Squeeze Page Dossier Blog

Of all the most successful online businesses which have grown exponentially thanks to viral marketing, Hotmail was the first, in 1997. In the time since, many companies have tried and failed with viral marketing but the facts are clear: When it works, it is spectacular: Google, Youtube, Skype, for example. And when it doesn’t, it isn’t a risky, or expensive, exercise to undertake.

So what was the method Hotmail used to grow so fast? Well the financiers, who struck the deal with Microsoft, called it Viral Marketing. It was the first time the term had been coined.

Viral marketing is best described as the modern form of word-of-mouth marketing. It delivers exponential growth to online businesses by generating its signups and sales through its own existing customer base. As the base grows bigger the message spreads faster and exponential growth, at sometimes more than double-rate, is seen.

Hotmail’s use of viral marketing was simple. It had a clickable link appearing at the bottom of every email it sent for its customers:

“Sent from my free Hotmail account. Get your own free web-based email account Here!”

Every time someone used Hotmail’s email service to send an email, they were advertising the service at the same time. Looking back, when Hotmail was the only web-based email service, it was a no-brainer for people to sign up and get a free hotmail account. The advantages and convenience of it by far outweighed the process of obtaining an email address by normal means.

So how can Hotmail’s success be replicated with other Internet-based products? Perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from Hotmail is the ease of spreading their message. In this case, the free service couldn’t be used without doing so. However, I believe it is possible to transfer this method to other industries and products.

These days there are numerous means of encouraging viral growth online. One of the most successful has been with the use of rebrandable ebooks. These are sometimes called viral ebooks because, when transmitted from one person to the next, they do alot more than a single PDF file can on its own.

Rebrandable ebooks enable your readers to stamp their own affiliate links for your product within the pages of the ebook. By doing this, they are the ones who will earn commission on any sale their copies make so they are motivated to rebrand and pass-on, rebrand and pass-on etc.

This method of viral growth has been developed and systemised with MyViralSpiral (MVS). This is a membership site script which automates the whole process of growing a list with rebrandable ebooks. As a member of timsviralspiral.com, for example, one of the script creator’s own MVS sites, you can grow a list – and integrate it with Aweber, Get Response, 1ShoppingCart or Email Aces – while passing on rebrandable ebooks using the squeeze pages provided by the site.

It provides an ingenious method for anyone to grow a list from scratch without having to create their own website or pay costly fees for traffic and hosting. Plus, with 3-dimensional rebranding of affiliate links, it means there are two methods in which members can make money from each signup they get.

And yet MVS is often miss-understsood. Many people imagine it must be an affiliate marketing script, like Butterfly Marketing or Launch Formula Marketing. But the truth is, MVS is a script which automates the front-end and generates automatic flows of traffic from the activity of its members alone. Therefore, whatever traffic it is fed, it multiplies it.

Yet, clever as it sounds, people have had mixed results with MVS. Some appear to have had a disappointing level of activity from their members, while others have seen their lists grow very quickly because of such member activity.

The record – apparently – is 1,200 new members in five days.

It seems likely that a key component to success with this viral system comes from putting in place a constant flow of traffic. The best way of creating that is with a blog on the front end, which is regularly updated. That way it will continuously, and increasingly, draw targeted traffic from the search engines.

By using the signup box widget from the MVS site, whatever page the search engine visitors are taken to, a good percentage will sign up to the MVS site to obtain their first free ebook. Thereafter, they can collect more, rebrand them and build their own list by directing traffic to the squeeze pages the MVS site gives them to use.

After reviewing many methods which might be deployed for engineering exponential growth, MVS has stood out as the favourite. It contains an energetic mix of viral motivators, viral triggers, viral slip and viral seeds. Working in combination, these factors work startlingly well to invigorate viral list growth and sales on auto-pilot.