The Two-Step Trick to Effective Viral Marketing
I know that I have mentioned this in passing in the previous chapter. But to drive home the point, I’m going to fully define the key steps you need to take to conduct truly effective viral marketing campaigns. These viral marketing campaigns will work not just on your social media accounts but also on your blog, your forum postings, and other online marketing efforts you take.
Step #1: Find what’s hot
The first thing that you need to do is to find what’s hot on the internet. There are tons of pictures, links, picture quotes, and videos going viral all the time. People can’t help but share this material. Find hot stuff.
Now, after you have found this material, make sure that you filter them based on how near or how closely related they are to your target niche. For example, if you are promoting a plumbing service company in Central Florida, you can share all the funny dogs riding scooters videos you want. You might even get a lot of traffic to your page. But guess what? You probably are not going to book too many new appointments for your client using these videos.
You can get a lot of eyeballs, but they are the wrong ones. Why? The videos that you reshared and marketed are not near enough or closely related enough to your target niche.
Niches are people who share certain problems. These are people who are looking for certain common solutions. Always keep that in mind. Just because you get a lot of traffic, it doesn’t really mean much.
Step #2: Share viral content to drive conversions
It’s really important to understand why you are doing viral marketing in the first place. This is where a lot of people trip up. They really do. Why? They focus on raw numbers. They focus on getting as many clicks to their target site as possible.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Traffic is good, but it has to be the right kind of traffic.
If I had to choose between 1 million random visitors or 1,000 highly targeted visitors, I would take the latter all day, every day. What’s the point of getting 1 million visitors when only one in a million actually converts into a paying customer?
Compare that with getting 1,000 qualified visitors and seeing 200, 300 or even 500 of them turning into actual paying customers. This is not rocket science. It should be quite obvious.
So understand how this works and understand what your focus should be on. It isn’t about traffic. It’s something more. It’s all about driving conversions.
You need to get the right people to the right webpage so they can do something that puts more dollars in your bank account. That’s the bottom line. That should be your goal.
This is why it’s really important to share viral content to drive conversions. You’re not driving traffic, you’re not trying to maximize visibility, you’re trying to drive conversions.
How do you do this? Share the material on your blog. Reshare your blog’s link on social media. Use these to pull traffic to your blog. You then convert this traffic into potential sales by getting these visitors to sign up for your newsletter.
This is how you play the game to win. You convert these visitors through an internal blog page. When they click on a link and they end up on an engaging page of content, they may like your content so much that they click on a link to get notified of your updates. That’s how you hook them.