Why Tell a Friend? How Viral Marketing Can Generate More Traffic to Your Site
As a webmaster you know that it would be a great thing if you could get every visitor to ‘tell a friend’ about your web-site. Basically it would mean that for every ‘told friend’ you would be getting a FREE visitor, even better, one that had been ‘pre-sold’ to a certain degree, because their friend had recommended, or pre-sold, your site.
Even better if that friend told friends and not just a ‘friend’.
But how on Earth do you achieve this? Because in theory, it is possible to create a self perpetuating money machine, if you can get each visitor telling more than 1 friend about your site. Actually, it’s a little more complicated that that, because each visitor has to generate more than 1 visitor (and not all the people he/she recommends will end up visiting the site).
So, how on Earth do you achieve all that? Basically, what you need to do is to get every visitor to tell not just one friend, but many friends.
Assuming that most of those ‘many’ friends then come along and visit and then go on to become recommenders themselves, then you really have hit the jackpot. But how on Earth do you get people to not just tell ONE friend, but tell many friends? How do you encourage word of mouth marketing? We all know it’s the best viral marketing out there, but it is just so hard to do.
The answer is incentive.
Yes, What’s in it For Me? Is the old FM radio station and it’s still playing nice and loudly today. If you can offer your visitors incentives to tell their friends, then assuming that the incentive is something that they desire, they will tell their friend. Give them more desirable incentives to tell more friends and they will tell more friends. It’s as simple as that.
But not quite.
The incentives have to be incremental. It is no good if you say, for example, tell 5 friends and get this, most people will be put off by having to input 5 addresses. However, if the incentives are incremental, for example, tell one friend and get this, tell two friends and get this as well, tell three friends and get this as well, and so on. I’m sure you get the idea, it is not just incentive that works, it is the incremental incentive that is the magic ingredient in this formula.
Do that right and yes indeed, you have created a self perpetuating money making machine.
