Viral marketing is as viral as the concept it describes these days. Every marketing conference includes a talk on viral marketing and how you can leverage the internet to achieve sales on a grand scale (or make epic commissions if you are an affiliate). If you haven’t heard of it yet, viral marketing is basically when an advertiser creates an advertisement that forwards itself to more and more people, i.e., every person who receives the advertisement will then forward it to more than one other person. Given that we all check our email all the time, a successful viral marketing campaign that earns epic commissions can make its way around the world very quickly, in fact it’s possible within a single day.
But what exactly makes a viral marketing campaign successful and how does one successfully leverage the power of the internet. The key to success in viral marketing is actually rather simple and you can probably guess what it is. We have all received emails from friends saying, “Hey, you really have to check out this video” with a link to a short video that makes us laugh and then want to share it with others. We then either forward the email to another bunch of friends or call over our colleagues from next door to watch it as well. This is basically what you want people to do in order to spread the word about whatever it is you are advertising and if you can get them to do it then your viral marketing campaign will be a success. All you really need is for each person who receives your advertisement to send it to at least one other person so you achieve an average of >1 new viewer per viewer.
To take these numbers to a larger scale, say you send out a funny short email about a current event that gets people interested. Your initial mailing list includes 1,000 subscribers. Say that on average they each send it to 1.2 other people. What that means is that some of them will send it to 20 people, others to just 2, and many will not send it out at all, but overall the average will be 1.2. So then you have the initial 1,000 people who received your email plus another 1,200 who they forwarded it to. Assuming these 1,200 also forward it to 1.2 people on average, that will get you another 1,440 people totaling 3,640. If this process continues, it will keep growing until geographic or demographic limits kick in.
Another example of a successful viral message are the message you get in your email or Facebook that say “Send this message to another 10 people who are not already on the list below or you’ll have bad luck for the next 5 years”. Lots of people, fearing bad luck, actually then do forward the message to 10 people and I’m sure you have received messages like these in the past. I remember having read a ton of them until spam filters started absorbing them.
More examples of viral marketing campaigns that you have probably seen in action are the Superbowl commercials. Firstly, there is a huge audience during the Superbowl but if a commercial is really funny, people tend to go straight to You Tube to watch it again and again. Then there will be conversation at work or in school about that funny commercial making more and more people go to You Tube to watch it. So in essence Superbowl commercials have a viral marketing side to them allowing advertisers to pay for a set amount of viewers and in the end get millions more.
Now that the concept is clear in your mind, or I hope it’s at least clearer, think about leveraging this technique as an affiliate marketer. If you can make people talk about your product that carries your product link then in just hours you could make really epic commissions. From experience I can tell you many people interpret this as becoming a spammer but that’s not the concept here. You can make a funny video that people pick up on You Tube by themselves and spread the word around. That’s not spamming. You don’t have to send 1,000,000 random emails to be a successful viral marketer and in fact modern spam filters prevent you from doing that anyway.
To conclude, viral marketing combined with on-page search engine optimization and off-page search engine optimization can greatly improve your yield as an affiliate marketer and lead you to achieve epic commissions.