Viral marketing?

[Brett_Tabke]

What types of viral marketing actually work? Do things like "email this page to a friend" stuff really work, or do they make a site look cheap? Any others?

[Woz]

Something FREE seems to work from all accounts. eg., "refer this site to a friend a receive a free report on ..."

People always like something free...

Onya
Woz

[Brett_Tabke]

>leaving yourself open to accusations of spam

What I do that seems to work, is tag the email with the senders IP and Hostname if you have it.

[robrob]

Viral marketing for Brett's site? My thought is that since a lot of your traffic is from webmasters, things that a webmaster could cut and past into their own site might be effective marketing (would this be considered viral? I guess if these things were freely reproducable you might call it viral). I'm thinking of web page widgets and components or maybe even written content of some kind, with a link back to your site. If these became popular they would be seen by all sorts of people.

[Marcia]

>written content of some kind, with a link back to your site

rob, are you referring to articles that can be put on people's sites with prior permission and credit, or "syndicated content" like short newsletters?

[robrob]

The former, although it could be just about anything another webmaster could use on his/her site.

[lak12]

I agree with sugarkane. I have been accused of being spammer for my "e-mail a friend" form on the site.
Now I do not allow people edit the text of the mail and in a new version I use
print "Location: mailto:e-mail_address?Subject=your_friend&BODY=$my_url"; [Perl]
It opens new letter in e-mail client and message will be authentic with no headers from my site and user can pretty much use it with any browser and e-mail client.
I have about 11% of visitors coming from hotmail/yahoo etc. mail reading servers... not too many of them AOL like users but many are new to the Net...
Cheers.
Mark

[tedster]

The client site I'm using a "Tell a Friend" script on only gets a handful of uses each week, but boy do we get conversions from the referrals! Over the last three months, over 50% of the "tell a friends" have made a purchase.

Apparently, there's nothing like getting a recommendation from a friend. This client recently ran a very successful sale, where clicking a button on a special page gave a 20% discount across the site. We mailed the URL for the discount page to our house list, and encouraged them to share it with "their closest friends". Tripled traffic over the previous sale and multiplied sales by 5.

Oh yes, the site's customers are almost exclusively female. That may be a big factor in the success.

[Brett_Tabke]

We are running about 250 uses a week of "e a friend" here. There have been some wild gyrations of it's usage due to hot topics that ramped up it's utility. Last week, we had a single thread that did 92 uses of email a friend. Of the weekly uses, my best guess is that about 225 click back. It is difficult to track the click backs because I'm not coding them it out of privacy concerns. We also had a thread a few weeks back that turned seriously viral in nature with friend after friend using it (350 uses) - the ol logs were riddled with yahoo/hotmail/freebie mail referrals.

I'm glad I took the time to do it.

[FreeBee]

A year since implementing, it looks like there’s been very little change in the proportion of visitors who actually click the “Tell a friend” input but the number of number of visitors who submit has doubled in the last 8 months.

We’ve seen no significant change in user demographics or made any mods to the form layout since October. Perhaps there’s a wider acceptance of “Tell a friend” prompts now?

Still, less than 1% of users actually use it and normal mail referrals are greater than the script generates.

>>The power of suggestion seems to be at work

Either way we’re getting low volume but highly qualified traffic – tacky or not, it stays!

[Eric_Jarvis]

thanks guys...this thread has given me the basis of a punning clan

what is the other thing that people email to each other apart from cute attachments?

I'll leave it at that because I'm going to need board level approval to try this and I don't want too many of you doing it before I do

[Halfloaf]

I have had good results from ICQ send a URL option using fun stuff joke etc.
I am now working on an ICQ chat BOT that can either be accessed through random chat option on ICQ or people can forward the bots ICQ number to friends.
We had test bot before and for fun called it 'Sally Slapper' and put in juicy profile and tweeked personality to be flirty and a bit Sarcastic. The response was incredible, after 30 mins had over 200 contacts and had to turn off logfiles after 1 day.
Even though most users were from random chat which is not strictly viral, once Sally's ICQ no was passed out the viral aspect was very strong.

ps some logfiles were scary and could be worth a bit :)