The concept of viral marketing is one of the more recent methods of advertising to come to the Internet. As the word ‘viral’ implies, it depends on people passing your advertising material around like a cold. It would normally go from friends and colleagues to their friends and colleagues ad infinitum. You can imagine that if I sent a message to all the people in my address book and they did the same, the message would perhaps get to a million people in a month. All free of charge.

Viral marketing is low cost and can be fast and far reaching, if you use the proper advertising medium, but it does tend to be unfocused. That is to say, you do not know who is going to get your viral advert, so you do not know if that person will be interested or not.

You can draw certain conclusions, if you select your material properly though. Say, you had a website on craft work. You could send out a free knitting pattern to all your friends and to those other people who have given you permission to do so (no spamming, please). Put the URL of your website at the bottom and tell the recipients that they may pass it on to anyone they know who would appreciate it.

Bingo! Now you know that most of the recipients after the first trenche that you sent out yourself will be interested in crafts and / or knitting. It is also pretty safe to presume that most of them will be older women with computers. If you marked your return URL with a code by sending them to a web page like viral-ad1-knitting.html and had a sign-up box their for a newsletter, you would soon have a list of older, computer literate women who like knitting or and other crafts. That information would be useful.

Various companies send out different things. It could be a free report on smoking or catching trout or bicycle maintenance. Some people simply send out jokes. Sending out jokes or pictures is not focused but you can see how other things are very focused.

Hotmail came up with this strategy and they maintain that they went from zero subscribers to twelve million in eighteen months. That is some record to beat. Look at the bottom of a lot of the email circulars that you receive and you will in all probability still see Hotmail’s viral marketing.

This is the best viral marketing technique, but you must attach you URL to something of value, you friends will not want to send junk or sales blurb to their friends and family. Keep the emails informative, useful or humorous, is the best tactic.

Very similar to this technique is the use of a sigfile (short for ‘signature file’). Write a catchy little one or two line file with your URL at the end. Outlook, Outlook Express and most of the others will append this sigfile to the bottom of your emails automatically. This is a good method of getting your URL out to thousands of people a month, particularly if, when you write to say, your Mum, she forwards it to all your brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles.

It is a simple, yet free viral marketing strategy that many people overlook. By the way, use the same sigfile in the entries you make on blogs. You do not make any? Shame on you, you should. Search Google for related blogs like – blogs knitting – and sign up to a few. Then read the posts and leave comments with your sigfile. Hundreds will read them and some will click through, if you are interesting enough. Do not bore people on blogs by advertising yourself.

Owen Jones, writes on many topics, but is now concerned with Marketing Your Website. If you want to know more, go to our website at The Best Sales And Marketing Strategy. This article, Viral Marketing: What Is It Exactly? is available for free reprint.

You are obviously already using the Internet for some things like reading articles and perhaps email. Maybe even research and chat groups. Or MySpace or one of the other look-alikes, but have you thought about using your time on the Internet to make some money?

Once you choose a business model, no matter which one you choose, the time will come when you need to tell the world about it in order to attract sales. In traditional business terms, advertising, promoting or marketing, whatever you want to call it meant spending lots of money. National advertising was a huge undertaking involving television and the press. Global marketing would bankrupt many national firms.

However, that has all altered now and one person sitting at a rented computer in an Internet Cafe can reach the whole world’s online population. This is quite a staggering thought. A poor Thai artist who used to have a difficult time hawking paintings on the beach road can now sell in New York, London and Paris all at the same time. Internet marketing is genuinely remarkable and it is practically free too.

So, where would you start your Internet marketing campaign? Remember that some kinds of marketing are more suitable for physical items and others are better at lead generation, so bear that in mind when you plan your Internet marketing campaign.

There are free classified ads. Hundreds of firms will allow you to place one or two free ads a week on their web site. Some will charge if you want to place more but others do not. Keep it free by placing free ads with a dozen websites. Look to see whether the publication is a newspaper (off line) or a newsletter (on line).

Many local newspapers accept one free ad per week per customer over the Internet. When you write these ads, put a distinguishing word or code into each one, so that if you get a sale or reply you know where it came from. Keep refining your ads and stop placing them where they do not work. Maintain records of what you are doing and where.

Create a signature file (sigfile) and attach it to all of your postings and emails. The sigfile should be a one or two line ad and your website or email address at the end. Many people overlook this simple, set-and-forget, free marketing tool.

Join groups, such as Yahoo Groups, of people who would want your goods. There are thousands of groups and blogs you can join. Just Google your speciality. Post courteous questions and join in discussions. Do not advertise, but add your sigfile after each post. People will become aware of it and come to see what you are up to.

Write articles on and around your favorite topic and leave an enlarged sigfile at the bottom with up to two links. Article marketing is a very effective means of helping people work out a problem or amusing them, while your advert sits at the bottom the page waiting for the inquisitive to click it. You can post copies of your article to any of thousands of blogs and article databases on the Internet. A Google search will reveal them.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few subjects, but is at present involved with Web Based Marketing. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at The Best Sales And Marketing Strategy.

categories: ecommerce,internet,internet business,home business,business,affiliate programs,site promotion,traffic generation,web design,web hosting,seo,creativity,goal setting,other

If you have been on the Internet long enough to set up some sort of email address, you will almost certainly have been invited to earn some extra cash by completing on line surveys.. These so-called paid on line surveys are aimed at the increasing number of people who find themselves at home all day with a computer, little money and no work. They are particularly aimed at stay at home mums and the jobless.

It is possible to earn a few dollars a month from some of these on line survey companies, but many of them are cons. They may make their money in a variety of ways, but usually the cash out figure for the person surveyed is quite high, often $50 or $100. It is hard to reach that figure at the rate of one $1 survey per week. However, they have you running back and forth to their site in the hope that you will click on one of their advertisements and they will get paid.

The first sign of a scam survey company is the up front registration fee. This is normally less than $50 and seems a good deal if you are going to be earning the thousands of dollars that they ‘promise’. Well, not really promise, because the disclaimer always says that you may not earn as much as the ‘people’ who have sent in the testimonials that you read plastered all over their web sites.

Testimonials from people like ‘Mary T., New York’, completely undetectable, unverifiable, probably fabricated ‘people’, who claim to be earning enough money completing on line surveys to pay off the mortgage, purchase a big car and go on holiday in the Seychelles every year. Rule number one for avoiding on line scams: never pay a fee on the promise of probably earning money.

The mobile phone scam is always very popular amongst con men and women. In this swindle, you will be asked to authenticate that you are a real person by replying to a straightforward text message. What you are not told though is that you are texting a premium number which will in all probability cost you up to $5. The company is sure that you will not notice this charge, especially if you are pay-as-you-go and do not receive monthly statements.

Another popular dodge is where you are promised special offers or even cash for clicking on the banners of the site’s ‘partners’. You will be required to seek more details by clicking on a banner. You may be promised 30% off or five cents for clicking. What you are not told is that you will be plagued from now to kingdom come by telesales marketers. Health insurance, pet insurance, free holidays, you name it. The only thing that you can be sure of is that you will end up paying more.

Then there is the free magazine scam. You are offered a free magazine on an exciting topic of your selection. Again they ask for your telephone number. What they do not say is that your free magazine comes with a subscription to their magazine which costs $19.95. The charge will be made to your phone bill and you will most likely never even notice it, which is what they are hoping for.

Never give out sensitive information over the Internet if you do not know who is receiving it. Phishing is also a lucrative sting, where an email purports to come from a bank or even Google or Yahoo. You are told that your account has been hacked and that you should confirm your details. As soon as you do, your account will be hacked sure enough.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is currently concerned with Web Based Marketing. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at The Best Sales And Marketing Strategy.

This article is about the reasons for failing at Internet marketing. There are many reasons why people are unsuccessful at Internet marketing and anything else for that matter. Most people who write on this subject will say that the first reason is lack of hard work, the second is lack of creativity and the third is lack of focus and I agree that these are the three main reasons for failure, but I want to look at some of the other reasons for failing at Internet marketing

Lack of valuable content is one of these reasons for failing at Internet marketing. Too many inexpert Internet marketers focus on earning money and they believe that they can best achieve this by firing a shotgun of web site banners at their visitors.

The secret here is so clear that nobody is trying to keep it, but, visitors to your web site have not come to marvel at your banners. They have come to be educated, to be amused or to solve a problem they have. And they want it free, so your banners are the last thing on their minds when they arrive. Particularly if they off topic. You have to have articles that are pertinent to the content of your site.

The more pertinent articles the better. The best kind are totally original and unique to your website, however, some marketers cannot write well and others cannot pay to have them written for them. These people can get articles free of charge from article databases (just Google it).

The main snag about this is that you will need to keep the resource box at the end of the article on your web site. This will cause some of your visitors to leak away, but certainly not all.

I have several such sites and they are doing all right. A website of other writers’ content is very easy to make, so you could have a website up in a day, if you want to swiftly create a website around a merchant’s special offer that does not fit into your existing websites. This can be very useful, especially if you want to build up a portfolio of say, 150-200 websites.

The trick here is to get your visitor to click on your ONE high-paying advert rather than leak out by clicking the link at the foot of the article. You can do this by putting the advert in the right place and prominent. The articles should concentrate on the keywords of the product you are promoting.

Those wishing to be successful Internet marketers must be prepared to keep aquiring knowledge. The Internet changes rapidly and new techniques and media are being brought out every month. Twitter has only been around for four years and it just passed its 16 billionth tweet. How long have you known about Twitter?

Have you learned how to harness it for marketing yet? Even if Twitter does not appeal to your object audience, you should have learned what is has to provide by now, so that you can make an informed decision.

Maybe, one day you will find a product to market where Twitter can be of assistance. Keep learning and be prepared. This all boils down to hard work, because there is always someone claiming to have come up with the next Myspace or Twitter.

While you are taking a rest from researching your next product or project, or the next social medium, you ought to improve your knowledge of programming or editing so that you can make improvements and adjustments to your web site yourself in order to keep it looking new.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is currently concerned with Affiliate Article Marketing. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at The Best Sales And Marketing Strategy.