Building Your Team With Viral Marketing
by Barry Gruber

There is far too much hype on the Internet today ... and especially about viral marketing. Viral marketing has been around since 1996 but has just recently become the 'sexy' term of the week - we see so many websites touting their amazing, unparalleled viral marketing technology. With so much buzz about  this marketing method, how do you separate the useful information from the hype?  Unfortunately, with so much mis-information on the Internet, it is very difficult to know who and what to believe.  We're going to cut through the layers of hype and get to the bottom of viral marketing ... and how it can be used to virtually explode your network marketing business.

Viral marketing is used to describe a marketing strategy that encourages individuals to pass on information or a message to others, creating the potential for geometric growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to hundreds, to thousands, and even to millions. Perhaps the biggest benefit of viral marketing is its ability to reach a very large number of interested people at an extremely low cost. And because it is based on word of mouth, viral marketing avoids the common issues associated with email marketing - spam complaints, bulk filtering, and ISP problems.

The definition of viral marketing (or viral promotion) is a method of advertising products or services that causes recipients to pass them on to friends, associates and family members. Viral marketing got its odd name because the word spreads like a virus, but it should not be confused with a computer virus. Computer viruses are the malicious and destructive "toys" of trouble makers and malcontents. Viral marketing, if done correctly, can bring quite a bit of good to the world.  When done correctly, viral marketing can be lucrative and powerful, bringing explosive growth.

By definition, viral marketing is a technique for promoting a product or service exponentially. When done correctly, one person will give it to a few people who in turn will pass it on to several other people. This is what makes viral marketing so effective. For instance, let’s say you developed an MLM training website (like the MLM Resource Center you're on right now)  and offered the training FREE to 10 people, who in turn forwarded the site to 10 people, who in turn passed it on to 10 people each. This simple viral campaign would put your website in front of 1,000 people almost immediately. Now here’s where it gets fun … if everyone passes it on to 10 people and this progression continues just three more times, one million people will have access to YOUR website. Continue the progression twice more and 100,000,000 people (100 million people) will have been exposed to YOUR website. And because the Internet is so efficient, it could realistically happen in a matter of days, weeks or months.

Perhaps the most famous viral marketing campaigns are Hotmail and Yahoo. Microsoft and Yahoo had the ingenious idea of giving away free email accounts as a way to penetrate the market. Once millions of computer users took advantage of the free email, the companies had a captive audience for “upselling” other products/services. They also had an audience of millions to offer their advertisers at premium rates.

What Makes For An Effective MLM Viral Marketing Campaign?

Some viral marketing promotions work better than others, and few work as well as the Hotmail and Yahoo campaigns. Why were those campaigns so effective? The primary reason they worked so well is they provided real benefits to the company and the end users.

There are 4 main attributes of a successful MLM Viral Marketing Campaign:

1. The products or service must be free to the recipient.
2. The product or service must provide tangible, measurable benefits.
3. The product or service must be easily transferred throughout the target community.
4. To be especially effective, the campaign should gain a rapid foothold in the MLM community, not opportunity seekers.

Why Is Viral Marketing An Effective Way To Build Your Network Marketing Team?

Success in network marketing is all about duplication. The issue for most networkers is the system they use for sponsoring new members is too complicated or too expensive ... meaning it is not duplicatable. Viral marketing addresses this issue in a number of ways:

• Viral marketing does not rely on the skill set or knowledge base of your team members.
• Once it gets started, viral marketing spreads on its own, making it completely duplicatable.
• Because their are tangible and free benefits to the recipient, nobody has to convince anybody.
• When done correctly, viral marketing is inexpensive and highly effective, so anybody can do it.

What sort of product or service makes for a good MLM viral advertising campaign? What we have seen work best during our years of Internet marketing are systems or tools. Offering network marketers FREE tools and/or techniques for building THEIR business provides value and creates excitement. Value and excitement are cornerstones of viral marketing. People will gladly share your tools if they get excited about the value they offer.

One of the things that separates viral marketing from other marketing methods is the speed of growth. With a good viral marketing promotion, you can be a "virtual" unknown on the Internet one day and your site can be all over the Internet "virtually" overnight.

Important Note: The focus of a successful viral marketing campaign is added value, not your brand. People will not share your site (or your information) because they love you or love your company; they will share it because they love the service, product, system, or tools.

Now that we have analyzed the key components of a MLM Viral Marketing Promotion, there is one last step. No matter how good your campaign is, it will be a major disappointment if you don't share it with a bunch of people. It's like the old story of the tree falling in the forest - if nobody is there when the tree falls does it make a sound? Likewise with your viral marketing - if nobody sees it, it doesn't exist.

So the most important step in your viral marketing campaign is .... in the immortal words of Frank Sinatra, "Start spreadin' the news!"


© 2007 Barry Gruber. All rights reserved.
http://www.YourWealthResources.com

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