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Viral Marketing
This is usually the free way to spread word about the fact that your website is possibly quality material. Thanks to the digital age, it can be a very effective way to more traffic.
The Viral Thing That Attracts
You may have gone into this kind of attraction. I must admit I have. It is something people usually like and which can easily be spread like a fire.
Free is the word of today. Give something nice and free for the people the way so that the they can get the idea of your website or company. Who wouldn't like free stuff like software or free smileys. People are usually preferring 'Free Dog Food' instead of 'Greatest Dog Food', don't you think? This is the first step.
Make the free thing easily spreadable. That is can be anything like copy/paste or an installable file. It's about your imagination.
To make the fire 'start' ignite it by advertising your free thing and the idea of the website or company in a community. If the free thing has something worthy to tell friends about, it spreads and possibly it can be spreading fast. This 'worthy-to-tell' thing can be something appealing, motivating, exciting, attracting or anything people and especially the target group of yours likes. This is why the word 'viral', it spreads like a virus, exponentially jumping from a person to another.
You can be sure that your website's heat spreads if your plan of viral marketing is good enough and you got the quality content. Take a closer look at this text and you will see the way this works is rather simple.
An Example of 'The Viral Thing That Attracts'
You have just opened a free, large and quality website about dog food nutritional information. You want to use viral marketing to make the website a bit more popular. As the 'free thing' you create the title 'Free dog food nutritional value information'. It consists of the 'free' part and the 'idea of the website' part, both together so it really doesn't need any side product like 'free smileys'. Also it is a potentially interesting topic for many people.
Then you go to your favorite discussion forums about dogs and give your messages the signature 'Free dog food nutritional value information' and a link to your website. As the time goes by and you are using the forums as always, some people see your signature and get interested.
The people who get 'hooked' to your website tell others about it. Then those people tell even others about it and link to your website.
As the time is still going by, your website starts to be more and more heavily linked. This is also starting to affect to search engines too, they are ranking you in the first page among the other best search results when searching for 'dog food nutritional value' or 'dog food'.
That's a possible way to get known but also a bit idealistic, who knows.
Create Videos to Promote Your Website
I personally enjoy teaching people things and sharing knowledge. This especially comes true when I create educational videos. You could create your own videos too and upload them to a popular video sharing website such as YouTube.
There are people who like learning from a video, random people who search educational videos for a variety of purposes and then there is that circle of people in video community websites who constantly look for specific kinds of videos. These are the people who you are going to get contacted with. Once they see your video and possibly get interested, they visit your website.
Creating videos isn't hard. You don't even need a camera or a microphone. More about creating website promoting videos here.
Guidelines for Blog and Forums
These are the main guidelines for those participating or commenting on blogs and forums website promoting in their mind. To keep Internet as clean as possible, please follow these rules.
1) Be honest while contributing.
2) Post when the topic is near you, when the readers could have a benefit from your post.
3) Be useful or you will be revealed as a salesman.
4) Personally give tips to people with problems and the link to your website.
5) Do not make sales pitches.
6) This is your PR challenge, your mission is to establish credibility. Remember that.
Getting Your Link Seen in Communities
There aren't many ways to promote your website in communities but they are the most effective ones you can get with this method.
1) Signatures after names or posts either in blogs or forums. This is a link with your website's name. Make sure that the link is working properly. There may be a preview mode, if there isn't at least put http:// in the beginning of the link instead of plain www. Also check out that forum rules allow linking.
2) Adjust your personal forum page. Add the information about you and in the description, add your link.
3) If there is an introductions sub-forum to make the first "Hello everybody" post, tell something about yourself and add your link. That is one acceptable place because now you are introducing yourself.
Searching for Blogs and Forums
Nothing special to be said, unleash your viral marketing dreams behind these links.
Finding Blogs:
Finding Forums: