Mention the word “virus” on the Internet and you’ll most likely get people in a frenzy to update their antivirus software. But viral marketing is not dangerous to your computer or anyone else’s for that matter. Quite the contrary, it is the kind of frenzy you should seek to create: about your products or services. Viral marketing is a form of marketing where news about your products, services, or company are spread by word-of-mouth, very much like a virus. Believe me, this is one bug you’d like everyone to catch. As word of what you’re doing spreads like the flu, new customers naturally flock to your website to see what the hype is all about, thus boosting your chances of increasing profits.

Here are some great viral marketing strategies:

1) Offer Top Quality and Superior Customer Service
If viral marketing is about spreading the word, you have to give customers something to talk about, better yet, something to get excited about. Get satisfied customers to offer testimonials on your website to report on your fantastic product or top-notch customer service.

2) Write Insightful, Informative Articles
Write great articles about your niche market. Make them interesting and provide useful information. Don’t forget to use the right keywords. Finally post them on several article distribution sites. An interesting article will eventually end up all over the Web.

3) Allow People to Reprint Your Articles
Post your articles on your own website.  Include a resource box and the option to reprint at the bottom of each article. Encourage people to reprint your articles on their websites, in their e-zines, newsletters, magazines, or ebooks.

4) Offer Freebies
People are naturally drawn to free stuff. You can provide anything from a free consultation or trial to free screensavers, software, videos, or samples of your products.

5)  Allow Embedding
Allow users to easily embed your content on their own websites.

6) Allow Users to Recommend Your Site
Make it easy for visitors to bookmark and recommend your site by facilitating a link or “AddThis” button for social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube.

7) Allow Downloading
Provide users with a simple way to download content from your website, in a usable format (PDF catalogs, videos, pictures, and whitepapers).

.8) Participate in Forums or Discussion Boards
You should especially use those which use signatures, thus allowing you to leave yours along with an interesting, informative post.

9) Encourage Comments
Provide your users with the chance to voice their opinion and share it with others. But don’t forget to comment back. It’s a great way to get a dialogue going and keep the fire burning.

10) Email Signature
Create an email signature as a mini-advertisement of your company. It shouldn’t be too long, just good enough to peak people’s interest and refer them back to your website. Make sure you contact others in your niche frequently by email and compliment them on their website or services, offer some advice or an opinion, or just ask a question.

11) Offer a Specialized Link Directory
Create a customized link directory of your link exchange partners; a fantastic way to direct targeted traffic to your website.

12) Get Incoming Links
Ask other sites in your niche market to link to yours. Contact site owners who provide services that compliment your own. The more popular a site is, the more traffic will be sent to your own site.

13) Use RSS Feeds
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS Feeds are used to automatically distribute articles or content to blogs, website owners, and ezine publishers.

14) Set Up an Affiliate Program
In affiliate programs, you pay affiliate websites a commission to send you traffic, in other words, these sites have a financial incentive to link to yours and everyone wins. These affiliate websites post links to your website and are usually paid for each sale or lead they bring you.

15) Never restrict access
I you want news about what you do to spread like a virus, access to it has to be free. Do not require people to register or become members to access information. This will only discourage them.

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Out of all the tasks related to Search Engine Optimization, link building is probably the most important one. Do-Follow blogs are one of the most incredible opportunities to get links to your website, traffic, and boost your search engine rankings.

What is a Do-Follow Link?
Some websites assign a nofollow tag to some links. That is a message to the search engines saying “I don’t trust this link, don’t count it”. Most blogs use this tag to protect themselves from people posting spam comments all the time. If the links don’t count, spammers don’t waste their time there.

But not all blogs are “no-follow”, some are “do-follow”, which, as you can imagine, is the exact opposite.

How Can You Find DoFollow Blogs?
These are some of my favorite resources to find them:

Comment Hunt
Do Follow Blogs
Stephan Miller’s Website
Squidoo DoFollow List

And last, but not least, there is Fast Blog Finder, an amazing software that lets you find dofollow blogs and sort them by Page Rank.

The Kind of Blogs You Need to Find
Your goal here is to find 10-20 blogs that meet this criteria:

• Have dofollow links for comments (you can use the SEObook toolbar to highlight nofollow links)
• Have a Page Rank of 3 or more
• Have several comments for each post written (this indicates high readership)

How to Post Comments
99% of the blog comments are moderated. If you post a spam message, it will be removed. So don’t. Write something useful related to the post. The blog owner is giving you a link, so be kind enough to make a useful contribution to his blog.

Some blogs will allow you to put a keyword in the name field. This is great because that will be the link’s anchor text. This is any SEO’s dream: a link from a quality website with the perfect anchor text. Don’t always use the same anchor text; switch it up a bit to make the linking look more natural.

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Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. It lets you post up to 140 characters at a time. Some people post their status  every 5 minutes (“Waiting for the bus”, “On the bus”, “Walking home”) and  companies use Twitter to get the word  out about new products, blog posts,  and other random stuff. Companies from all over the world  have Twitter accounts and thousands of people following them. Some of these companies are Apple, Intel, H&R Block, and Zappos. Barrack Obama has over  8k followers!

To leverage the Twitter potential you need to have people following you. That is, people that want to be updated on what you are up to.

Step 1: Importing Contacts
When you sign up for Twitter you will have a chance to import contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, and your own address book. Do it.

Step 2: Complete Your Profile
Make sure all your profile is complete and include a link to your website. Add “http” at the beginning of it to make it clickable. Personalize the colors and the sidebar on your profile page. Use keywords in your profile so others can find you.

Step 3: Understand the Dynamics of Twitter
Twitter is not a marketing tool; it’s a social tool. That means:

• Don’t spam
• Follow other users
• Be active in the community (comment and post frequently)
• Post useful information
• Don’t post every 10 minutes
• Engage in conversations. Retweet (reply to other tweets) often
• Don’t promote yourself. Share cool stuff. To give your company exposure, do it the smart way. Direct your followers to a blog post with useful information and have that post invite users to take action. Don’t try to take people from Twitter to your checkout page directly.

Step 4: Build Your Audience
There are several things that you can do to build your audience:

• Put a link to “Follow Me on Twitter” in your email signature, forums signature, website, and maybe even your business cards
• Invite people to follow you on Twitter at the end of each blog post you create
• Find Twitter users that you really look up to and see who is following them. Follow these people. Once they see you are following them, they will follow you.
• See who is following your friends and follow them. They will follow you too.
• Use Twitter directories to find members who are likely to follow you. My favorites are Just Tweet It and Twellow.
• Use the search feature to find profiles that you want to follow. You can use Twitter’s RSS feed to be notified every time a tweet is made containing a certain keyword.

Step 5: Watch Your Following/Followers Ratio
Try to have a balance between people you follow and people that follow you. If 1,000 people follow you and you only follow 10 folks, you will be seen as selfish and snob. If 10 people follow you and you follow 1,000, you will be seen as a spammer.

Some tips that will help you keep both numbers balanced:

• Grow slow. Instead of adding 500 new friends in one day, add maybe 50 and wait for them to follow you. Then do another 50.
• Use a tool like Friend or Follow to see who is following you that you are not following and who you are following that is not following you. This tool is very useful to balance the number of following/followers.
• Avoid the “follow/no follow” tactic. Some people follow others so they follow them and then they stop following those folks. Avoid this practice if you don’t want to look like a spammer.

Step 6: Post Useful Tweets
Make it worthwhile to follow you. If you’ve found something that your audience might find useful, tweet it. You can use Twitter tools to automatically tweet your blog posts.

Share what you do but avoid “selling”. For example, if you are a web developer you can tweet “we just finished designing the website for ABC Widgets” but avoid something like “Custom Web Design from $899”.

Step 7: Learn from the Experts
Find 10-20 users with over 300 followers and see what they are doing right. Get ideas and implement them.
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Millions and millions of people visit YouTube every month. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube have more views than Oprah’s show. If you are not promoting your business on  YouTube yet, what are you waiting for?

I am about to reveal some of the coolest techniques to promote a video on YouTube. We’ve used them with clients from all over the world and most of them have seen thousands of new visitors as a result of these powerful tactics.

Anyway, here is the list:

Copy the Top Performers
Look for the three videos with more views in your category and get ideas from them. Copy their video title, tags, and descriptions. Don’t copy anything verbatim, change things up a little.

Create Your Own Channel
Create a channel and customize to feature your best videos. This alone will drastically boost your views.

Use the Bulletin Board
This is a great feature that lets you start a conversation around your own videos. But don’t limit yourself to your own bulletin boards; use others’ too.

Add Friends
People often forget that YouTube is a social network. Add friends to your list and engage with them.

Use Video Responses
Search for popular videos related to yours and post your video as a response to them. Leverage the views that other videos get.

Create Something Worth Spreading the Word About
If your video is boring, all these tactics won’t do much for you. The videos that work best on YouTube are either hilarious, controversial, unique, or very useful.

Complete Your Profile
YouTube allows you to fill out your profile; do it. And by all means include a link to your website here.

Link the Videos to Your Profile
You can link your videos to any page within YouTube. Set it up so when people click on your video they go to your profile. And from your profile they can click on the link to your website.

Create Playlists
Create a playlist of related videos. Include a lot of popular ones on a certain topic and, of course, your own video.

Join Some Groups and Start Your Own
Join some groups and post both text and video comments. You can also start your own group.

Encourage Viewers to Subscribe
End each video asking viewers to subscribe. Many people don’t know they can subscribe or they will forget unless you remind them to.

These are some of the techniques that we have used for our best clients. Most of them got over 500,000 views in less than one year. How would you like to get your business in front of half a million potential new clients?

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It boils down to this. Facebook is all the rage now, a social networking site that has grown so fast over the past year (over the past few months!) that it has beat MySpace as the world’s number one social network. There are currently about 130 million active users, a number that is still growing at a staggering rate. If you want to grow your business, the opportunities to promote yourself and your  products or services are extensive. It is definitely the kind of marketing tool you should have under your belt. However, like similar social networking sites, it takes time and effort to master all of the features, applications, and marketing possibilities that Facebook offers.

Here are some very useful tips that will help you exploit the potential Facebook offers to reach new customers, promote your business, and drive traffic to your website.

Put Together a Killer Profile Page
Create a profile page that will look attractive to your customers or business contacts. It doesn’t necessarily have to be professionally designed, but simple and effective. You should provide enough information to peak the interest of your target market and your profile page should be created with this goal in mind.

Add Your Business Contacts
Many business owners, professionals, and entrepreneurs already have a Facebook account. Invite your business contacts and customers to add you as their “friend” and invite those who do not have an account yet to get their own. This way, you can build a Facebook community around your business.

Start a Group
Another great way to create a Facebook network around your company. Use the site’s Groups feature to network with your business contacts. This feature also allows you to reach your target market as you join existing groups or create one just for your business.

Buy Ad Space
This requires a small investment, but it is still a lot more affordable than traditional advertising methods. Facebook provides you with the tools to create your ad and target it to a specific age group, gender, and location. It even gives you the choice to pay per click (CPC) or impression (CPM). Finally, you have the ability to track your ad’s performance.

Post in Facebook Marketplace
You can promote and sell your products in the Facebook Marketplace for free.

Promote Your Blog
If you have a personal company or business blog, you can easily import it into your Facebook notes. Each of your blog postings will then appear in your news feed and that of your contacts. A fantastic way to keep your business contacts up to date with your blog.

Advertise an Event
Facebook has developed a free application called Facebook Events, which allows you to promote meetings, conferences, marketing event you may be hosting, product launches, and your company’s achievements.
Now you have some great tools to get started. As you get used to Facebook, explore all of its applications, add-ons, and possibilities; exploit its potential to the fullest and take your business to the next level. Some of our clients get about 1,000 visitors from Facebook every month using these techniques and you can achieve the same results.

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Although Google and Yahoo claim that managing Pay per Click campaign is easy, we strongly disagree. Sure, opening an account, choosing some keywords, and setting up a budget is a piece of cake. But making more money than the campaign is costing you is a real challenge.

This article will provide you with a great insight on some advanced techniques that we use for our own clients. Three out of five people that start a Pay per Click campaign lose money and every single one of our clients makes money; so we must be doing something right. Pay attention and get ready for the most useful article you will ever read on PPC campaign management.

Concentrate on the Segments of the Market that You Can Serve
Make sure that you are very specific about how you can solve a need. For example, one of our clients is an English school in Denver. They offer accent reduction courses for foreign executives that want to sound more American. When they were managing their own campaign they were losing a lot of money going after the keyword “accent reduction”. The reason was that people wanted to get rid of their accents in a lot of different ways (cassettes, CDs, computer software, teleseminars, and one-on-one phone consultations) but our client offers classes on the subject. We did three things about it: we started using keywords like “accent reduction class” instead of just “accent reduction”, we changed the ad to something like “Accent Reduction Class in Denver, CO”, and we used negative keywords (software, phone, book, CD, cassette, etc.) to filter out unqualified prospects.

Create a Landing Page for Each of Your Top Keywords
Figure out what keywords get you most of the traffic. If you have 1,000 keywords in your campaign, chances are that 10 of them are getting 90% of the traffic. Create a landing page for each one of them. Driving all your PPC traffic to your home page is probably the most common mistakes that people make.

Optimize Your Campaign for CR (Conversion Rate), not CTR (Click-Through Rate)
CTR is the number of times your ad is clicked for every 100 times it is displayed. The CR is the number of visitors that complete a goal on your website (place an order, download your whitepaper, sign up for your newsletter, or whatever you expect them to do.) CTR is a very important metric for two reasons: Google will display your ad in a higher position if your CTR is high and a high CTR also means that you are getting more traffic. The problem with taking CTR as your main metric is that people might visit your website and not convert, which means that you are wasting a lot of money attracting them. Google Analytics allows you to set up goals and see the conversion rate and ROI for each of your keywords. If a keyword is converting really well, try increasing its bid; if it’s converting poorly, get rid of it.

Use Long-Tail Keywords
A long-tail keyword is the opposite of a general keyword. For example, “cars” is a broad keyword and “2002 Honda Accord” is a long-tail keyword. A specific term doesn’t have as many searches as broad terms but it will cost you a lot less and will bring you much more qualified prospects. Someone searching for “cars” is not very likely to become a paying customer any time soon. But someone searching for “buy 2002 Honda Accord in Chicago” is.

Use Locations, Brands, and Models
Let’s go back to the cars example. Bidding for the term “cars” will cost you a lot and bring you a great percentage of unqualified visitors. So why not break down the market based on the areas you serve, brands, and models you offer? For example: Honda Accord Chicago, Honda Accord New York, Honda Civic Chicago, Ford Mustang Austin, and so on.

Use Negative Keywords
Some negative keywords are obvious. If you offer high-end design services services you probably need these negative keywords: free, cheap, affordable, and low cost. But sometimes you might be missing some less common negative keywords. Set up your Analytics with advanced filters to find out the real search terms that people are using. This way you will find out that your ad is showing for search terms like “web design book”, “professional web design in Miami” (and you are located in Utah), or “how to learn web design”.

Use DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion)
This is by far the best way to boost CTRs. DKI is a technique that allows you to insert the keyword that the person searched for in the headline of the ad. Ads with the keyword in the headline are highlighted by Google and get a lot more clicks than ads without it. This is how you do it in Google AdWords: {KeyWord:Default Keyword}, where “Default Keyword” is the headline that should be shown in case that the search string is over 25 characters long.

Put the Benefits in the First Line and the Features in the Second
Tell people how they can benefit from what you offer. Instead of:

Online Marketing Agency
Social Media , Search Engine Optimization,
Pay per Click, and Conversion Boosting.
www.Website.com

try this:

Online Marketing Agency
Get 500 Qualified Visits per Day.
Customized Plan. Results Guaranteed.
www.Website.com

The first ad is focused on what the company does while the second ad focuses on what they can do FOR YOU.

Split-Test Ads
Always have two ads competing with each other. After both have gotten 30+ clicks, pick up the winner and write a new ad to try to beat it. Don’t settle for a good ad, it can always be better. Many times changing one single word can boost the CTR by more than 50%. Make sure you only test one thing at a time. If you test two things at once, you won’t be able to tell which one caused the difference in the CTR. Set up your account so your ads show evenly and never let Google pick your winner ad.

Explore Other Options
Google AdWords is great but it is not the only option. Try Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, and Ask ASL.

Use Coupon Codes
When you open a new account, all the PPC services offer you free money to get started. It can be anywhere from $25 to $100 in free clicks. I won’t post any coupon code here because it will expire as soon as everybody starts using it, but do your homework; search for something like “AdWords coupon code” and you will find tons of links.

Avoid the #1 Spot
The #1 spot is the one with the most clicks but also with the lowest conversion rate. People often click without reading the ad first and that will cost you money. Place your ad between positions 2 and 5 to optimize your conversion rate.

Include Buying Words
Words like “buy iPod Touch”, “purchase iPod Touch”, “order iPod Touch”, “iPod Touch store”, and “buy iPod Touch online” have less searches than “iPod Touch” but people searching for them are a lot more likely to buy the item.

Geo-Target Your Ads
Pay per Click providers let you choose where you want your ad to be displayed. So if you only serve the Los Angeles area, make sure that your ad is not showing for the rest of the world.

Bid on Your Competitors Names and Products
Bidding on your competitors’ names and products can be a very effective way to get qualified clicks. Leverage all their branding efforts and write a creative ad that shows why you are a better option.

Write Great Ads
Some ads are up to 10 times more effective than others. These are some of the techniques that work best: use powerful words (guaranteed, killer, proven, quick, fast, easy), ask questions that the readers can identify with (“Do You Want to Speak English Like an American?”, “Are You Tired of Repeating Yourself?”), and keep your copy simple and straight to the point.

Avoid Salesy Ads
Don’t use all caps or exclamation marks and make your copy believable. Ads like “LEARN HOW I LOST 100 POUNDS IN 4 DAYS. CLICK HERE NOW!!!!” are a huge “no, no”.

Use Your Ads to Pre-Qualify Prospects
Because you are paying for each click you get, you want to make sure that you only get qualified traffic. If your services are more expensive than the average, include the price in the ad. If you only serve your city, include that in the ad too. “Web Design in Austin, TX – Make Your Company Stand Out. – Custom Designs Starting at $4,000.” is a good example.

Go After Common Misspellings
Misspellings are great because almost nobody bids on them and therefore they are very inexpensive. You will be surprised at how many people misspell words.

Don’t Start a Campaign Bidding Too Low
If your bids are too low, your ad will show at the bottom of the page (if it shows at all) and you will create a very poor CTR history, which will cost you more in the long term because a high CTR lets you get high positions with a lower bid. It is always better to start bidding high and then decrease the bids if necessary and not the other way around.

Structure Your Campaigns Right
Don’t just throw all your keywords in one ad group. Divide them into different campaigns and ad groups so it’s easier to optimize the campaign later. If a keyword is getting a lot of traffic, give it its own ad group. Remember that 90% of your traffic will most likely come from a handful of keywords so watch that elite group very closely.

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