How to Establish Your Brand With Viral Marketing
If you are trying to build a successful business online one of the most important elements is branding your online business. When you brand your online business it becomes your identity online and the way that people recognize and remember your product. To brand your online business, you can begin with elements such as a logo that people will recognize, a specific color scheme for your website, a catchy name that people can easily remember, and other important elements.
Once you come up with a memorable brand you must get the word out on the Internet to get your brand established. One of the ways that online businesses achieve this is through viral marketing. Viral marketing is just like the name implies, it spreads the word about your business virally throughout the Internet through the use of specific viral marketing methods.
Spreading the Word with Viral Marketing
Viral marketing works very much like word-of-mouth advertising in the offline world. The methods that you use for viral marketing are designed to allow people to share your content with others across the Internet. By engaging in viral marketing for an extended period of time your brand gets known across the Internet and is associated with quality. So how do you use viral marketing to spread the word?
Social Networking: If you set up a professional profile and begin helping others by offering quality information related to your area of expertise, people will quickly take notice and tell their friends about you. You will also build a list of friends and clients who will be interested in learning more about you and they will click through to your site from your social networking page. If you use your brand name on social networking sites people will use it when they share your information with others and then those people will share the information, and so on.
Write for Newsletters and Blogs: Newsletter and blogs are another source of viral marketing and allow people to pass on high quality information to others. Find high quality newsletter and blogs that receive a lot of traffic and approach the owners about writing a useful article for each.
Most newsletter and blog owners will allow you to place a link back to your site as long as it is relevant and you can use your brand in your signature on the article. A lot of blogs use RSS Feeds to notify others when new content has been posted. There are also tools available that allow users to quickly share the information with others with one click of the mouse button.
Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites allow users to share bookmarks for websites that contain high quality information. Social bookmarking sites cut to the chase by allowing users to search with keywords to quickly find quality content instead of sifting through the hundreds of pages in the search engine results.
You can set up a professional profile on social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon and then bookmark your website. Also, start sharing bookmarks with others from high quality websites that you have found to be useful. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg allow you to contribute articles for others to read. If they are useful and high quality people will vote on your content. If you receive a lot of votes your article can make it to the home page of the site and you can literally have hundred of thousands of visitors to your website within a short period of time.
Online Videos: Content videos are a very powerful viral marketing method as long as you offer quality. Sites like YouTube and Viddler allow you to post educational videos related to your area of expertise. If your audience finds your video useful they will share the video with others and the word will spread virally throughout the Internet. There is also a way to watermark your videos so when they are spread throughout the Internet people know how to find you.
These are just a few of the ways that you can establish your brand through viral marketing. There are many other methods you can use such as article marketing, offering free ebooks and mini courses, and an endless number of other creative ways to encourage people to share your information with others.
