Product Review:
Viral Marketing

That's the average number of visitors to the average website today.

Assuming that only one visitor in about 100 buys the product at a "sales" site, that means about 1 sale per month. If you look at the statistics for sites that promote an affiliate product, and the results are even MORE grim--about one sale every 10 MONTHS! That's hardly worth the effort.

A few months ago at we began to look at one way that a site could, without cost, increase that number. We set out to generate "viral" traffic--hoping that it would turn out to be free, easy to generate and MORE HITS THAN WE COULD HANDLE.

[At the end of this article I will tell you where you can download a complete copy of all the pages we used so that you can use them too!]

The results were not quite THAT good, but they were good enough to make it worth the effort. Here are some of the things we tried and how they worked:

First, we tried a MIND-READING site. You can see it here:

The design of the site was to get the maximum number of page views per visitor--and then to have them tell other people about the page. Our goal was to have enough pop-behinds and banners built into the page that for every visitor to our "mindreading" site we would get one back to our "sales" site.

This is what we found:

Surprisingly, this turned out to be a VERY viral page. We posted it to several appropriate news groups and several people added it to their signature for emails. One of the postings resulted in it getting picked up by a discussion group and in one day we had over 500 people visit the site.

The banner impressions and pop-behinds added up, but not as well as we had hoped. Many of our visitors killed the pop-behinds before they loaded and many visited only one or two pages rather than the several we had hoped.

This promotion netted several thousand visits and the page is still receiving visits--even though we have not promoted it since December.

Though we cannot track it with total accuracy, this promotion resulted in about 1500 visits to our main site.

Recommendation: High

Changes we would make if we did it again: Put up a pop-up for subscribing to our FUN STUFF newsletter as well as the form on the page. Post it more often (monthly) to newsgroups, etc.

As a follow-up to our mindreading site we tried what we thought would be a similar promotion. You can see it here:

http://all-in-one-business.com/towboat

To put it mildly...it was a total flop. We wanted to generate a large number of page views again, but all we ended up with was a lot of work putting it together for very little visits.

What went wrong? The pictures--we wanted to show a series of photographs that are pretty amazing. The problem was that each one took so long to load (even after being optomized) that no one was willing to wait.

Recommendation: Forget It!

The final type of viral promotion we did was a "joke of the day" page. We put together a joke or funny picture every day or two and sent them out through a mailing list and some friends who always forward jokes to us. You can see the index and look at the pages here:

http://all-in-one-business.com/v

This has worked--and is working--extremely well. It takes us about 20 minutes to turn out a new page, upload it and send out a mailer. We have done that several times each week for the last several.

For that work we are getting 3000 visitors to these pages each week and about 300 to our main sales site. We figure we are putting about 1 hour per week into getting the pages up and promoted. One hour for 300 visits to our sales page is pretty good.

In addition, as our mailing list grows, so will the number of visits for the same amount of effort.

Recommendation: This is the BEST

Things we will change in the future:

This experiment worked very well and it is worth putting a little more effort into. We will be setting up a domain name and hosting just for our "Joke" site. Something that pertains to the topic and is a little easier for people to pass on.

A second change we will make is to begin putting a joke in the actual email we send out, rather than putting it just on the site. We are hoping that this will mean more people will forward it to their friends.

A third change will be to more actively promote the mailing list. For every letter we sent out (effortlessly through our autoresponder) we got approximately 1.2 visitors to our site. The more we send, the more we get.

A fourth change we will make will be to locate and promote appropriate affiliate products in the email--things with some mass appeal. We will need to separate these from the joke and links, so that forwarders don't delete the links, but we believe that this could end up producing some good income.

With these changes we think that we can get even more visits to our sites from this version of viral marketing.

At the beginning of this article I told you I would give you a place to download the pages we actually use for these promotions. In order to get them, you need to send a blank email to:

Viral@Quicktell.net

You will receive download instructions along with being subscribed to our weekly, award winning marketing eZine, I-Marketer. Of course, you can unsubscribe with the click of a mouse any time--but you won't want to!

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