I’ve been responding to a few requests for help on the Digital Point forums lately from webmasters who are having a few issues getting their message across to potential consumers and/or visitors. And you know what I’ve recommended in most cases? Viral Marketing

Like a virus, viral marketing is designed to spread amongst a targeted community, ‘infecting’ person after person through word of mouth, consequently creating a knock-on effect. It is without a glimmer of doubt, extremely effective and simultaneously proven to work rather well. So the question is, how can we get viral marketing to work for your website?

One of the most classic examples that comes to mind in the online world, is Hotmail and their now famous viral campaign. It was a simple and effective concept, that helped drive the email giant into becoming what it is today - and did I mention it was simple? The concept was setting up a free email service, in which anyone could sign up, and placing a small advertisement in each users signature; “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”.

Viral Marketing can be also mean staging an event to get people talking, whether it be something rather outrageous, hilarious or simply unique. I remember some years ago, a major mobile/cell phone carrier (Vodafone) had someone run into the middle of a sporting event - naked, with their company name written on them. From memory I think this happened in the UK - but please feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.

To get people talking you need to stand out. Some very quick ideas for viral marketing campaigns are;

1. Announcing a product/feature with a minimal amount of detail, and issuing a countdown to ’something’ brand spankin’ new. This also has the potential to backfire if your feature or product does not live up to the hype, so you’d want to be sure you do this one correctly.

2. Engaging in some sort of challenge with your viewers. Some examples that I’ve come across over the years are; “If I can’t raise $72,000 from affiliate marketing - I’ll walk around in a dress for a day” or “If I reach one million unique views - I’ll donate xxxx to charity”.

3. Pulling a stunt, writing about it and/or video-taping it, and publicizing it on your website. The CEO for Host Gator recently pretended to be homeless and attempted to find out how much he could earn by asking people for money. He then issued a money making challenge to his staff members, and later donated the money to charity.

4. Engaging in something controversial. Controversy sells! I’ve seen many bigger websites get themselves into disputes with the little guys, and when attempting to publicly shame them, they often send buckets of traffic to the smaller site.