Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing is an excellent way to gain more traffic to your website. The basic idea is to create a campaign that’s designed to get people to pass along your information, website URL, and other content you produce.
You will generally have to “think outside the box” to get people interested enough to pass the word along. This often means giving away things for free or speaking about controversial or important topics. This is an age-old marketing technique that companies have employed successfully for centuries.
You’re lucky, because the Internet makes this doable for everyone – it’s easy to pass things along with a simple e-mail or click on a website.
Plan your campaign
Once again, proper planning is the key to success. When you plan ahead you can almost be guaranteed that your campaign will take off like wild fire and generate traffic and leads. Your campaigns have several components, with the most important being free content.
You should study what other companies have done to successfully “spread the word”. The Burger King dancing chicken is one example of a successful word-of-mouth campaign. People are so interested in that dancing chicken that Burger King got a lot of business as a result (do a search on Google if you’re not sure what this is referring to).
Hotmail is another great example — they got a ton of people to use their e-mail service because they included a link to it in every e-mail people sent.
Give something away for free
One of the most important components of your word-of-mouth campaign is giving away something for free. People love free stuff. Your free content can be a video, PDF report, white paper, audio or anything else you want it to be.
This is very exciting. As soon as you start to give things away for free you’ll notice an increase in traffic. This comes from people passing your link along, and from people who are coming back to see what else you have to offer. This also makes it easier than ever to sell things to people down the line because they will know that you are all about quality information.
Make sure people know they can pass campaign materials along
Many webmasters make the mistake of giving away things for free but not making it very clear that people can pass the free item along to others. Many people will not, simply because they are busy or they don’t know it’s even allowed. The more clearly you spell things out for them, the higher the chance they will pass it along.
For example, if you are creating a PDF document that offers great information you need to clearly write in that document, “Freely pass this document along to friends and family.”
This serves a couple of purposes.
First of all it lets people know that it’s okay to pass it along — that they’re not going to get in trouble.
Second of all, it has a call to action –“Pass this along.” It’s telling them exactly what they need to do.
Understand the key reasons people pass things along
They are two reasons people might share content with others.
These include:
Intrinsic motivation – they feel good about themselves for passing it along, or do so because they know it can help others
Extrinsic motivation – They may get some kind of reward that you’re offering
Keep these reasons in mind as you plan your word-of-mouth campaign.
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Keep the momentum going.
You need to keep your campaign going even after your initial viral marketing component is released. Make sure you’re adding content to your website to draw people’s attention and keep their interest. Soon enough you’ll start getting the visitors that you want so you can start to make more money with your website.
Remember — the key component here is getting the word out about your website. The profits will come in later. Just focus on getting those eyeballs on what you have to offer.
