Why you should focus on your word-of-mouth advertising. One of the biggest reasons people don’t buy is lack of trust. Your product or service can be astounding, but if prospects don’t trust you, they won’t buy. A word-of-mouth referral comes with a high degree of trust compared to other advertising methods. The more trust your prospect has in you, the easier it is to sell. So why not invest in your word of mouth advertising? Why not make it easier for people to refer you? Well this is where your web site comes in! Here are 5 ways to use your web site to boost your word of mouth advertising:

1. Tell all your word-of-mouth advertisers about your web site.

Often, a business will either put up their web site for the first time or make significant updates and not tell anyone. People who can potentially refer you business ought to be aware of your web site. So when you put up a web site or make significant updates, let everyone know about it.

2. Get your web site on all your points of contact.

This will help spread the word about your web site. In addition to putting your web site name on brochures and business cards, put it on the not-so-obvious places like your emails, voice mail greeting, and customer receipts. The more times people hear about your web site, the more they will share it when telling people about you.

3. Put your referral program on your web site.

Having a page on your web site that explains your referral program will help others be more effective at sending leads your way. On this page, make it clear how to refer business to you and what kind of business you are looking for.

4. Put your special offers on your site.

Special offers are good for getting prospects to take action. They also can make referring people to you easier. For example, instead of saying, “My friend Joe is a plumber, he can help you,” a referrer can say, “My friend Joe is a plumber, go to his web site, and you can get 10% off!” After you put your offers on your web site, let the people who will refer you know about them.

5. Give free information on your web site.

Free information is a good way to make referring people to your web site easy to do. It can be as easy as saying, “Oh, go check out Jen’s web site. There’s a lot of good free advice there.” Everyone wants good free advice. Let everyone who may refer you business know about the free information on your web site. Wouldn’t it be great if people who used to say, “Hey, my friend Ann is a graphic designer, umm, I have her card somewhere.” can now say, “Hey, my friend Ann is a graphic designer, visit her site at www.anndesign.com so you can get free design samples?” In conclusion, use your web site to boost your word of mouth referrals. By doing so, you will attract prospects that have a higher degree of trust, and you will have an easier time closing sales.

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Viral Marketing can be understood as giving away and spreading your own free report or ebook along with your ad copy (contact information, link, email, etc.). In turn, anybody who received your product is allowed to give it away to their visitors, prospects and others as freebies. Using viral marketing method, you can easily market your product at no extra expenses on your part.

In this article, we will discuss some popular and useful viral marketing techniques that you may use and adopted in promoting your blog or website.

1. Ebooks – You can share your ebook with your website or blog visitors. You may include full-color ad for your most popular. You may give license to your ebook recipient to give it away to their visitors. This may help spreading your ebook on the net and at the same time it can help in promoting your website or blog. To encourage recipient to spread the viral ebook, may be you want to give some incentives for them. Maybe allowing them to change certain link in your ebook with their affiliate link will motivate them to spread it among their friends, visitors, etc

2. Software – Giving away a trial or “lite” version of your software with your website visitors as a freebies. Peoples love to get something for free. Sometimes, newbie tend to get free report or ebook first. And, they may spread it to their friend who they think will benefited from that report or ebook.Don’t forget to include ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email. And tell recipients to share copies of the software with their own site visitors and other contacts. For help creating software, hire help from online bid sites like Elance.com.

3. Web Host – You may consider or offer peoples to host small business web sites on your server at no charge. In exchange, they will allow you to place your banner ad at the top of the site for viral marketing. You can setup a fold for their site and they can choose their own domain name and have it redirected to that folder.

4. Templates – Design your own website or other templates, and include your own marketing information on them and give them away as free downloads or as an electronic package. Usually webmaster who give away free templates will inform that you may use the templates you want but the link to their website should not be erased.

5. Articles – Write articles about your industry. Include your website and contact information in the byline and grant permission for others to publish as long as they keep the byline in tact. Then people can use your contact on websites, in ezines, newsletters and other places where once again, viral marketing will speed the spread of information about your business.

6. Discussion Board – Set up a Discussion Board on your website with your banner ad attached at the top. And invite others to link to it and use it for their own sites.
In summary, by using viral marketing strategies, you can reach out all over the Internet with much less effort. See which methods work best for you and repeat them as often as needed.

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Viral marketing is the new method in advertising and marketing product on the net. It used and utilized the advantage of the internet’s network effect to be able to reach a great number of people in such a short time.

Benefits of Viral Marketing

Most marketers use viral marketing strategies because the advantages that it gave to businesses. Here is reason why you should use viral marketing.

- Easy to perform.
Viral marketing can be executed easily and you can choose the methods you comfortable with. There are several methods you can choose to send viral messages such as by sending email, instant messaging and using your blog or website. Sending viral messages through these media will not take much effort and time.

- Inexpensive.
Viral Marketing proves to be cheaper and cost-effective method compared to sending direct mails. With just small sum of money invested on viral advertising, it can reach hundreds of thousands of people compared the same amount of money you spent on traditional advertising. The amount is small because the only money you spend is for sending the initial set of viral contents. Then, spreading the message will not require additional costs.
As compared to sending direct mails, viral marketing proves to be cheaper and a more cost-effective method. With just a little investment on viral advertising, its power can reach even hundreds of thousands of people as compared to spending the same amount of money to traditional advertising methods. That is because the only money to spend is for sending the initial set of viral contents, then forwarding or replicating the message will not require additional costs anymore.

Targeting specific prospect-

When you use viral Marketing, there is huge probability that the message will spread and circulate among the people that are interested in it. Viral marketing concept is essentially passing on a message from user to another person, most likely, the user will pass it to a person whom he knows will be interested in it. Thus, you will receive more valuable prospect and the percentage of wasted advertising, which is sending the message to the wrong market, will be reduced.

- High response rate.
Using Viral Marketing, you could reach huge number of the business’ target market. So there is possibility that you will have a high turnover ration. Even if the responses you received will not immediately convert into profits, there will still be huge traffic that you will receive which is what most web owners want.

These are indeed great benefits a business can get by adopting this marketing technique. But what really makes viral marketing more powerful than other marketing or advertising strategies?

Let us take Hotmail as example, where this viral marketing concept started. Hotmail was able to spread over the internet at an amazing rate. It is like an epidemic that quickly spreads out to others once there is a single person infected by the virus. That is why this technique was named as such.

According to Hotmail’s statistics, it shows that within 18 months, its number of subscribers grew from zero to twelve millions users. What’s more amazing is that the company only spent $50,000 on advertising to achieve that number of subscribers. Compare that to Juno which spent $20 million on traditional advertising during the same time period as Hotmail but got much less output.

With those facts, viral marketing is a powerful method in reaching a huge number of the target market at a considerably low cost. Hotmail did not even have marketing or advertising presence in most countries outside the United States but it got to be the major email service provider in these places like India and Sweden.

What adds more power to viral marketing is the fact that the viral message passed on is like an endorsement from a friend or somebody who can be trusted. People have this way of thinking that “if my friend uses this product and is happy about it, what stops me from using it as well?”

In Hotmail’s case, when those people who received an email from their friends, relatives, or colleagues using Hotmail learned that it works and their friend is a user, they quickly signed up and became members as well. These people wanted to belong in this group where their friends are also in. This technique is also a matter of association or affiliation.

Viral marketing is indeed one powerful method you can use to increase popularity of a product or service. However, just like any other things, proper use of the technique is necessary. A single mistake of misuse of it may mean permanent damage to the product or service being promoted.

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