by Blaz Banic

What would you call 731 new subscribers in a month and slowly falling, after having started with just 100? A great month? Fabulous outcome?

Would it be fair to say that you’d be a bit intrigued if I told you that this actually sucks?

What does that mean? The above figures mean that the site is not correctly utilizing an extremely important component of marketing — word of mouth marketing, or viral marketing.

Let’s assume that the site stops using other types of advertising. With that rate, it would get less than 20 new members the next month and almost no new members the next! The site would completely stop growing and would have to resume with paid advertising.

 

Now let’s take the first sentence of this article and put it in perspective. If the site would have taken just a few small steps, it could have had 3512 new subscribers the next month — after 30 days that’s 135 new members every day and growing!

You see now why I mentioned that the first result “sucked”.

So, what is there for a webmaster to do in order to take full advantage of the viral marketing techniques?

The basic principle of viral marketing is to get people talking. This could also be done in a manner that they’re not consciously aware of or they know, but do it anyway (example is Hotmail –whenever somebody sends an email, a short note gets attached to the message that invites the other person to join Hotmail and get a free email account).

What is the thing that makes people talk? How does one “make them”. The answer is very simple… The thing must be something people would want to talk about. In other words, the thing has to be news worthy.

The most obvious thing to do is to create an extremely high-quality product for a very fair price. This could also be in a form of really quality information for free or whatever.

But to make a site a real success, there has to be another ingredient involved. People have to be very motivated and eager to pass on the information about a web site. And this is where an affiliate program comes in.

Having an affiliate program for your site is one of the fastest ways to success, provided that you utilize it correctly. An affiliate program can make your site grow faster than almost anything else (if you don’t have millions for advertising).

It’s the ultimate viral traffic machine and if you haven’t yet taken advantage of it, you really should. There are many places out there where you can get great information on making your affiliate program work and I suggest you get it and implement what you learn in your business.

You can get more information by checking out this author’s web site and resources he recommends.

About the Author

Blaz has been marketing online since 2004. He’s made up to $408 a day and now shares his ideas on his blog on Internet marketing