.
It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, but
it must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online and
there's no reason to believe that this situation ever radically changes.
So it's not only information on new available services and opportunities that is sought after,
and therefore sellable. In order to be successful in this sort of business, where there's so much
available information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fully
trusted, one needs to find their own way. Way of doing business online.
Human life being as short as it is, with most often very limited finances (or you wouldn't spend
your time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven't
found the right method and attained real success in online business will need a "recipe", or,
perhaps better, a successful person to help them -- a teacher, or even perhaps what the Americans
call "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents to
pay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary and
very risky thing to do.)
If you already are successful, then being the N marketer you have serious advantages. One of them,
perhaps the most important, is that you only deal with one (big, that's true) issue: online marketing.
As X marketer you would need to handle both marketing itself and the market niche you're in. This
fact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketer
you're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. What
I mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course is
Internet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, you
will be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen as
a crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you are
in any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will be
much harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested business
methods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's the
best marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate many
new players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicing
N marketing.
One special advantage that N marketing has is something that I personally call "self-propelling money machines".
So far they are not very numerous, at least those that work smoothly and bring tons of money without
constant need for adjustments and pushing. But there are some, pretty successful. And their will be more.
What are those self-propelling money machines? They are smart combination of promotional resources with selling.
One could say that they are resources that sell themselves, automatically. The simpler form cosists of just two
main parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something that
can be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that was
CommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook by
Stephanie L. Woolford, a very successful online marketer. (This ebook can be for example found on http://ebiz-guru.com.)
Here one can three conceptual modules:
the Lead Generating Module, the Selling Module, and an ebook (that can be either free or paid) that ignites the
whole process. I'm not sure I managed to describe the idea clearly enough, but it can be understood when seen in action.
Ebooks are supposed to be the almost-perfect business and in near future they may really become that. If we assume
that this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishing
a competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have much
greater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previous
paragraph included. Which seems to be another advantage of N marketing. So after all Selling to Sellers may not
be so stupid idea, wouldn't you agree?
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