What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing can simply be broken down to word of mouth marketing online. Allowing others to share, and promote your business. And although the information on your blog should not be utilized to directly sell, you know have the opportunity to be in front of a much larger audience now that you offer information related to your market as well.

You don’t necessarily just want to add information and wait for it to gain importance and help promote your business. Social bookmarking sites allow blogs, for example, to share information. It is that simple. So your reviews, comparisons, articles etc. have the opportunity to build your blogs link popularity and be shared on huge existing networks. Build link popularity through the social media sites and capture readers attention with great articles all while increasing the importance and exposure of your business. Certainly seems like a solid foundation for success.

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Just like a website, there are going to be key factors that you want to make sure are implemented. Your blog should have search engine friendly page names, title tags etc. so as you are building your businesses information source you are doing so in a beneficial way.

The Concept is Simple

If there is relevant information related to your business, you should offer that information on your business blog. Categorize your information, continue to post on a regular basis and link from your articles utilizing pertinent / relevant keywords. One major reason for utilizing a blog to build link popularity is that you are able to obtain inbound links with specific keyword phrases related to your business. So not only do your control the information source, you are also able to link exact keywords that you want to help promote for your business from relevant information.

You have now accomplished creating an information source, where even people just performing research may now be able to find your business as well. Obvious the information you offer is going to directly relate to how successful your blog is but smart business owners will understand that continuing to build the blog as an information source is going to create a reason for the search engines to continue to index their blog, which links to their website, and more and more information and links are being built related to their business.

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More importantly business owners continually overlook the fact that so many online users are looking for information. And information related to their business, industry, or market. In order to gain constant importance you are going to want your site to continue to expand with information and other sites linking to yours. Why not use all of this potential information to help promote your business? Depending on your market there is an unlimited information for you to share with your customers and build credibility, or establish your business through information including reviews, comparisons, news, history, how-to’s etc.  In fact, if you have an online business that does not offer this information, another site, another source is taking your visitors and seeing more exposure.

In my opinion, there is not more effective way of marketing then by combining content and link popularity. In any market you are going to want to establish a network of information. You can decide what information is contained on your businesses main website and what information to post to your business blog. In building a business blog as a source of information you are accomplishing consistent importance through content, and constant link popularity.

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More important in so many ways is content. What you offer literally has to be placed within the content on a site. Content can be much more expansive and descriptive reaffirming or communicating what you offer. The main assumption in the idea of content is that by adding product names and descriptions your site has ‘content’. Content should actually be something that is unique. Your and every other site online potentially has the same product names / descriptions in your market.

With proper setup including categorization, page names, meta tags and content you will simply have a solid foundation creating relevance for your site and merely the proper implementation of a competitive e-commence website. At this point you are ready for avenues of online marketing.

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Let me first explain the concept of the general link exchange between websites:

Contact Established, Relevant websites, and request to exchange links.

This is a pretty straight forward explanation on how a link exchange happens. You contact the business or website owner, most likely sites that have good placement themselves within the search engines. These sites should be relevant so the information etc. relates / ties to your website. Through this contact you request to exchange links.

Wasted Time
Through this method you can certainly waste a lot of time contacting top listed web site’s within the search engines that would rather continue as they are then allow you to ‘feed’ off of their success. The more people learn about how accomplish links on their own the more weary and less interested they are.

Buying Links
Perhaps you decide to have another company create links for you. Certainly any affective strategy in building your sites visibility can be warranted. Not all business owners have time to accomplish each task and perhaps a company can do it more efficiently for a reasonable price. I think that you would agree, anything worth paying for you get to keep. How are they accomplishing this? Are you interlinked to irrelevant sites? Are you listed on some back page with nothing but links and limited importance to the search engines? You may even be setup on some link exchange page that does not technically attach to your web address or URL because it is actually a frameset etc. Even if you link to other businesses that are relevant, are you linking just to others starting out and the same sites as everyone else that signed up?

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You may not want to incorporate loads of information on a product website but adding information to a business blog with a solid structure and proper setup can certainly create a lot of inbound links.

Benefits
I recommend this method over any other link building strategy for the following reasons.

• You have control over the information
• You are seeing visibility infront of readers just looking for information that your website would have not otherwise captured
• You have multiple sites / avenues to capture traffic

This will also enable you to target specific topics, link specific keywords based on that topic and overall will have more of an impact on a link campaign. Most websites don’t necessarily have a lot of product changes or information added. They are not necessarily designed to organize information either so you are utilizing all of this information that relates to your products and becoming a source of information and credibility but you are using that information to link to your site from an external source.

Blogs
Blogs are the best way to accomplish this, because they are designed for articles and posts of information. They are efficient and easy to use, organize etc. But as I will mention the setup and implementation are key. Search engine friendly URLs, proper setup, information and linking are key to the success of a business blog.

Blogging is also revolutionizing how information is shared through social media / viral marketing including social bookmarking sites. Being able to share information in the most convenient way possible is always going to be a benefit for your business and customers.

Social Bookmarking Sites
This will certainly have to be covered in detail in a future post but any way that you can share information with a huge visitor base in going to generate solid results with proper implementation. Your blog and its information can be featured on social bookmarking sites, increasing your blogs visibility and creating inbound links for your business through huge networks. Social bookmarking sites are constantly having information added to them and can carry major clout with the search engines so your business becoming a part of this network is essential.

Bottom Line
One thing I always consider is that good sites through some exposure are going to build links on their own. The whole purpose of ‘link popularity’ is to decipher which sites are important because other web users and website owners want to link to you because of the information they found. Imagine offering all the best products and a huge source of information with all things related including industry news, articles, reviews, product comparisons etc. That certainly sounds like a recipe to generate people’s interest and links.

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Unless I have otherwise forgot a specific way of creating links most will fall under a one of the following methods:

• Link Exchange
  • Exchanging links means having to contact website owners and getting them to willingly add your site to their ‘recommended sites’ / links page and is mainly a waste of time.
• Directories /Shopping Malls
  • How do you justify weeding through the endless lists of other sites? But is it worth the link.
• Networking - Blogging
  • A great way to become a voice in the world of readers / potential customers interested in information related to your business, credibility anyone?
• Article submissions
  • I lump this together with many forms of submitting articles to be distributed including press releases and directory articles but what is the exposure of this for of promoting?
• Informational Sites
  • Creating an interlinking ‘network’ of sites related and controlled all by the business owner. Can you say recipe for success? With web 2.0 being talked about so much, don’t you think it is time for your business to upgrade how and who you are reaching?

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First you will want to research keywords related to your products if necessary. These will be the basis of your meta tags because what people are searching for related to your products you will want to reaffirm to help promote your websites relevance for those phrases. Simply put if it relates to your products, you will want to include it on the most relevant pages set of meta tags.

There are many different opinions about proper setup and character count. My goal is to give you the information as to how and why, you as a business owner can make an informed decision. First compose a general list of keywords for your website, the more categories / products the more potential keywords. Again you can use wordtracker to get an idea of what people are searching for, I use it strictly as a guideline though. Now create a hierarchy - if the whole site is about guitars, then you will most likely have guitars as the first keyword on your homepage keywords tag and somewhere in the title tag as well. However if you offer all kinds of musical instruments and have a specific category for guitars, your homepage is going to mainly promote musical instruments with the specific / most relevant page reaffirming guitars within the meta tags.

• Title
  • The title tag should include at least your most important keyword phrase, the general phrase for your whole site, but can be composed as a general statement including the name of the website as well. Keep in mind that the title tag is the most important meta tag and your I try and always set them up with my most important 2 to 3 keyword phrases especially for subcategories.
  • Generally the title can be around 90 characters, Google is said to index around 80 but other index more, so again a business decision.
  • • • • or

<title>Business Name and what I offer</title>

<title>Keyword phrase, Keyword phrase2, Keyword phrase3</title>

• Keywords
  • The keywords meta tag is designed strictly to be a list of keywords that are relevant to that specific page with your website. I suggest around 15 keyword phrases simply separated by commas and spaces.
• Description
  • The description tag is simply a one sentence summary of what the page offers that I generally utilize to also incorporate my top 2 to 3 keyword phrases for that page in order to continue with the idea of reaffirmation.

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Most of the wizardry behind owning and especially marketing an online business is simple formulas. Initially you will want to research a product line. I don’t care if you don’t care as long as you make money, the reality is that if you want to make this a success you are going to have to live and breathe this business for its duration. Find what you are passionate about first, through research you will be able to uncover a market with just a general idea of the type of products that interest you.

This is going to also give you an idea of your target market. Even online you can certainly market or target a specific audience through your site. Selecting the product line can be generally easy but what you should do next is gather information about that market. If everyone online is selling the same items in the same what, how are you going to find that niche that will allow you to reach buyers?

Where there is a will there is a way, so lets start by using wordtracker. This free tool will give you a relative idea of how much keywords related to your market are being searched for. This is important because you can target a market and setup your website to cater to a specific product line. Most businesses that sell major items from wakeboards to HD televisions also offer the accessories because there is money to be made even in these seemingly inexpensive products. These keywords related to the products that you sell will also be important in the setup of your web site’s meta tags, content, and structure.

Compare the searches to your competition. Who cares what you want to sell if you do not have the time or money to properly market your site. Chances are you will also discover more targeted keywords, specifically related to your products that have high searches and better competition.

Perhaps you have two product lines that you are trying to select from. Designer Handbags or RC cars for example, in comparing the competition, estimated time /money to invest. Those decent searches for specific types of RC products with lower competition is starting to look bitter sweet.

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