One of the richest men in the world has finally retired. The time has come for Bill Gates to leave his Microsoft office and his daily job. All these years, his creativity and discipline made from Microsoft one of the most respected business on the planet. Here is an excellent, funny video on his last day of work.
Creativity - This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so much competition and rivalry going on, every method of internet marketing should be employed and utilized.
It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.
While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these are the so called Viral Marketing methods.
While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; I think everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.
What is Viral Marketing ?
Viral Marketing also known as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.
In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, directory or Wordpress template, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.
Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.
Using Viral Marketing to your advantage
The main advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.
Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.
Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a beautiful sponsored template, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular.
Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.
Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.
A few days ago we have launched the Top 50 Traffic Directories List. I came up with this idea when I realized that there is no list to sort the directories by their actual traffic. Obviously Alexa pretend to rank the websites by their traffic but who trust their system? So what it might be better than an actual traffic screenshot from every interested directory owner?
For long time webmasters used to hide their traffic or very often to lie about it. This is why everyone pretends to have a great website but when you actually see their traffic…hmm…there is only a tiny fraction from what they use to say. It takes quite a bit of courage to show your traffic to everyone else…why? Because first of all this might clarify many things about the site you run. Many times webmasters promote their directories as “high quality” websites but if you would have seen what exactly they offer you would actually be surprised to find out that the things are quite a bit different.
I have a strange feeling that most of the so called “quality directories” offer so little in terms of traffic that it may be worthless to have your link submited.
My advice to every person looking to submit their websites to paid directories is to do a brief analyze of the directory in cause. This way you won’t get tricked by a nice custom template or by a flashy banner you might see on some other website. First of all…if you are a PR chaser (not recommended) you might see a lot of promotions for high PR directories. Please do not associate the high PR with high quality as most of the times the things are pretty different. You might pay quite a lot of money to a PR5 directory just to find your website on the third page of its category with PR0 on it and then just ask yourself…is it worthwile to pay so much for nothing? In most of the cases you won’t receive either PR or traffic from that directory but instead you’ll only get a normal backlink which you can get at half price or even for free from somewhere else.
On the other hand…submitting to a directory that has a lot of visitors may increase the chances to get some clicks back which it will be an extra bonus for your submission.
Top Traffic Directories List want to establish as an useful resource for those who are interested in submiting in directories that deliver. The most important thing is that the owners in cause were so kind and open minded so they provided us with a copy of their traffic details. Just thinking there are people willing to share with you their stats it’s a good feeling and it should be a huge plus when deciding to do business with someone you never did before. These people inspire trust and I would highly recommend to consider their directories when submitting your website. Don’t just get tricked by people saying “my directory is high PR” or “my directory is high quality”…always ask them to prove it.
As you may notice…there are not so many submissions so far…maybe the people still have something to hide, maybe they will need to drop the old ideas and to understand that being open to your potential customer it will only benefit in long term to your business.
I really hope this list will become more popular in the future and will atract both directories and submiters.
