Viral
Marketing Tips: Greeting Cards by: Richard Lowe, Jr.
When we speak about viral marketing,
we are not talking about the newest disease. We are not talking about a
Mad Cow Disease variant or something that you need to be vaccinated for.
In fact, we are not referring to a disease at all.
What we are talking about is literally
the most powerful traffic generation technique available on the internet.
Viral marketing is so powerful that it makes the search engines look small
and insignificant in comparison. Even link exchanges, as powerful as they
can be, wilt into oblivion in comparison.
What you do with viral marketing
is create something, anything, that visitors will want to give to other
people. This thing, whatever it is, contains a link and perhaps a short
advertisement for your website, ezine or ebook. So far so good, this is
just good marketing. The viral part comes in because the people who receive
these items want to give them to other people, who in turn want to give
them away also.
So you see? What you get is an explosion
of marketing for a very small price. It's actually kind of like an avalanche,
in that you throw a snowball down a slope and it just grows and grows until
the whole mountain of ice and snow is tumbling down.
One very cool viral marketing technique
that any web site can take advantage of is greeting cards. I'm sure you've
run across these all over the web. You select a graphic (a drawing, photo
or other image), perhaps a sound file and add some text. This is sent to
one or more people via email. These people open the email and click on
a link to view their card. They, of course, have the option from here to
visit your web site and perhaps send additional cards to other people (or
back to the sender).
If your cards are good enough, you
can find this technique alone will generate an incredible amount of traffic.
Of course, you have the same problem with greeting cards that you have
with your web site - you have to get people to it to begin with. Once you
do that, however, you will find that it becomes more or less self maintaining.
The more traffic you get the more you generate. Just make sure that all
of your greeting card pages are listed in the search engines, well displayed
on your page (and perhaps all of your pages) and advertised elsewhere as
much as practical.
In fact, it's a good idea to spend
as much or more time marketing the greeting cards as the rest of your site,
since these tend to create visitors exponentially, while your site is linear.
How do you put greeting cards on
your site? First, pick a theme or two. If your site is about model railroads,
for example, you might get some photos of trains and train sets; you could
include vacation photos, cute animal pictures, scanned drawings or anything
else that you feel would make a good card. Just remember to honor copyrights
- make sure you have the right to make copies of the materials before you
use them.
Once you have a theme or two, you
need to find a greeting card service. I've experimented with a few options.
I've tried hosting it entirely on my own site, and what I've found is it
is difficult to maintain. I've also tried it completely hosted on another
site and found it is too restrictive.
The service that I settled upon is
called CyberGreeting Network - http://cybergreet.net/.
This company, in my opinion, provides the best of both worlds (local and
remotely hosted).
The pages, images and sound files
are stored on your own web site. You can tailor these all that you want
so they blend with your pages perfectly. This is the perfect freedom, and
as long as you set up the form properly all will work fine.
How do you do this? You download
a template file (as explained in their instructions) and modify it to suite
your needs. This may require a little effort on your part (as well as some
skill with HTML) but the end result will be worth it.
The remote part of the product (which
is free, by the way) is the piece that actually formats and sends the card.
You see, on your page you get the visitor to supply the answers to a series
of questions in a form. The form data is submitted to a CGI routine which
puts everything together into a greeting card. Your visitor simply answers
the questions and presses submit. You pass all of this to the routine,
which then sends the card to the destination.
I was able to get half a dozen pages
of greeting cards working perfectly in an afternoon. These remain on my
site, and serve me well by creating a steady, growing stream of traffic.
I think you would do well to take a look and determine if this will work
for your site as well.
About The Author
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster
of Internet Tips And Secrets. This website includes over 1,000 free articles
to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
Web Site Address: http://www.internet-tips.net
Weekly newsletter: http://www.internet-tips.net/joinlist.htm
Claudia Arevalo-Lowe is the webmistress
of Internet Tips And Secrets and Surviving Asthma. Visit her site at http://survivingasthma.com
Courtesy of http://www.ArticleCity.com/
