Viral Marketing for Beginners

Viral Marketing for Beginners

Checking the del.icio.us popular page today, I noticed this page, which had already been tagged 923 times and rising. No knock against the person who wrote it but...it's just a list of a half-dozen or so AJAX tutorials.

I mean, can viral marketing really be this easy?

A killer, comprehensive resource like the SEOMoz Ranking Factors page gets 882 del.icio.us tags, and a links page listing seven AJAX tutorials eclipsed it easily in a few days (although SEOMoz's Web 2.0 awards had significantly wider appeal).

And, of course, it's been Dugg.

So what's the lesson here? I guess that getting Del.icio.us and Digg traffic by writing about AJAX is easier than your sister on prom night. I suppose the other lesson is get linked to by Scoble.

Here's something that's both inspired by, and a commentary on, that post. It's a short list of the best viral marketing info I've come across online.

First, a quick rundown on what makes an idea viral by the guy who essentially invented the term, Seth Godin.

Second, Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl) has an excellent post on viral marketing from an SEO perspective(commonly referred to as linkbait).

Third, Graywolf has some good ideas on how to get Dugg even if you're (gasp!) not writing about AJAX.

From what I've heard, Digg traffic doesn't have much commercial value, since Digg users don't tend to buy anything, click on ads, or do anything else that might make you money. They arrive, read your stuff, and then move on (possibly knocking your site offline in the process if you weren't prepare for the influx of traffic). Tech-recipes breaks down what you should know about Digg traffic.

Finally, CopyBlogger has a great free PDF ebook on viral marketing with blogs.

With blogging, going viral doesn't necessarily mean big bucks. The financial benefit of going viral typically doesn't lie with selling to or otherwise monetizing the traffic itself, but rather with the increased exposure that might result in a large number of sites linking to you (especially bloggers).

That boost in incoming links can then nicely translate into your site ranking higher for those keywords that actually will bring in paying customers.

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Site With Delicious.com

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Site With Delicious.com

Social bookmarking sites like delicious.com are rapidly becoming important to search engine optimization, though for a slightly different reason than most people might suspect.

Links from sites like delicious.com aren't worth a whole lot from a search engine perspective, since they use the "noarchive,nofollow,noindex" robots meta tag at the top of the bookmarks pages.

However, these social bookmarking tools can be used to drive traffic to your site, if they're used correctly. The way to do that is to tag your pages with the keywords relevant to them. This especially can be used to increase the exposure of new blog posts.

Let's say you have a blog about ringtones. After making a blog post, post it to your delicious account and tag it with keywords like "ringtones", "cellphone", and "mobile."

A link and description will then show up on the following pages:

http://delicious.com/tag/ringtones
http://delicious.com/tag/cellphone
http://delicious.com/tag/mobile

Each of those pages has its own rss feed, which is usually subscribed to by bloggers and other people interested in tracking the latest about those keywords. That means you increase the chances that those people are going to see the link to your site, a certain number are going to click through, and, if your post or article is a good one, some of them will probably link to you from their own sites..

Also, a link to your post will show up on this page (but only for two minutes):

http://delicious.com/recent

and if enough people find your page interesting enough to tag with their own delicious.com accounts, then it could show up on this page:

http://delicious.com/popular/

Getting listed on the delicious.com "popular" page can potentially send you a huge amount of traffic, but getting there is not easy, since you have to be creating something that a large number of people will find tag-worthy.

As you can see, the link-building effect of a site like delicious.com is indirect.The links from delicious.com confer no ranking benefit in themselves, but they can be used to send traffic to your site, and if you have something good to offer, a certain number of the people coming to your site are going to link to you.

However, the traffic boost will be non-existent if the content is mediocre, and even good content will often be ignored if it doesn't catch on with a large group of people. While a site like delicious.com can be used to increase the exposure of your site, if you're going to be tagging your own pages, you should save it for those pages you find really exceptional. Otherwise, you're just increasing the clutter on the site, and boring pages are not likely to result in any increase in traffic or links.