Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!

Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized. 

It doesn't matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed. 

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing. 

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares. 

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it. 

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product. 

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well. 

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with. 

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games. 

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them. 

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.  

Using Your Social Bookmarks to the Fullest: Ping!

By now you know that how much social bookmarking can do for you. It is a phenomenon that has the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to your website.

The World Wide Web is dynamic, as we saw when discussing the world ‘live’ web. It focuses on websites, blogs articles and videos that are constantly being updated.

Especially when considering your blog, it is vitally important to stay on top of the traffic game by making sure that search engines have the latest knowledge of it instead of relying on the search engines to do all the work to find you, since search engines have several million blogs to sift through every day.

So, you should do whatever you can to ‘help’ the search engine search results by informing them every time you update your blog. You do this by sending a ‘ping’ to the major directories every time you add a new posting to your blog.

The technology behind the ping function is, however, not new or solely related to blogging. It is, in fact, a simple program that has been used for many years as a way of making sure that a certain IP address actually exists and is able to accept requests from remote machines.

‘Ping’ is sometimes also used as a verb – to ‘ping’ is the act of using the ping program or command. Sending a ping is almost like running a sound check on the computer that you are trying to test. Using the ping program or command is also commonly used to figure out how much time it takes to get a return response from the host. A ping can also help you learn the numeric form of the IP address of the host computer, simply from the domain name.

That was the original ‘technical’ meaning and usage of a ping.

Let’s make sense of it for our own use. In simple terms ‘ping’ implies ‘getting attention for’ or checking the presence of another party that may be online. A ping works by sending information or a ‘pack of data’ to a particular address and then waiting for the correct anticipated response.

In fact, the word ‘ping’ has interesting roots. The technical computer term for the program is Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper – hence the acronym PING. Ping is also the term used for the sound of a returning sonar pulse used by submariners. The ping function is also relatively commonly used for validating the existence of an emailing list. This sort of ping involves sending a message to the mail server service of the members of a specific email list requesting an acknowledgement code or ACK. This ensures that all the emails listed are both live and valid.

This is done before sending a genuine real life e-mail message in order to confirm that all of the addresses on the list are reachable and not dummy addresses. So, this form of ping is not sent to you personally, as this kind of e-mail validation takes place strictly in the background without your knowledge. It is a behind the scenes communication between the computer that sends the ping and your email host’s mail server computer.

However, if you have your own mailing list, it enables you to make sure that you are not sending newsletters, updates, promotions etc to email addresses that either did not exist in the first place, or have since become dead or dormant.

Pings have become increasingly important to bloggers as a part of their efforts to keep search engines informed about their latest updates. Bloggers inform the various search engine and aggregation services such as social bookmarking websites by sending a ping to these service providers. It is simple notification that basically says – I’ve just updated m, blog - care to check it out?

Once the service receives an appropriate ping signal from a website, it is taken as a confirmation that something has been updated on that blog or website. The service then visits the blog or website in question and immediately indexes any new content it discovers. In this way, it could be suggested that a ping is like an ‘invitation to visit’ more than anything else!

Having the ability to actively ‘ping’ an update message to all of the major directories means that search engines no longer need to regularly visit blogs to discover new changes. Pings allow bloggers to make the first move by informing search engines of changes when they happen. This allows search engines to be more efficient by reporting and showing updated links as soon as they happen. It also means that blogs are indexed on time.

For you, it means that new content on your website is presented to the public in a more timely fashion whether you rely on search engines or social bookmarking websites for your traffic. When you send a ping to the social bookmarking website where you are registered, it knows immediately that there is some interesting new material out there and puts it forth for their users to view. As we saw in the social bookmarking site reviews earlier, many of them highlight the latest posts made, so the more you can post regular updates to your site, the more it is going to pay you to ping your social bookmarking website. This is because an increasing number of more ‘new’ posts also means an ever-increasing number of links back to your website.

Most of the blog authoring tools automatically ping a server every time you update an existing post or create a new one. The blog authoring tool sends a signal to one or more ping servers. The ping server receives these signals from many thousands or millions of these events, with the number obviously depending on the number of updates made to blogs. The ping server then creates a list of the blogs that have new, updated material.

One thing that you should be aware of is that many of the big players in the blog search engine business use their own proprietary ping servers and software. Whilst this works excellently for the blog search engine itself, it does not necessarily provide you with the maximum benefit. This is because it effectively creates a conflict of interest between the blogger who wants his/her post to remain visible for as long as possible to generate maximum exposure and publicity, and the web service owner who wants his/her search engine to be updated with the latest blog posts as quickly as possible.

As a result of this conflict of interest, bloggers have had to find independent ways of pinging their blog to the search engines and blog directories, and this has led to the development of ping servers that can ping several proprietary ping servers at the same time. This ensures that the blog gets the most publicity possible and it is updated on several search engines rather than just on any individual one.

Here are a few of the many independent ping servers that you can utilize the services of:

Pingomatic: Find it at www.pingomatic.com. You will see that it is an extremely simple website. You just have to enter the URL for your social bookmarking website along with its name. Below that is a list of the web services that ping-o-matic can ping for you, so all you need to do is choose which services you want to inform of your updates. You could also just enter the URL for your website or blog directly. Ping-o-matic updates all of the major web services such as Weblogs, FeedBurner, My Yahoo!, Technorati, NewsGator etc.

 Kping: Find it at www.kping.com.  Kping is also a free ping service that lets you ping up to 57 different services at the same time, and once again includes all the most important is services and directories such as Weblogs, Technorati, NewsGator, TopicExchange, StrategicBoard and many more.

 Using Your Social Bookmarks to the Fullest Ping

The Top Rated Social Bookmarking Websites

Below are the top thirty social books marking websites. These have been ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. There are no exact measures of traffic but these numbers no less give us some idea about the market share of each these social bookmarking players.

1. The single biggest social bookmarking website on the internet is Digg.

www.digg.com

2. Digg is followed by Technorati www.technorati.com

3. Next in line is del.icio.us – one of the senior players on the social bookmarking scene http://delicious.com/.com

4. The fourth largest social bookmarking site is Propeller. www.propeller.com

5. Then we have StumbleUpon – rounding up the top five social bookmarking sites around. www.stumbleupon.com

6. Reddit. You can check it out at www.reddit.com

7. Next up is the most hilarious social bookmarking site you will find and it’s called Fark. If you are into pop culture, you need to make it to www.fark.com

8. MyBlogLog – which obviously specializes in blogs. www.mybloglog.com

9. Slashdot is aimed at the techie population. Its tag line goes like this ‘for nerds, things that matter’. www.slashdot.org

10. Kaboodle completes the top ten of the biggest social bookmarking websites around. This is aimed at those looking to buy things on the internet – shopping! You can share notes about products and stores at www.kaboodle.com

11. Bloglines tracks blogs, news and feeds. It is still quite a busy site in terms of traffic www.bloglines.com

12. Newsvine encourages users to post the latest news items from around the world at www.newsvine.com. It becomes a one stop shop for all kinds of news.

13. Blinklist is a very simple and easy to use social bookmarking website. It sticks to the basics of creating and sharing bookmarks. www.blinklist.com

14. Netvouz allows users to have their own personalized bookmark page. Like Blinklist, it is also quite simple. www.netvouz.com

15. Clip the highlights with Clipmarks. It shows the most popular and recent ‘clippings’ from the web by submitters. www.clipmarks.com

16. Then we have Furl at number sixteen, which claims to be ‘your personal web file’ It allows the same features of bookmarking, tagging and sharing. http://www.furl.net/

17. Mister Wong lets you do your social bookmarking in several languages, so you can make use of resources that may or may not originally be in your language. www.mister-wong.com

18. dzone. This is aimed specifically at web developers www.dzone.com

19. Magnolia. This simply lets you find websites and build a community with users who have the same interests. http://www.ma.gnolia.com/

20. Rounding up the top twenty social marking sites we have Tailrank. Tailrank tracks the hottest news in the blogosphere at http://www.tailrank.com/

21. Shoutwire has several topical categories. www.shoutwire.com

22. Simpy is a very simplified social bookmarking website. www.simpy.com

23. BlogMarks promises users a hassle free way to save their bookmarks and share them too. www.blogmarks.com

24. Faves – which used to be known as BlueDot.us. Faves builds personalized pages for its users based on preferences and interests. http://faves.com

25. Spurl lets you upload bookmarks from your computer on to the social bookmarking website. www.spurl.net

26. Spotplex contains social bookmarks in multiple languages. www.spotplex.com

27. Linkswarm is a humorously written social bookmarking tool but with all the same features. www.linkswarm.com

28. Spotback also involves collaborative filtering. www.spotback.com

29. PlugIm. www.plugim.com

30. Rounding up the top thirty list on the best social bookmarking websites is appropriately called MyBookMarks. www.mybookmarks.com

How to Make Social Bookmarking Work For You

Here are some methods that you can employ to get the most benefit from social bookmarking. Many of them focus on how to organize your information so that your website shows up in more and more search results:

#1. When you create a blog post, make sure that the keyword phrase is as close to the beginning of the post as is possible. When you bookmark the post, use the title of the post and tag the keyword as well. This is great for search engine results. In fact, doing this is often termed search engine ‘bait’!

#2. Stay active on the social bookmarking website and bookmark every post. As mentioned before, social bookmarks are bait for the search engines, and this is an opportunity that is not to be wasted.

#3. Social bookmarking leads to more people reading your articles, posts etc., and over time this will create additional credibility for you. It can also lead to repeat traffic, referrals, sales, newsletter sign ups, comments on your blogs, emails from readers etc. In order to make the most of the social bookmarking website, you need to have all these functions working for you.

#4. Interaction is your biggest and most potent weapon in social bookmarking. Links back to websites rely on being bookmarked and getting read. With advancing technology, you can add video, audio, RSS feeds etc to get more and more interaction on your website and eventual links back to your website.

#5. The content on your website must be good. There is no substitute for good quality content when it comes to generating traffic. You must ensure that you get quality links as well, because the links that you receive on your website must be from reliable sources and have to do be relevant to your content.

#6. Related to the point made earlier about having good content is the fact that search engine spiders are always crawling good websites. Increasingly, social bookmarking websites are becoming a favorite of search engines. This is because there is a human element to social bookmarking. People are actively involved in organizing and tagging their favorites. This is a strong indication that the web page is extremely relevant to the search, much more so than a simple keyword search.

#7. When using social bookmarking you should work towards improving your search ranking. Get as many people – ideally those with similar interests – to bookmark your web site. The best way to encourage people to come back to your website is to provide great content and make it easy for people to bookmark your website.

The Basics principles of social bookmarking

What is it?

No doubt, everything you have read so far has given you some indication of what social bookmarking sites are and what they do. Let’s try to break it down into even simpler terms. Social bookmarking is the practice whereby you can save your bookmarks to a public website and tag them according to content, type etc. In order to create your own collection of social bookmarks or be able to view others’, you must register with the social bookmarking website in question first. The site will allow you to store bookmarks, make tags, decide upon which of your tags should be made public and which should be kept private. Some social bookmarking will do periodic checks on the bookmarks to make sure that the links still work, and as suggested, those visiting social bookmark websites can perform searches by keywords, popularity or person.

Who does it?

Social bookmarking is useful for just about any one who uses the internet avidly and loves information. Social bookmarking is particularly appropriate and useful for pooling resources from research from around the world.

How does it work?

Social bookmarking is a new way of organizing information and categorizing resources, making everything easier to access in the process. The person creating the bookmark must assign a tag or a group of tags to each link or resource. This creates a user directed and defined classification of information. Social bookmarking services show who created particular bookmarks and also give access to other bookmarks created by the same person. Users can therefore make social connections with other users interested in the same topic by following these tags. As a user you can also see how many people have used a particular tag and search amongst all the resources with the same tag. Over time, users of a particular community site tend to develop a unique set of key words to describe their resources. This is known as ‘folksonomy’.

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Why is it important?

Social bookmarking gives users a unique opportunity to express their own personal take on information and resources, as well as on the organization of these resources. The process of social bookmarking allows people of similar interests and tastes to locate each other and create a sort of online cyber-community.

It follows that using folksonomy as a tool for research allows you to benefit from the insights and research of other users, and this helps you find information relevant to what you are looking for, as well as topics that are not directly related (such as those that show up in key word searches). For example if your search is based on cars, you may also notice that other users found some connection between cars and car repair services, and this could prove to be a valuable connection and resource for you, either personally or on a business level. Furthermore, the collections of these folksonomies keep changing and are therefore generally up to date. Social bookmarking also allows users to rank tags and this acts as a collaborative filter of sorts and enables you to find your most relevant results.

Where is it headed?

Social bookmarking is not a technological marvel, and indeed the technology behind it is quite simple. The basic idea on which social bookmarking is built, that is tagging, is now spreading into other applications as well such as email and multimedia files. As the net gradually moves away from ‘formal’ taxonomies and terminology, it will change the way that online communities come together and interact. The horizon of resources available on the internet is changing, new ways of classifying information are constantly emerging and much of it is user directed and controlled. Keeping this in mind, it is more than likely that in the future, the organization and function of databases may change as well.

Why use it?

The most obvious advantage of using social bookmarks is accessibility. You can access your favorite websites from any computer and even from your mobile phone!

You could argue that if you wanted to access any kind of information, you could simply enter key words into any search ‘engine’ and gets thousands or even millions of results, but that is exactly the problem.

No matter how fast or how many results a search engine may yield, it is still selected by a computer. In essence, computer software is trying to determine the meaning of your search. On the other hand, bookmarks are the result of discerning, deliberate human action. Furthermore, such bookmarks within a social bookmarking service are usually focused upon a certain topic or attract a certain kind of user.

For example, if you and I share an interest in celebrity gossip, then you are likely to benefit from my bookmarks list much more so than running a search in one of the major search engines.

Besides that, you will also have a certain ‘word of mouth’ recommendation about the site. You don’t have to waste time figuring out which is a good website to catch up on the latest Hollywood gossip – you would simply log on to the social bookmarking website and choose from recommendations by fellow gossip-holics.

Perhaps this is the most important advantage of social bookmarking. It has the ability to incorporate human intelligence. Furthermore, a community of like minded people can help you sort between good and bad content. This is something that search engines try to figure out by way of algorithms but is difficult to achieve.

Social Bookmarking