How Does Viral Marketing Work – Top 4 Secrets to Success!

Viral marketing comes from the concept of the sinister virus: one that secretly creeps, transfers, makes use of resources until it is fully alive and winning by exponentially increasing its power. It is a marketing technique that is also sometimes called viral advertising, word of mouth marketing campaign or network marketing.
Creating a buzz online to help your business may seem like an expert’s job. Questions like” how does the internet work for my business?”, “What is seo and how does it work?” and “ how does viral marketing work?” always come to mind.
Well, we’ll discuss all that and let you in on the top 4 secrets to success!

Does viral marketing work? Definitely. It is time consuming, entails careful planning but generates income and great results!

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Here are basic elements or secrets that experts use in making viral advertisements and generating viral traffic:

1. Power of freebies
Free is probably the most powerful word in the marketing world. After all, who could resist something that doesn’t cost a cent?
The trick is giving away a product or service as a part of a promo or using what is commonly known as “delay of gratification”. Say, availability of a free downloadable trial version to entice customers to get a pro version with more perks. There may not be any income from giving away today but once people rave about the trial version, there will be an increase in demand of the real thing!

2. Effortless transferability  
Basic premise: Viruses only spread if they’re easy to transmit.
Viral networking happens when people can easily spread the word about your business, sometimes without even consciously doing so. E-mail, software downloads, websites, graphics and links are some of the easiest to transmit and replicate. From a marketing point of view, the simplest and shortest message works best. Something like hotmail’s “Get your private, free email at hotmail.com.” is a classic because it is brief, concise, informative and found at the end of every email message that people forward or reply to. Effortless, wouldn’t you agree?

3. Use of common human motivations
People desire to belong, be social, popular and more. Knowledge of these drives of human beings widely help in viral marketing. Take SEO or search engine optimization for example, websites want to be at the top rank of search engine sites to increase visibility, popularity and income. SEO works by feeding on widely searched keywords and incorporating them in websites to make some ideas and contents trend and go viral. Another example is the blogosphere which caters to people who desire for their opinions to be heard. Blogs can propel a business through word of mouth advertising on the internet, whether the bloggers are paid  to do so or not.

4. Taking advantage of existing networks and resources
Experts in the social sciences would tell us that each person has a network of about 8 to 12 close friends, family and associates. This is what fuels today’s social networking sites.  How does viral marketing work in these sites? Put your message across. It might be as simple as a link on Facebook or as complex as an affiliate program with other networks—the thing is, as long as it’s on a network, it’s bound to work.

The answer to how does viral marketing work doesn’t just lie on these 4 secrets we’ve shared with you. Information on the internet rapidly changes and nowadays, novelty is the name of the game. To keep your business afloat in terms of viral marketing, employing these secrets and keeping a list of creative and fresh ideas always help.