Exponential Growth. How To Grow A Website With Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing is a phrase which was first used in 1997 to describe the extraordinary growth of Hotmail which, by December of that year, when it was only 18 months old, had generated over 8 million members. It was quickly snapped up by Microsoft for $400 Million. In the time since then it has been attempted countless times. Some have succeeded (Skype, Google, YouTube - for example) but many have failed.
The term “Viral Marketing” was first used to explain the remarkable rate of growth experienced by Hotmail. It was coined by the financiers handling the deal for Microsoft.
Viral Marketing is what we used to call word-of-mouth marketing. Basically put, it is the means of spreading your customer base by using your customer base as your mouthpiece.
The wonder of good viral marketing is its simple and inexpensive. Sometimes even free. Hotmail’s deployment of viral marketing was done simply by placing a clickable line of text 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.
The most important characteristic of Hotmail’s success with viral marketing is the seamless ease with which its message was passed on. In their case, it was so compulsive that the service couldn’t be used without doing so. The question we should ask now is, how transferable is it to my own product or service?
There are numerous ways which have been used since to invigorate viral growth on the Internet. One of the most effective recently has been to use rebrandable (sometimes called ‘viral’) ebooks. A rebrandable ebook does more than a single pdf file can do.
Ebooks with a rebrandable feature in them give your readers the ability to place their own affiliate link for your product on every page of the ebook. When they do this, they will earn commission on any sales which are made by passing it on to someone else. Whatever emotional motivation they may have for your product is given financial motivation as well, therefore, to highten their encouragement to rebrand and pass-on.
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.
MVS has a unique combination of viral factors built into it which together enable anyone to build a list from scratch without needing costly traffic and hosting fees. It also adopts a 3-dimensional rebranding feature which means that every new member immediately has two ways to make money from each new member they generate.
Some people think MVS is an affiliate marketing script, like Butterfly Marketing, or Launch Formula Marketing. But they are mistaken. There is nothing else like MVS. Its purpose is to automated the traffic-gathering front-end of any website. It is a script which generates and accumulates more traffic by using the activity of its members. Basically, it multiplies whatever traffic it is fed to increase signups and sales.
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.
With MVS’s sidebar widget installed on the blog, visitors can then join the MVS site while obtaining their first ebook. Later, when they can rebrand it and use their in-built squeeze page to generate their own list, they get their own signups and build their own list.
Following a review of methods used for engineering exponential growth, MVS has impressed me the most with its productive mix of viral motivators, viral slip, viral seeds and viral triggers. When an MVS site is used well, all of these functions work closely to power viral list growth and automatic sales.

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