There are many reasons to consider creating a viral marketing campaign, of course the long term goal is use it to earn money either directly or indirectly. Successful viral marketing can bring in a multitude of benefits from generating more sales, brand exposure or backlinks to your website.
As the owner of a SEO Company we’re mostly interested in the high quality backlinks a particular campaign can deliver. This is because high quality backlinks mean great rankings on Google and the benefit of organically built links far exceed any paid links that can be easily bought. As an added benefit, you don’t have any of the risks associated with paid links.
Whether you’re just starting to incorporate viral marketing into your online strategy or if you’ve already started creating viral campaigns I’m going to hopefully give you a few tips so you can use viral marketing to not only create buzz & additional exposure for your brand but also those highly valuable backlinks your website so desperately needs to perform well on Google.
When link-building is your primary concern, you need to build your campaigns around getting the most links possible, a campaign that has been tailored so that its primary aim is to get links will acquire far more links than a general campaign that hasn’t. With that in mind, here are some ideas that will help encourage people to link to your sites:
1. Create a “badge” with a link within badge so any people installing the badge will automatically link back to your site. Do note that if you have an anchor text link below the badge, don’t use keywords that are very spammy, I’d suggest you stick with the site name.
2. Creating great resources is another way to encourage linking, “infographics” are very popular at the moment and people seem to love linking to them.
3. Ego viral marketing is also another fantastic way to get links, if people do a test or a quiz and they score well, they are likely to link back to the particular quiz or test so that other people can go and see how smart the first people mentioned is.
Awesome videos, competitions and games are far more traditional forms of viral marketing and in our experience don’t work as well as stuff that’s created around getting backlinks. Also, note that if you create a video, try to avoid using YouTube as people tend to link to the video rather than your actual page or site where it’s placed!
Whenever you create a linking campaign or otherwise, try to identify your link targets BEFORE you conceptualise your campaign, if you can’t identify a several hundred link targets, then your campaign probably won’t have a great chance of success in terms of getting a fair amount of links.
Once you’ve created your campaign, you’re going to need to seed it so that you get thousands of people seeing it and therefore spreading it and finally a tiny percentage of them will link to it. Some of my favourite ways of seeding a viral campaign are as follows:
1. Social Media: Getting your campaign “hot” on Digg, Facebook and StumbleUpon
2. Top Blog Review: Having a trusted blogger with a big readership mention your viral campaign and you’re likely to hit a homerun.
3. Pay-Per-Click advertising: Google and Facebook work well for some initial traction if it suits your campaign.
4. Emailing webmasters individually: This does work and should be part of any viral resource based campaign.
One golden rule to follow is to ask yourself: “Why would people want to link to this?” If you can answer honestly, and think people have a reason then your campaign has a chance, if not, then you probably don’t.
