How to market your website with viral marketing

If you’re designing a site from scratch and want it generate traffic, the best way to do is to employ viral marketing techniques. Viral Marketing is using techniques that voluntarily turn your customers into salespeople for your product - simply by using it and endorsing it. Here are some ideas to do it for your website.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• website

1. 
    
   Unusual isn't it?

   Try to make the content on your website unusual. Find the niche for your website, service, topic, or product, and then try to approach it from an unusual perspective, or a different direction then the other sites that you find online relating to your topic. Be controversial, be humorous, be different.

2. Make sure that your URL is a dot com. DO NOT USE .net, .org, .tv - or anything else other than a .com! It makes your URL easier to remember -plain and simple.

3. Now that you know to make your website a .com - Come up with a catchy URL. A really good URL is short, to the point, and memorable. Viral URL's are often very fun, off-the-wall, and colorful.

4. 
    
   Get Social

   Build your site around social interactivity. Include blog comments, forum postings, RSS feeds, DIGG links, YouTube videos, and other forms of visitor interactivity. These things are expected on a site today, and they also keep your visitors coming back.

5. 
    
   Add Video to your site

   I need to mention that if you can possibly find a way to incorporate a video into your site to either introduce yourself, your product, or your service in a fun or extremely informative way - DO IT, and post it on your site, YOUTUBE, and other social networking sites. Include a link to your site in the video, and if you can - make the video click-link back to your site. Think about that video where the kid re-enacts - "Star Wars" - you have seen it, and so have thousands of other people.

6. 
    
   Bookmark This

   I mentioned DIGG above, and this has become a really important method for people to bookmark sites and share them with their friends. The biggest component of viral marketing is allowing others to easily share your site. Make it easy for them to bookmark your site using bookmarking programs, Feedburner Feed Flares, and other tools that allow your site to be easily linked to and found. Find the mass bookmarking tool that works best for you, and use it.

7. 
    
   Weird Dog Image

   Do not keep your textually heavy. It is important in this day and age of search engine optimization to be very specific with your content and to include all of your keywords and subject matter, but images are also very important. Considering that books are very popular and sell extremely well - Magazine still have higher circulation and outsell books - images and text used together are your best bet to attract and keep your visitors interested in your content.

8. 
    
   Thanks - Respond to your visitors

   The easiest and sometimes hardest thing to do is to just respond to your site visitors. Write about their emails, post discussions on your blog, and share your insight and perspective publicly when you are given the opportunity. This reminds people that there is actually someone on the other end of the internet - taking an interest in them, and it helps to form a bond between you and your visitors. They’ll tell their friends about how cool it was that you responded, posted their email, displayed their image, or wrote back to them, and they will sent other people to visit your site.

[fluffator]

on 2/23/2009 Your first suggestions is a bit extreme. There are times when other gTLD's are acceptable. For instance if your website qualifies for a .org it is a good idea to go with it as it enhances credibility. When dealing with viral marketing you are attempting to tap into trust and sell them on you experience.

[writesister2]

on 1/19/2009 Thanks for the tips.