Viral Marketing Trends in 2008
Mar 28th, 2008 by admin
There is a number of ways to get around massive spendings on your media campaign. Big, rich corporations usually have a huge budget for all kinds of marketing campaigns, so let them be!
It is closer to the real world for small business guys. For 2008 link building opportunities remain mostly the same with some exceptions. Here are observations from our web analytics company.
It is still good to participate in various social networks. Unfortunately, some of them followed Google guidelines and combined every link with “no follow” attribute, which is not gonna help you. Most social networks jealously watch for any type of “commercial” text or other types of data in blog entries. So, beware small business guy, if they catch you, they will throw you out of the network without any mercy. Naturally, they want to get each and every subscriber for themselves and sell him all the stuff without anybody standing on their way.
It is still a good idea to find a way to prestigious sites like Washington Post and the like. The drawback is that you’ve got to be a really talented journalist with a highly interesting topic to offer them. As for the attempt to add your comments to high value media sources, well, it seems that editors watch people who add comments like hawks and clean everything on a regular basis.
Good link-baiting applications are still OK and might help your viral marketing campaign. If your apps are really interesting people can post a link from it on their sites and with each click, you will become more and more visible on the Internet. You will still need to constantly conduct your web analytics tests to see if this strategy is effective and brings you desired Internet traffic.
We would not suggest small business guys to get involved with PR companies. Honestly, there is nothing you or your courageous employees can’t do without spending thousands of dollars, paying for outsourcing PR. Just surf the net and pay 10 bucks here and 20 bucks there for participation in PR feeds. Personally, we think that this trend is on its way out and is not as powerful as it used to be. At least, this is what our web analysts observe. Let’s wait and see.
It seems that old search engine preferences for all those .edu, .gov and big non-profit .org sites are still out there. If the main theme of your site somehow is relevant for these sites, then you are in luck. All you have to do is to convince them to add your link on their sites. These powerful sites can drastically change to the better your marketing campaign.
Google Blog Search and other tool that appear swiftly like mushrooms after the rain can help you find influential blogs and bloggers. By using link baiting principles you can start some sort of discussion on these blogs, or find some controversy (but be extremely careful here). The popular blogs never have stale content, they are extremely dynamic and, thus, can bring hundreds of visitors to your site and/or add a lot of relevant links.
Of course, there is another way to try to improve your mass media campaign. We are talking about purchase of links, that we totally oppose. First of all, we don’t believe in white hat stuff. Second, many companies that were selling the links went belly up because they were getting the links from adding meaningless comments to all those media sources we were talking above. So, when these media sources added “no follow” attribute to the links, or simply deleted them, who do you think turned out to be the biggest loser? Customers, of course. We are not here to judge anybody, after all, everybody tries to earn a piece of bread with butter. But, this still looks risky and unstable way to earn visibility with no guaranties. Through our web analytics research we observed small businesses that lost thousands of those kind of links overnight.
And last but not least. Watch for the changes that are going with search engines right now. We are not saying that you, guys, need to sit and try to figure out search engine algorithms. But last offers to Yahoo from Microsoft and re-positioning of ASK.com just make us wonder. Right now, there are sites out there, that already got link recognition from Google and Yahoo but just don’t get noticed by MSN, or the other way around. Those who found themselves in these situation, know what we are talking about.
