The Silent Avatar Speaks

Give me $500. Come on! Give me $500!!! 

What?  You’re not going to just give me your money?

Why Not!?

See, when you ask someone to do something for you, unless they have some motivation to do so, they just won’t do it. No motivation.

So today I want to focus on motivating your current subscribers to grow your list (aka viral marketing).

Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something found to be informative, entertaining or amazing. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behaviour. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilise. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialise this marketing scheme.
Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behaviour. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an e-report, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

Viral marketing is wonderful, but “True Viral Systems” are quite rare.

A true viral system is one with a “Spawn Rate” of x>1 Spawn Rate: The Rate at Which Your Viral System Grows – That is, for every one person who enters the viral system, they will, on average, result X number additional people spreading the word as well.
                        
If your spawn rate is greater than 1, over time you have something that grows and grows perpetually.

  Every viral system will die at some point even if they are truly viral, however your system does not have to be truly viral for you to benefit.  If you have a spawn rate of X < 1 you will still get growth – and growth, when you’re talking about an email list, *is* exactly what you want to achieve.

Ah, this is the *theory* of viral marketing.  It sounds wonderful doesn’t it?

The problem is, getting the actual result is the problem.
Here’s where the real value of what I have to tell you surfaces.

So just how do you increase the Spawn Rate of your viral system?, or put in layman’s terms, how do you get people to spread your marketing message for you?

The Golden Rule of Viral Marketing:
“If there is no motivation, there is no viral  growth.”          

You weren’t motivated to give me $500 were you?  Unconsciously you were looking for the “What’s In It For Me” answer.

And if you weren’t offered a reason to give me $500, or you couldn’t find one then you simply won’t do it. Put simply, there has to be motivation.

Whoa! I can hear the naysayer loud and clear…

 “But what about if I just wanted to give for no real reason at all?”.

Then I say your motivation is to please the asker, or you want to avoid the pain you will  experience when you say  “No”.           

So in order to motive people to do something for you, you want to motivate them by giving a compelling reason to do so.

The classic way to motivate people to spread the word is to offer them an incentive: “Pass this on and we’ll give you ____” (fill in the ____ with your creativity).            

Motivating doesn’t need to be overt as sometimes people are motivated to pass things on for more subtle reasons. Ever noticed how many jokes get passed on from one email address to another? The reason they get passed on is you generally found them funny and want to share the humour with a friend.

Knowing the value of viral marketing, a number of software applications have been spawned to assist your viral marketing efforts.

There was plenty of hype around Mike Filsaime’s Viral Friend Generator when it was launched and I recommend as the best viral marketing tool to use for your website.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell-a-friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of  a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

 With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

 Tell A Friend Script Availability

 A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.

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