Viral Marketing
Pillar #10 – Viral Marketing
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Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use
pre-existing social networks to increase brand awareness, through a self replicating
viral processes. Viral marketing is often known as word-of-mouth
marketing, in fact it’s any medium which your existing customers use that
enables a peer-to-peer recommendation to be made. Viral marketing means that
your customers do your marketing on your behalf. The process of encouraging
viral marketing to take place is to make it as easy as possible for your customers
to tell their friends about you – and to give them a reason to do so.

Pillar #10 covers what viral marketing is and how you can use it as part of your
overall internet marketing strategy. I would like to focus on two main viral
marketing opportunities. Firstly Social bookmarking – something that you can
easily build into your blog with ease and secondly Video marketing. By driving
people towards your videos on video sharing sites like YouTube you increase the
ranking of your videos on those sites by increasing your number of views. This
increased ranking of your video makes it more likely to be found on YouTube by
people who haven’t heard of you before. You then have an opportunity to drive
people back you your site after viewing your video.

An early example of effective Viral Marketing – Hotmail

One of the first examples of a super-successful viral marketing campaign came
back in the late 1990’s. Hotmail was just developing as a company and doing OK
– until they hit upon an idea. Why not automatically add a little bit of text at the
bottom of each email that people sent saying something like, “Would you like a
free email account too? Visit www.hotmail.com”

At the time (the late 1990’s) many people still paid for an email account. So, this
fact, combined with the “free email” message at the bottom of each mail
exploded Hotmail’s business. Hotmail’s message spread like a virus – hence viral
marketing. This one idea is probably the main reason why Hotmail became so
big so quickly. Hence, in my opinion, this one line of text is the reason that
Microsoft paid millions of dollars to buy Hotmail.

So, a simple email signature worked for Hotmail. But that’s not necessarily what
I’m recommending for you. Your viral marketing strategy does not necessarily
have to revolve around an e-mail signature. Remember that a viral marketing
campaign can be anything that encourages your users to pass on information
about you, your business or your business’ products to their friends. The
question is what’s the right viral marketing strategy for you?

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows anyone who views web pages the opportunity to
save a list of their favorite pages online, and at the same time, if they wish to do
so, to share these favorite web pages with their friends.
Two examples of social bookmarking tools / websites are StumbleUpon.com and
Delicious.com.

There are two main reasons why it’s a good idea to encourage your website
visitors to book your web pages online. Firstly, other users of these social
bookmarking services can see to most recently popular web pages that have been
bookmarked. This provides a way for other people to discover your web pages
on these social bookmarking sites. Secondly, search engines also like these social
bookmarking sites because t shows which web pages are popular with users at
any given moment in time. Therefore, if search engines crawl these social
bookmarking sites and find that lots of users are bookmarking your site, then
your site will be more likely to be ranked higher in search engines – social
bookmarking also helps with your search engine optimization.

Don’t think that social bookmarking is the same as traditional bookmarking
where people save their favorite websites on their internet browser software.
That way of saving bookmarks is just for their personal use as the information is
stored on their internet browser software on their computer. Search engines can
only crawl bookmarks that are stored online – so that’s the kind of bookmarking
that you want to encourage.

Social bookmarking and tags
Another great reason why social bookmarking is so good is the use of ‘tags’ with
each bookmark. A tag is a word or a phrase that a user associates with a web
page. Again using Freddie Faldo’s golf shop site as an example, people may
decide to save his home page on their bookmarks and add the 3 tags ‘golf’, ‘golf
clubs’ and ‘golf shop’ to the bookmark. This tag addition will make it easier for
them to find your website in their bookmarks in the future – it’s like listing the
web page in multiple categories. It’s a more modern, more user-friendly version
of storing web pages in folders.
Figure 10.1 – Delicious.com – a popular social bookmarking site

Browsing popular bookmarks on Delicious.com

Another reason why tags are great is that they help to educate search engines
about the subject matter on your website. i.e. if lots of different people are saving
your home page on a social bookmaking site using the tag ‘golf store’, then this
will give search engines more of a reason to rank your home page higher for the
keyword phrase ‘golf store’.

Delicious.com

Figure 10.1 shows the Delicious.com social bookmarking site homepage. This is
a great example of the kind of website I have been referring to.
But how do you encourage your website visitors to save your website pages?
Apart from producing great, valuable content that people will want to come back
to and regularly revisit in the future, the next thing that you should do is make it
easy for people to bookmark your web pages.

Figure 10.2 – AddThis.com
AddThis.com is easy to integrate into your website

AddThis.com
You may well have noticed on web pages – especially on blog posts that you are
occasionally invited to bookmark the page or share it with your friends. Websites
commonly link directly to the ‘add’ page on social bookmarking sites to increase
the chances that people will bookmark the page. One popular free service that
makes it easy to add this service to your website is AddThis.com (figure 10.2).
AddThis is a service that people may recognize when you add it to your website
– because it’s already very popular and on lots of other websites.
Once a user clicks on it for the first time, it gives you a list of the social
bookmarking service for them to select the one that they regularly use (figure
10.2). If it’s Delicious.com then once someone selects the Delicious icon in the
AddThis window, they’ll proceed to a window like figure 10.3.

Figure 10.3 – Adding a web page to Delicious.com bookmarks
Entering a bookmark’s URL, title and notes on Delicious.com
After you select your chosen bookmarking service through the AddThis service,
AddThis will remember your bookmarking service for next time. This reduces
the amount of clicks that it takes for someone to save your web page to their
bookmarks.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon (Figure 10.4) offers a similar service to Delicious.com.
StumbleUpon lets users ‘randomly find’ other people’s bookmarks by searching
the StumbleUpon website within certain categories. The service will then
recommend other websites that people have already tagged in a similar manner.
The more that you can get people to ‘stumble’ (bookmark) your web pages, the
more likely it will be that StumbleUpon will recommend your web pages.

Figure 10.4 – StumbleUpon.com

StumbleUpon lets users ‘stumble upon’ new, related web pages

Video Marketing
Thanks to every-increasing broadband capacity, online video is becoming more
and more the norm. At the time of writing around 10 of the top 100 websites in
the world are video-based. This means that ignoring video as a medium to drive
traffic towards your website could be a significant mistake.

I’d like to share with you a few of the top online video sharing sites, show you
how easy it is to create your own videos for these sites, share with you how to
include a ‘call to action’ within your video and recommend a great free service
that les you upload your video to many of these sites at the same time, tracking
your video views too.

Figure 10.5 – YouTube

YouTube – the most popular video sharing website by far

YouTube
YouTube is the granddaddy of all online video sharing sites. In fact, it was 50
percent more popular than all other video sites combined, according to Hitwise
in June 2007. But even though YouTube is still miles ahead of other video
sharing sites in terms of visitor numbers at the moment, as a content producer it
would be folly just to rely on YouTube as a marketing medium. I’d advise on
distributing your videos to at least 10 video sharing sites.

How to make your videos more popular on YouTube

1) YouTube is one of the websites which will reprint your URL as a live link
if you include ‘http://’ in front of it. If you include this link in the
description of your video you will get a live link back to your website,
meaning that people will be much more likely to visit your website after
viewing your video. Although it’s a ‘nofollow’ link, it will still increase
your website visitor numbers.

2) Include your keyword phrase in your video title and your video
description. i.e. Including ‘internet marketing’ within the video title and
description made YouTube much more likely to rank it more highly in
searches for that keyword phrase.

3) Drive visitors to your newly published video and ask them to help you by
rating the video, adding the video as one of their favorites and adding a
comment to the video. All these measures are indicators to YouTube of
your video’s popularity. And if your video quickly becomes popular then
YouTube are much more likely to rank it highly themselves.

Once of the best ways of driving visitors to your video is to have your own email
list of appreciative subscribers. If you regularly over-deliver, you’ll find that
members of your list are much more likely to be willing to help you when you
ask a favor from them. This is just one of the reasons why it’s an extremely
valuable thing for your business to build up a list of subscribers – even although
you don’t have an email marketing strategy at the moment.

Other Video Sites

As mentioned already, there are other popular video sites available apart from
YouTube – get your videos in as many places as possible! So which sites apart
from YouTube should you be using to host your videos?
Yahoo! Video

Figure 10.6 – Yahoo! Video
http://video.yahoo.com/
Yahoo! Video originally began as a search engine during 2005. It combined
traditional search engine techniques to crawl other websites to look for videos on
other sites together with a web 2.0 facility that allows users to upload, share, tag
and host their own videos on Yahoo!

However, as part of a recent upgrade, Yahoo is indexing more video from
several new media sources, including CBS News, MTV, the Discovery Channel
and The Food Network which the users of Yahoo! can see embedded within the
Yahoo! video player.

MySpace Video

Figure 10.7 – MySpace Video
http://vids.myspace.com/

In early 2007, MySpace introduced MySpaceTV. Since launch it has been
rebranded to MySpace Video. (Figure 10.7)

MySpace Video works in the same way as most of the other video sharing sites.
However, because it’s part of the MySpace network, you need a MySpace
account to upload videos.

However, this also means that if you are already an active MySpace user, when
you up load videos to the MySpace Videos service, you can share these videos
with your existing MySpace contacts.

Metacafe

Figure 10.8 – Metacafe
http://www.metacafe.com/

Metacafe (Figure 10.8) is another similar online video sharing service. However,
it does have a couple of policies that differentiate it:

•Using its unique ‘VideoRank’ system, Metacafe attempts to gauge viewer
reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its
viewers.

•Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has
exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and Videorank score via its
Producer Rewards Program.

Any video that is viewed a minimum of 20,000 times, and has achieved a Videorank
rating of 3.00 or higher (and does not violate any copyrights or other Metacafe
community standards) is awarded $5 for every 1,000 views.

Revver

Figure 10.9 – Revver
http://revver.com/

Revver (Figure 10.9) is another popular video sharing website that hosts user generated content. It attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and
shares all ad revenue 50/50 with the creators. Revver includes adverts on all its
videos, whether you like it or not which may be a problem for you depending on
what your business offers.

Each video is automatically made available in both Flash and QuickTime formats
and you are given the HTML code to embed either format along with the ability
to add your own branding or logo into the Flash player interface.

Uploading to Revver is easy and it provides a progress bar to show your upload
status. They review all videos before making them live and this process can take
up to 24 hours.

DailyMotion

Figure 10.10 – DailyMotion

http://www.dailymotion.com/
DailyMotion (Figure 10.10) is a French-based video website which was founded
in 2005. The videos that it features on its site are often of good quality in
comparison to many other video sites.

As of April 2009 DailyMotion was ranked by Alexa Rank as being the 67th most
popular website in the world.

Blip TV

Figure 10.11 Blip TV
http://blip.tv/
Blip.tv (Figure 10.11) is a video sharing site which features videos that tend to be
more professional in quality rather than simple clips. On Blip.tv the videos are
like mini TV series and often very entertaining. You can search for your favorite
episodes by category, use the search box or search by popular tags. You can also
become a subscriber to your favorite shows so you do not miss an episode.
If you like to produce videos, you can create your own show and advertise it to
others through a trailer or you can participate as a critic and rate the shows.
Blip.tv also offers advertising schemes with profit being split 50/50 between you
and them. You can also submit your videos to iTunes through Blip.tv, creating a
video podcast.

B rightcove
Figure 10.12 Brightcove
http://www.brightcove.com/

Brightcove (Figure 10.12) was originally a company who helped create video
content on websites such as the New York Times and MTV but they’ve recently
launched a video service with the motto ‘Share your videos in style’.
Every publisher who creates a Brightcove account is assigned a channel, their
own page on Brightcove.tv.

Publishers can customize their channel through the Brightcove Console. Simple
details like the channel’s name, logo, and description can be updated in the user’s
profile. The content of a channel is defined by changing the settings of individual
titles, lineups, and players to allow distribution and promotion on Brightcove.
tv.

Brightcove.tv – along with syndication, search engine indexing and a user’s own
site – serves as a distribution and promotion tool for video publishers.

Veoh
Figure 10.13 Veoh
http://www.veoh.com/

Veoh (Figure 10.13) lets you upload a range of video formats with no limits on
file size, resolution, or length. If your video is over 45 minutes a viewer will
need to download it to watch the full video.

To download and watch videos on your computer rather than watch videos online,
users must use the VeohTV desktop application. VeohTV is also what you
need to be using to upload videos over 100MB. You can also upload videos directly
from a URL or if you have a Veoh Pro account you can upload via an RSS
feed.

A Veoh Pro account is free. However, it requires a credit card account number to
confirm your address. When that is given, you can then take advantage of advertising programs where you can share revenue 50/50 and sell or rent video
downloads through Veoh’s e-commerce system (you keep 70 percent of the sale
price). As a Veoh Pro account holder, your uploaded video will be transcoded
into Flash 8 video. Flash 8 is superior to the Flash 7 format used for converting
video submitted by basic Veoh users.

Imeem
Figure 10.14 – Imeem
http://www.imeem.com/
Imeem (Figure 10.14) is a video sharing service where users interact with each
other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including
blogs, photos, audio and videos.

Launched in October 2004, the service has a social network structure as well as a
content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of YouTube. It works on an
advertising-based business model and is free to use.

Imeem provides a broader range of privacy options and incorporates peer-topeer
technology for better security and unlimited bandwidth.

Editing video
For PC users you probably already have a piece of software installed on your
computer – Windows Movie Maker (Figure 10.15). This allows you to edit and
produce your own video. If you have a Mac the alternative is Final Cut Studio
and if you are using Linux then there are plenty of open source programs that
you can simply download for free – try searching Download.com.
All these video editing software will allow you to import your own videos into
the program, add titles, endings or music to it. They will also allow you to create
videos out of still photos as well.

Figure 10.15 – Windows Movie Maker
Windows Media Player – the free video editing software from Microsoft
If you have a number of still photos that you want to create a movie with, you
can import the photos into your movie editing software and then drag the photos
into your video timeline. Then you can then choose video transitions from your
software to include in-between your photos. Transitions mean that each new
photo can appear either from the side, up or down or in fact in one of any
manner of options pre-installed in your video editing software. You can also
apply effects to your individual photos such as slowly zooming in or out.

When you create a sequence of photos and ass multiple effects, you will be
surprised at how quickly your photos start to become a video – and how quickly
and easy the process is. After you’re satisfied with your video sequence it’s also
easy to add beginning titles and end credits should you wish to do so. It’s also
easy to import audio.

Figure 10.16 – PodsafeAudio.com
PodsafeAudio.com is a great place to find royalty-free backing music
Adding audio to your video

Bearing in mind copyright restrictions, you should be careful about the audio
you use with your video. However, there is a website called PodsafeAudio.com
(figure 10.16) that download and use any of the audio tracks on the website – as
long as if you credit the artist.

Simply mention the artist name and song title at the end of your video clip to use
the audio legally. There are lots of great audio tracks on PodsafeAudio.com
including some great tracks from unsigned, independent new artists. Simply
download the audio that you wish to use in MP3 format to be able to use it as a
backing track for your video.

Including a ‘call-to-action’ in your videos
It’s important to include a ‘call-to-action’ in your video – a call-to-action is
simply asking the viewer to do something after they have viewed your video.
This must be measurable, and of potential benefit to your business.

I’d certainly recommend including an easy-to-remember domain name as a
subheading throughout your video in additional to a clip at the end of your
video telling the viewer why they should visit that domain.

However, if you find that video marketing is an important part of your overall
marketing mix I’d say that it’s important to have a unique URL within your
video i.e. a URL, domain name that is not mentioned anywhere on your website,
or anywhere else. That way, when people visit that website address you know
that it can only be your videos which are responsible for driving those visitors.
For example, your video could be an introduction to a subject matter and for
more information they can visit your website address to watch more videos or
perhaps download a free report. Just remember to make the first free video
valuable and informative.

A common successful strategy for the web pages that viewers are asked to visit
after viewing an informative video is to ask for someone’s name and email
address in exchange for more great content. Remember that if there is no link to
this website address from anywhere else online, you know that your visitors
have landed on your web page because they viewed one of your videos on a
video sharing site like YouTube. More information about tracking your visitors
will be covered in Pillar #11 – Visitor Analysis).

Saving your video in the optimum format
There are literally tens of different formats in which to save your video – and
then there are so many different sizes of videos. Until recently, 320×240 pixels
was the size that most video sharing sites preferred. This happens to be in the
traditional 4×3 television screen size. However, more recently video sites have
started to prefer videos in widescreen format which is 16×9 screen size. As
broadband speeds have increased, so have the number of pixels per video. 16×9
videos for online distribution are now most commonly uploaded in 640×360
pixels size. At the time of writing (April 2009) that’s the size which I’d
recommend.

When it comes to video format many file types will work just fine, but most
video sharing sites recommend MP4 format with h.264 codec. However, you’ll
probably find that WMV or AVI will work just fine. If you’re worried about your
video format compatibility it’ probably best to create a test YouTube video site
first-of-all to confirm what your video will look like when it’s published.

Figure 10.17 – TubeMogul.com

Helping you upload your videos to multiple sites and track video views

Uploading you video to video sharing sites

I’ve already introduced you to several video sites – and it’s worthwhile to upload
your video to several of those video sites and more. However, if you haven’t
done so already you’ll start to realize that uploading videos to video sharing sites
can take a great deal of time and resources.

Many internet connections upload files at much slower speeds that they
download files. This means that it could take you a day just to upload one ten minute
video to all the video sharing sites that you want your video to feature
on.

However, help is at hand. There’s a great free-to-use (for their basic service)
website called TubeMogul.com which will upload your video to several video
sites at the same time. All you have to do is upload your video to TubeMogul,
enter your usernames and passwords for the various video sharing sites and
TubeMogul will upload your videos to several sites on your behalf. This makes
the whole process a great deal easier and a lot less time consuming.

As a bonus TubeMogul will also track your video views on each of the sites,
meaning that you’ll be able to quickly and easily track your conversion rates for
your call-to-action.

Of course TubeMogul have a partially free service for a reason – they want you
to sign-up for a more comprehensive service that offers more. However, whether
you choose to upgrade or not, as it stands their free service is great.

Other video sites
Assuming that you decide not to upgrade to TubeMogul’s paid service, it’s
probably a good idea for you to manually upload your video to a few other
services. Viddler (http://www.viddler.com/) is another good general video
sharing site and 5Min (http://www.5min.com/) calls itself a one-stop shop for
instructional videos and DIY projects. For this reason, you may well find 5Min to
be a good site for uploading informative business videos.

You may also find that there are other video sharing sites that are aimed
specifically at your industry segment. For instance, I have also uploaded the 13
Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar videos to a video sharing site called IM
Broadcast (Internet Marketing Broadcast). You can see my 13 Pillars videos here:
http://www.imbroadcast.com/users/13pillars/videos/public.

So make sure that if you’re in sales recruitment like Jane Jobs then you search for
a video sharing site that specializes in sales advice. And if you own a golf shop
like Freddie Faldo then check to see if there’s a video sharing site that specializes
in golf videos.

Tweaking your conversions
After testing video marketing as a form of internet marketing you find that
you’re finding it to be a productive tool for your business, then it’s important to
try to improve your conversion rates. Test including different calls-to-action for
different videos.

For example, try including a free report as the incentive at the end of the video
instead of more videos. Perhaps you should also try to drive viewers towards
your main website. Remember that if you increase your conversion rates from
1% to 2% then that’s 100% more potential customers driven towards your
business from your video marketing efforts.

Pillar #10 – Viral Marketing Summary

•Viral marketing uses word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer communication to
advertise your website.

•Social bookmarking and video marketing are two examples of what you can
use to encourage viral marketing to take place.

•Aim to improve your number of returning visitors using social bookmarkingby
allowing people to quickly and easily make your site one of their favorites.
Try incorporating the AddThis.com tool within your blog.

•Remember to kick-start the popularity of your videos on video sharing sites
like YouTube by driving people on your email list to your videos and asking
them to add comments.

•Be efficient in the uploading of your videos – make sure that you use the free
TubeMogul uploading and tracking service. Don’t just upload your videos to
YouTube. There are lots of other sources of video viewers and some sites will
convert a lot better than YouTube even though they don’t necessarily bring as
many video views.

•Have you included a call-to-action in your videos? Do people know who has
uploaded the video and what else they could get from you if they visited your
website?