Nothing markets a site better, spreading it like wildfire, than
having a viral product, tools or processes. And nothing makes it more
capable of generating revenues than being sticky, because people only part with
their money after they are comfortable with a product, after they've seen
it a few times and interacted with it somehow.
The great news is that your site can start becoming sticky and viral right
away by employing a few simple tools.
Email To A Friend
On every page on your site, you should invite people to send that page to their
friends. Most people will look at something their friends send them. The number
one rule of making something viral is making it easy to spread. Make sure that
each page has a clear link or icon that invites the user to send the page to a
friend. When they click on it, they should be able to send simply by entering
their name and their friend's email address - keep it simple. The only other bit
of information you may want to ask them for is their friend's name for personalization
purposes. To add such functionality to your site, you will need to download a
free script. There are plenty to choose from. You can find one in the Webmasters
Specials CGI Scripts category at www.aboutwebmasters.com.
Free Products To Pass On
Offer a free version of your product, or something else free. Make sure that
it's useful, otherwise no one will really care about it. Ensure also that it's
very easy for users to pass on these free products to their friends. Something
you can quickly make is a screensaver and wallpaper, using software from www.download.com
and some decent images.
Forums, Chat, Community And Office Tools
Provide ways through which your site visitors can add content to your site
and communicate with each other. Have forums, chat, and possibly instant messaging.
One way to easily add this to your site is using www.everyone.net. Offer free
office tools such as calendars, file sharing, to-do lists, group tools, and more.
You can do so easily and for free by signing up with www.myevents.com.
Postcards
People love sending postcards. Blue Mountain Arts made history when it was
acquired for over 800 million dollars, yet all it did was allow people to send
electronic postcards to each other. The magic here is that if someone sends a
friend a card from your site, that friend will almost always want to pick it up,
and to do so they have to visit your site! That's a great way to get new users.
To start a free postcards service on your site, all you need is to buy a CGI script
that will do all the work for you. It's very easy. You can find one in the Webmasters
Specials CGI Scripts category at www.aboutwebmasters.com.
Newsletter
It's very important that you have a newsletter (or mailing list). Newsletters
work wonders for sites that use them well. Give an incentive and a reason for
someone to join your newsletter. People are not willing to just hand over their
email address with no idea what they will be getting in return. The newsletter
should always carry relevant, useful content, nut just advertising. As long as
it is useful, people will love it and pass it on to several friends. Again, remember
to actively ask them to pass it on. If you don't ask them to pass it on, even
if they are willing to do so, they may just forget or not even think about it.
To start a newsletter, all you need is a mailing list server. You can get a free
one from www.listbot.com or www.egroups.com,
or use a commercial one you pay for, such as www.sparklist.com.
Free Email
Be another Hotmail. Give away free email accounts. Every time someone sends
email from them, a small signature goes out to the recipient with your URL and
a short description, just like Hotmail. And whenever they check their email they
have to visit your site. You can quickly set up for free as an email provider
at www.everyone.net.
News And Articles
Your site should always have relevant and ever-new content. One free way of
achieving this is to sign up for iSyndicate's (www.isyndicate.com)
or Moreover's (www.moreover.com) services.
These push relevant news and articles to your site.
Link Away
Provide easy ways for other sites to link to you. Have a page that showcases
a variety of different banners and other links that webmasters can place on their
sites. Offer the HTML for each of those links to make it
easy for webmasters to copy and paste on their sites. Also offer an affiliate
program so you can reward the performance of webmasters who link to you. Do all
you can do to make it easy,
profitable and interesting for people to tell others about you.
Recommend This Site
Other than an email-this-page and an affiliate program, one more thing you
can do to get people to tell others about you is to add a recommend-this-site
button. Most people will never click on it unless there is something in it for
them, so offer them something free in exchange or a chance to win a big prize.
You can sign up free with Recommend-It (www.recommend-it.com).
They will give you a neat button that tells your users to recommend your site
in exchange for a chance to win $10,000 - and they supply the prize money!
These are some of the tools and principles that created and continue to
create businesses that thrive in the new economy. you can implement all of
them on your site in a day if you put your mind to it, and for very little money
(if any). The benefits will be immense if you do it right. More than
anything else, stickiness and a viral nature are the most important elements
of marketing online businesses, arguably even more than branding and
advertising.
