Ecommerce Online Marketing—Catch Eye Sight

Posted by arlene

The best kind of ecommerce marketing is the kind you don’t have to do yourself— especially if you’re a small business on the Web with a limited advertising budget. Let’s face it. Viral Marketing is like it sounds—call it word-of-mouth, spawning, self-propagation, or organic.

Viral marketing has been around forever. Spreading the word through word-of-mouth was the world’s first form of marketing. But the Internet has taken this organic form of marketing to new heights by making communications better and communities of people tighter—thus making word-of-mouth even more effective.

So, how do you spread the word of your Web store virally on the Net? Motivate your customers and visitors to do it. Here’s how.

Tell ‘em Sam sent you

Reward your steady visitors for bringing new visitors to your site. Create a special referral program that your steady visitors can sign up for. Have them invite their friends to visit and if they do, have them mention the referrer’s email address and the referrer earns something free from your site.

Got any good jokes lately?

I don’t know how many times I’ve forwarded jokes or scam and virus alerts I received in my email to friends and associates. So, create a funny newsletter or an email alert that someone would pass on to friends.

Take my site, please!

This is similar to “Got any good jokes lately,” but in this case you give away your best assets. Don’t just send out a notice about new content on your site—send out summaries by email and ask people to forward them on (with copyright and URL attached, of course). A variation on this is to let other sites reprint your content on their site, with appropriate credits and links to yours.

The challenge is to exercise some control over how your message is delivered and how others perceive it. But when you master this technique, your message and your site can spread as quickly as the common cold.

Finally, don’t expect a Viral Marketing program to pay off immediately. Like a real virus, viruses don’t become epidemics until they reach critical mass. Your virus must propagate through the host population until it reaches a certain threshold of visibility and scale.

Think of it this way. Suppose a real-world virus doubles every year. In the first few years it’s scarcely detectable. But within a few years after that it suddenly becomes an epidemic. You should understand that you’re playing the same game. Viral Marketing takes time. So be patient, be fruitful—and go out and multiply!

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