Traffic is the main source for any website or blog. It does not matter which niche you are trying to go after, if you want to have good feedback, you must have a steady source of traffic for your website. There are many different ways to generate targeted traffic and StumbleUpon marketing is definately one of them.

Is StumbleUpon marketing part of your social bookmarking strategy?

As in our online marketing plan it’s crucial that you apply one promotional strategy and ensure that it works before you move on to the next one. One type of method is using the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon to get visitors to your website. StumbleUpon is one of those few social sites that have a massive reach in various niches. This makes it very easy for those to utilize it for online marketing reasons.

Don’t sell in social media

Not surprisingly, this is social marketing which means toss out all the selling approaches, but you can tell people about products you think they will like. Soft-selling is the key to succeed with niche StumbleUpon marketing because people that are usually browsing the site aren’t interesting in buying things. So you want to always be helpful and come across like you are doing that, and then your site needs to be able to carry the conversation.

Don’t put pressure on users to Stumble

If you ever reveal your hand and employ the slightest pressure with the users, then that will give you disappointing results. So this is really not hard to figure out because they are actively looking to stumble on something. So that is the very basic battle plan at StumbleUpon, and you can learn how to work there with just a little effort.

Interact – share other sites as well as your own one

One way to sort of stay below the radar is to have a healthy number of shares, or stumbles, to sites that do not belong to you. It’s alright to submit links from your website, but don’t overdo it. Everybody is subject to the same set of expectations, and that is to give good stuff to the other users. Once you understand how to give more and more value to StumbleUpon, it’ll become easier for you to submit links that are actually worth it.

Healthy relationships with other users

Always be a genuine user and not a crude marketer that only aims at promotion. Create a healthy relationship with the other users in your niche, because friendships that you create here go a long way. This is not hard to do at all, but most marketers do not do it because it’s not fast enough. The common group psychology applies here, and that is just the way it is.

Be regular with your social marketing

Your approach needs to include patience and being regular with your social marketing. As long as you know what you’re doing, and you avoid hurrying then you can make some profits. StumbleUpon is just a business model that dictates certain approaches, and there really is no way around it.

But, when you speak about StumbleUpon, the traffic is not only highly targeted, but the people that come to your site are really wanting to see what you are offering. StumbleUpon has thousands of people who browse its website. So just image the type of exposure you could get if you put forth the effort and begin using the site to your advantage. But again, it all comes down to how efficient you are about taking action. This is because if you are not going to take action with the things that you have learned, you will never experience good results.

All marketers would love to run successful viral marketing campaigns, and you the truth is you can if you know exactly what you are doing. So many people do not even consider bothering with viral marketing because they just do not know the truth about it – that it is not high level particle physics.

Can you persuade your existing users to tell their friends about your content?

Viral marketing frustrates businesses because they know it can work, it is just that most of them cannot make it work. This is the kind of thing that generally requires you to know a few important fundamental items. Just keep in mind that it is the market that determines if something should go viral, not you.

Provide something of very high value

The way to attempt a viral reaction is to provide high quality content that shocks people into talking about it. There are times when your idea will spread around virally, without you knowing at the start.

This is why you should focus on being patient when it comes to achieving results from your campaign. You never know which idea might work and give you massive returns. Think about it, how often do you hear about something truly becoming viral and setting the net on fire? Not often, really. Also consider that very many times what may become viral may not be confined to your target audience.

Be careful about overloading your hosting account

So you can do things you think will create a buzz in your market, and there’s nothing wrong with that. One danger about a viral campaign is that it can overload your hosting account if you are using shared hosting. This has encouraged many savvy webmasters to consider cloud hosting. It is hard to say if you could improve your viral idea, and we are not sure why you would want to do that, anyway.

You can easily go to the places where your market visits, and then do something to create a stir or buzz. If you can ignite an idea in a group, it will be a lot more easier for you to get the idea out in the market, and let the big influencers pick it up.

Finding your target market

Defining your target market is in theory easy, and you will find them in forums and at Facebook and most likely Twitter plus others. You need to do things to draw them to you, and once done then you keep their attention. Once you have that step done, then you will be in a prime position to do something virally.

There are already so many examples of succesful viral marketing campaigns that have happened because of YouTube. You can experiment with any viral idea you can think of and post it at YouTube and see what happens. This is not anything like film class, and the most important thing is that you test out your ideas as they come to you. You never know what will become viral, so just get things done and make them happen. You can use many types of viral marketing to achieve spectacular results in your own business.

The 34th edition of our podcast brings you week #5 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video looks at internet viral marketing.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

View the entire presentation on viral marketing below via the Slideshare website. This is an audio recording of the original 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar added to the original slides.

This is part 2/2 of a video on running a viral marketing campaign is the tenth pillar in our series of internet marketing videos which were recorded at an early version of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar. Enjoy!

This is part 1/2 of a video on running a viral marketing campaign is the tenth pillar in our series of internet marketing videos which were recorded at an early version of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar. Enjoy!

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to increase brand awareness, through a self-replicating viral processes.

Viral marketing campaign strategies are often known as word-of-mouth marketing, in fact it’s any medium which your existing customers use that enables a peer to peer recommendation to be made.

Viral marketing campaign strategies mean that your customers do your marketing on your behalf. The process of encouraging viral marketing to take place is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to tell their friends about you – and to give them a reason to do so.

Pillar #10 covers what viral marketing is and how you can use it as part of your overall internet marketing strategy. I would like to focus on two main viral marketing opportunities…

Firstly Social bookmarking – something that you can easily build into your blog with ease and secondly Video marketing. By driving people towards your videos on video sharing sites like YouTube you increase the ranking of your videos on those sites by increasing your number of views. This increased ranking of your video makes it more likely to be found on YouTube by people who haven’t heard of you before. You then have an opportunity to drive people back you your site after viewing your video.

An early example of effective Viral Marketing – Hotmail

One of the first viral marketing campaign strategies from back in the late 1990′s. Hotmail was just developing as a company and doing OK – until they hit upon an idea. Why not automatically add a little bit of text at the bottom of each email that people sent saying something like, “Would you like a free email account too? Visit www.hotmail.com”

At the time (the late 1990’s) many people still paid for an email account. So, this fact, combined with the “free email” message at the bottom of each mail exploded Hotmail’s business. Hotmail’s message spread like a virus – hence viral marketing. This one idea is probably the main reason why Hotmail became so big so quickly. Hence, in my opinion, this one line of text is the reason that Microsoft paid millions of dollars to buy Hotmail.

So, a simple email signature worked for Hotmail. But that’s not necessarily what I’m recommending for you. Your viral marketing strategy does not necessarily have to revolve around an e-mail signature. Remember that a viral marketing campaign can be anything that encourages your users to pass on information about you, your business or your business’ products to their friends. The question is what’s the right viral marketing strategy for you?

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows anyone who views web pages the opportunity to save a list of their favorite pages online, and at the same time, if they wish to do so, to share these favorite web pages with their friends. Two examples of social bookmarking tools / websites are StumbleUpon and Delicious.

There are two main reasons why it’s a good idea to encourage your website visitors to book your web pages online. Firstly, other users of these social bookmarking services can see to most recently popular web pages that have been bookmarked. This provides a way for other people to discover your web pages on these social bookmarking sites. Secondly, search engines also like these social bookmarking sites because t shows which web pages are popular with users at any given moment in time. Therefore, if search engines crawl these social bookmarking sites and find that lots of users are bookmarking your site, then your site will be more likely to be ranked higher in search engines – social bookmarking also helps with your search engine optimization.

Don’t think that social bookmarking is the same as traditional bookmarking where people save their favorite websites on their internet browser software. That way of saving bookmarks is just for their personal use as the information is stored on their internet browser software on their computer. Search engines can only crawl bookmarks that are stored online – so that’s the kind of bookmarking that you want to encourage.

Social bookmarking and tags

Another great reason why social bookmarking is so good is the use of ‘tags’ with each bookmark. A tag is a word or a phrase that a user associates with a web page. Again using Freddie Faldo’s golf shop site as an example, people may decide to save his home page on their bookmarks and add the 3 tags ‘golf’, ‘golf clubs’ and ‘golf shop’ to the bookmark. This tag addition will make it easier for them to find your website in their bookmarks in the future – it’s like listing the web page in multiple categories. It’s a more modern, more user-friendly version of storing web pages in folders.

Another reason why tags are great is that they help to educate search engines about the subject matter on your website. i.e. if lots of different people are saving your home page on a social bookmaking site using the tag ‘golf store’, then this will give search engines more of a reason to rank your home page higher for the keyword phrase ‘golf store’.

Delicious.com

Figure 10.1 shows the Delicious.com social bookmarking site homepage. This is a great example of the kind of website I have been referring to.

Figure 10.1 – Delicious.com – a popular social bookmarking site

But how do you encourage your website visitors to save your website pages? Apart from producing great, valuable content that people will want to come back to and regularly revisit in the future, the next thing that you should do is make it easy for people to bookmark your web pages.

AddThis.com

You may well have noticed on web pages – especially on blog posts that you are occasionally invited to bookmark the page or share it with your friends. Websites commonly link directly to the ‘add’ page on social bookmarking sites to increase the chances that people will bookmark the page. One popular free service that makes it easy to add this service to your website is AddThis.com (figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 – AddThis.com

AddThis is a service that people may recognize when you add it to your website – because it’s already very popular and on lots of other websites.

Once a user clicks on it for the first time, it gives you a list of the social bookmarking service for them to select the one that they regularly use (figure 10.2). If it’s Delicious.com then once someone selects the Delicious icon in the AddThis window, they’ll proceed to a window like figure 10.3.

Figure 10.3 – Adding a web page to Delicious.com bookmarks

After you select your chosen bookmarking service through the AddThis service, AddThis will remember your bookmarking service for next time. This reduces the amount of clicks that it takes for someone to save your web page to their bookmarks.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon (Figure 10.4) offers a similar service to Delicious.com. StumbleUpon lets users ‘randomly find’ other people’s bookmarks by searching the StumbleUpon website within certain categories.

Figure 10.4 – StumbleUpon.com

The service will then recommend other websites that people have already tagged in a similar manner. The more that you can get people to ‘stumble’ (bookmark) your web pages, the more likely it will be that StumbleUpon will recommend your web pages.

A special request to all readers

This is probably a good time to ask for your assistance to help me get the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing book in as many people’s hands as possible. If you’ve found this book valuable so far I’d really appreciate if you could share http://www.26weekplan.com/13pillars with a few of your friends. If you could tell your Twitter followers, share it with your Facebook friends and bookmark the page on an online bookmarking service line StumbleUpon it would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Video Marketing

Thanks to every-increasing broadband capacity, online video is becoming more and more the norm. At the time of writing around 10 of the top 100 websites in the world are video-based. This means that ignoring video as a medium to drive traffic towards your website could be a significant mistake.

I’d like to share with you a few of the top online video sharing sites, show you how easy it is to create your own videos for these sites, share with you how to include a ‘call to action’ within your video and recommend a great free service that les you upload your video to many of these sites at the same time, tracking your video views too.

Figure 10.5 – YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is the granddaddy of all online video sharing sites. In fact, by June 2007 it was 50 percent more popular than all other video sites combined, according to Hitwise. But even though YouTube is still miles ahead of other video sharing sites in terms of visitor numbers at the moment, as a content producer it would be folly just to rely on YouTube as a marketing medium. I’d advise on distributing your videos to at least 10 video sharing sites.

I’m assuming that you’ve seen it before, but figure 10.5 shows you what the YouTube website looks like. I published the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oheBDHB-IZU (An introduction the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing) in May 2007, and over the first year it was on the first page of YouTube search results for the phrase ‘internet marketing’. At the time of writing it’s now had over 14,000 views.

How to make your videos more popular on YouTube

There are a few small things that I did to make the introduction to the 13 Pillars video more popular of YouTube and drive more visitors back to my website. I’d like to share them with you now…

YouTube is one of the websites which will reprint your URL as a live link if you include ‘http://’ in front of it. If you include this link in the description of your video you will get a live link back to your website, meaning that people will be much more likely to visit your website after viewing your video. Although it’s a ‘nofollow’ link, it will still increase your website visitor numbers.

Include your keyword phrase in your video title and your video description. i.e. Including ‘internet marketing’ within the video title and description made YouTube much more likely to rank it more highly in searches for that keyword phrase.

Drive visitors to your newly published video and ask them to help you by rating the video, adding the video as one of their favorites and adding a comment to the video. All these measures are indicators to YouTube of your video’s popularity. And if your video quickly becomes popular then YouTube are much more likely to rank it highly themselves.

Once of the best ways of driving visitors to your video is to have your own email list of appreciative subscribers. If you regularly over-deliver, you’ll find that members of your list are much more likely to be willing to help you when you ask a favor from them. This is just one of the reasons why it’s an extremely valuable thing for your business to build up a list of subscribers – even although you don’t have an email marketing strategy at the moment.

Other Video Sites

As mentioned already, there are other popular video sites available apart from YouTube – get your videos in as many places as possible! So which sites apart from YouTube should you be using to host your videos?

Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Video originally began as a search engine during 2005. It combined traditional search engine techniques to crawl other websites to look for videos on other sites together with a web 2.0 facility that allows users to upload, share, tag and host their own videos on Yahoo!

However, as part of a recent upgrade, Yahoo is indexing more video from several new media sources, including CBS News, MTV, the Discovery Channel and The Food Network which the users of Yahoo! can see embedded within the Yahoo! video player.

Figure 10.6 – Yahoo! Video

In early 2007, MySpace introduced MySpaceTV. Since launch it has been rebranded to MySpace Video. (Figure 10.7)

Figure 10.7 - MySpace Video

MySpace Video works in the same way as most of the other video sharing sites. However, because it’s part of the MySpace network, you need a MySpace account to upload videos.
However, this also means that if you are already an active MySpace user, when you up load videos to the MySpace Videos service, you can share these videos with your existing MySpace contacts.

Metacafe

Metacafe (Figure 10.8) is another similar online video sharing service. However, it does have a couple of policies that differentiate it:

Using its unique ‘VideoRank’ system, Metacafe attempts to gauge viewer reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its viewers.

Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and Videorank score via its Producer Rewards Program.

Any video that is viewed a minimum of 20,000 times, and has achieved a Videorank rating of 3.00 or higher (and does not violate any copyrights or other Metacafe community standards) is awarded $5 for every 1,000 views.

Figure 10.8 – Metacafe

Revver

Revver (Figure 10.9) is another popular video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. It attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and shares all ad revenue 50/50 with the creators. Revver includes adverts on all its videos, whether you like it or not which may be a problem for you depending on what your business offers.

Figure 10.9 – Revver

Each video is automatically made available in both Flash and QuickTime formats and you are given the HTML code to embed either format along with the ability to add your own branding or logo into the Flash player interface.

Uploading to Revver is easy and it provides a progress bar to show your upload status. They review all videos before making them live and this process can take up to 24 hours.

DailyMotion

DailyMotion (Figure 10.10) is a French-based video website which was founded in 2005. The videos that it features on its site are often of good quality in comparison to many other video sites. As of April 2009 DailyMotion was ranked by Alexa Rank as being the 67th most popular website in the world.

Figure 10.10 – DailyMotion

Blip TV

Blip.tv (Figure 10.11) is a video sharing site which features videos that tend to be more professional in quality rather than simple clips. On Blip.tv the videos are like mini TV series and often very entertaining. You can search for your favorite episodes by category, use the search box or search by popular tags. You can also become a subscriber to your favorite shows so you do not miss an episode.

If you like to produce videos, you can create your own show and advertise it to others through a trailer or you can participate as a critic and rate the shows.

Blip.tv also offers advertising schemes with profit being split 50/50 between you and them. You can also submit your videos to iTunes through Blip.tv, creating a video podcast.

Figure 10.11 Blip TV

Brightcove

Brightcove (Figure 10.12) was originally a company who helped create video content on websites such as the New York Times and MTV but they’ve recently launched a video service with the motto ‘Share your videos in style’.

Figure 10.12 Brightcove

Every publisher who creates a Brightcove account is assigned a channel, their own page on Brightcove.tv.

Publishers can customize their channel through the Brightcove Console. Simple details like the channel’s name, logo, and description can be updated in the user’s profile. The content of a channel is defined by changing the settings of individual titles, lineups, and players to allow distribution and promotion on Brightcove.tv.

Brightcove.tv – along with syndication, search engine indexing and a user’s own site – serves as a distribution and promotion tool for video publishers.

Veoh

Veoh (Figure 10.13) lets you upload a range of video formats with no limits on file size, resolution, or length. If your video is over 45 minutes a viewer will need to download it to watch the full video.

Figure 10.13 Veoh

To download and watch videos on your computer rather than watch videos online, users must use the VeohTV desktop application. VeohTV is also what you need to be using to upload videos over 100MB. You can also upload videos directly from a URL or if you have a Veoh Pro account you can upload via an RSS feed.

A Veoh Pro account is free. However, it requires a credit card account number to confirm your address. When that is given, you can then take advantage of advertising programs where you can share revenue 50/50 and sell or rent video downloads through Veoh’s e-commerce system (you keep 70 percent of the sale price). As a Veoh Pro account holder, your uploaded video will be transcoded into Flash 8 video. Flash 8 is superior to the Flash 7 format used for converting video submitted by basic Veoh users.

Imeem

Imeem (Figure 10.14) is a video sharing service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio and videos.

Launched in October 2004, the Imeem has a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of YouTube. It works on an advertising-based business model and is free to use.

Figure 10.14 – Imeem

They also provide a broader range of privacy options and incorporate peer-to-peer technology for better security and unlimited bandwidth.

Editing video

For PC users you probably already have a piece of software installed on your computer – Windows Movie Maker (Figure 10.15). This allows you to edit and produce your own video. If you have a Mac the alternative is Final Cut Studio and if you are using Linux then there are plenty of open source programs that you can simply download for free – try searching Download.com.

All these video editing software will allow you to import your own videos into the program, add titles, endings or music to it. They will also allow you to create videos out of still photos as well.

If you have a number of still photos that you want to create a movie with, you can import the photos into your movie editing software and then drag the photos into your video timeline. Then you can then choose video transitions from your software to include in-between your photos. Transitions mean that each new photo can appear either from the side, up or down or in fact in one of any manner of options preinstalled in your video editing software. You can also apply effects to your individual photos such as slowly zooming in or out.

Figure 10.15 – Windows Movie Maker

When you create a sequence of photos and ass multiple effects, you will be surprised at how quickly your photos start to become a video – and how quickly and easy the process is. After you’re satisfied with your video sequence it’s also easy to add beginning titles and end credits should you wish to do so. It’s also easy to import audio.

Adding audio to your video

Bearing in mind copyright restrictions, you should be careful about the audio you use with your video. However, there is a website called PodsafeAudio (figure 10.16) that download and use any of the audio tracks on the website – as long as if you credit the artist.

Figure 10.16 – PodsafeAudio

Simply mention the artist name and song title at the end of your video clip to use the audio legally. There are lots of great audio tracks on PodsafeAudio including some great tracks from unsigned, independent new artists. Simply download the audio that you wish to use in MP3 format to be able to use it as a backing track for your video.

Including a ‘call-to-action’ in your videos

It’s important to include a ‘call-to-action’ in your video – a call-to-action is simply asking the viewer to do something after they have viewed your video. This must be measurable, and of potential benefit to your business.

I’d certainly recommend including an easy-to-remember domain name as a subheading throughout your video in additional to a clip at the end of your video telling the viewer why they should visit that domain.

However, if you find that video marketing is an important part of your overall marketing mix I’d say that it’s important to have a unique URL within your video i.e. a URL, domain name that is not mentioned anywhere on your website, or anywhere else. That way, when people visit that website address you know that it can only be your videos which are responsible for driving those visitors.

For example, your video could be an introduction to a subject matter and for more information they can visit your website address to watch more videos or perhaps download a free report. Just remember to make the first free video valuable and informative.

A common successful strategy for the web pages that viewers are asked to visit after viewing an informative video is to ask for someone’s name and email address in exchange for more great content. Remember that if there is no link to this website address from anywhere else online, you know that your visitors have landed on your web page because they viewed one of your videos on a video sharing site like YouTube. More information about tracking your visitors will be covered in Pillar #11 – Visitor Analysis).

Saving your video in the optimum format

There are literally tens of different formats in which to save your video – and then there are so many different sizes of videos. Until recently, 320×240 pixels was the size that most video sharing sites preferred. This happens to be in the traditional 4×3 television screen size.

However, more recently video sites have started to prefer videos in widescreen format which is 16×9 screen size. As broadband speeds have increased, so have the number of pixels per video. 16×9 videos for online distribution are now most commonly uploaded in 640×360 pixels size. At the time of writing (April 2009) that’s the size which I’d recommend.

When it comes to video format many file types will work just fine, but most video sharing sites recommend MP4 format with h.264 codec. However, you’ll probably find that WMV or AVI will work just fine. If you’re worried about your video format compatibility it’ probably best to create a test YouTube video site first-of-all to confirm what your video will look like when it’s published.

Figure 10.17 – TubeMogul

Uploading you video to video sharing sites

I’ve already introduced you to several video sites – and it’s worthwhile to upload your video to several of those video sites and more. However, if you haven’t done so already you’ll start to realize that uploading videos to video sharing sites can take a great deal of time and resources.

Many internet connections upload files at much slower speeds that they download files. This means that it could take you a day just to upload one ten-minute video to all the video sharing sites that you want your video to feature on.

However, help is at hand. There’s a great free-to-use (for their basic service) website called TubeMogul which will upload your video to several video sites at the same time. All you have to do is upload your video to TubeMogul, enter your usernames and passwords for the various video sharing sites and TubeMogul will upload your videos to several sites on your behalf. This makes the whole process a great deal easier and a lot less time consuming.

As a bonus TubeMogul will also track your video views on each of the sites, meaning that you’ll be able to quickly and easily track your conversion rates for your call-to-action.

Of course TubeMogul have a partially free service for a reason – they want you to sign-up for a more comprehensive service that offers more. However, whether you choose to upgrade or not, as it stands their free service is great.

Other video sites

Assuming that you decide not to upgrade to TubeMogul’s paid service, it’s probably a good idea for you to manually upload your video to a few other services. Viddler is another good general video sharing site and 5Min calls itself a one-stop shop for instructional videos and DIY projects. For this reason, you may well find 5Min to be a good site for uploading informative business videos.

You may also find that there are other video sharing sites that are aimed specifically at your industry segment. For instance, I have also uploaded the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar videos to a video sharing site called IM Broadcast (Internet Marketing Broadcast). You can see my 13 Pillars videos here: http://www.imbroadcast.com/users/13pillars/videos/public.

So make sure that if you’re in sales recruitment like Jane Jobs then you search for a video sharing site that specializes in sales advice. And if you own a golf shop like Freddie Faldo then check to see if there’s a video sharing site that specializes in golf videos.

Tweaking your conversions

After testing video marketing as a form of internet marketing you find that you’re finding it to be a productive tool for your business, then it’s important to try to improve your conversion rates. Test including different calls-to-action for different videos.

For example, try including a free report as the incentive at the end of the video instead of more videos. Perhaps you should also try to drive viewers towards your main website.

Remember that if you increase your conversion rates from 1% to 2% then that’s 100% more potential customers driven towards your business from your video marketing efforts.

Pillar #10 – Viral Marketing Summary

• Viral marketing uses word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer communication to advertise your website.
• Social bookmarking and video marketing are two examples of what you can use to encourage viral marketing to take place.
• Aim to improve your number of returning visitors using social bookmarking- by allowing people to quickly and easily make your site one of their favorites. Try incorporating the AddThis.com tool within your blog.
• Remember to kick-start the popularity of your videos on video sharing sites like YouTube by driving people on your email list to your videos and asking them to add comments.
• Be efficient in the uploading of your videos – make sure that you use the free TubeMogul uploading and tracking service. Don’t just upload your videos to YouTube. There are lots of other sources of video viewers and some sites will convert a lot better than YouTube even though they don’t necessarily bring as many video views.
• Have you included a call-to-action in your videos? Do people know who has uploaded the video and what else they could get from you if they visited your website?

This eleventh episode of our internet marketing podcast looks at Internet Marketing Pillar #10 – Viral Marketing.

Remember, if you haven’t done so already, before going any further make sure you download the free 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook which accompanies this viral marketing podcast.

Click here to listen or subscribe for free using iTunes

Click here to go to listen or subscribe using other software

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to increase brand awareness, through a self-replicating viral processes. Viral marketing is often known as word-of-mouth marketing, in fact it’s any medium which your existing customers use that enables a peer to peer recommendation to be made.

Running a viral marketing campaign means that your customers do your marketing on your behalf. The process of encouraging viral marketing to take place is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to tell their friends about you – and to give them a reason to do so.