Morning
No video today, it is to noisy here to make a recording, they are working on the house next to ours so it is a bit like having a construction site in my yard.
If you have looked at my videos or read any thing about web 2.0 you will probably have seen the word “viral” used more than once.
What does viral mean and how can you get it working for you?
Viral traffic is where you person sees your site and passes it on to two of his friends, then they like it so much they pass it on to two of their friends. YouTube is the ultimate in viral traffic generation.
I know some of you are reading this thinking that is impossible to achieve..
Hands up everyone who had a forward in their inbox this morning, you know a joke, photo or maybe a short video clip..
When you look at the email see all those email address’s that are there at the top, that’s all the people that your friend sent it to as well as you (I won’t even get into discussing that they should Blind Carbon Copy everyone so no one else can see the email addresses) In my experience there are normally, 10 names at least there, so friend A has sent the joke to 10 people.
Those people are , B, C, D, E, F,G, H, I, J, K (not original names but you get the point)
Now 4 of those 10 hate the joke so they just delete it..
The other 6 thing it is the funniest thing ever sent, so they forward it to their 10 friends..
So the original joke has now been sent to 70 people (original 10 + (6×10))..
And if just 20% of those people send it to 10 more then you are up to over 200 people..
My wife gets these forwards all the time, I actually looked at one of them and counted over 20 names on the header.. so this one friend of my wifes sends all the forwards to 20+ people..
If a Joke can go viral why cant anything else..
A real life instance of viral traffic is Hot or not
Now I am not suggesting that you start a joke site (been there done that, they don’t pay) so how can you make money from the forwards?
If you run a very generic site (relationships, online games, pets, dating) then you could just put a link at the top and bottom of the joke.
or
(take into account that this is me thinking outloud) find a pay per lead program that allows email promotion and sign up for them, then put that info in the forward.
Some ringtone offers are paying $10 a sign up!
Ok thats your view inside Paul’s brain for today. I hope you like at least some of what you see.
Very good post Paul, I get these forwards all the time with jokes in and the ones that say “forward this to 10 people or something bad will happen etc etc.” So I added a link to my relationship advice website to the bottom and forwarded the email on. It was an email about a tragic love story with relationship topics so I thought why not. For a few weeks traffic was increased slightly before it died down to normal.
The mistake I made was not to track the results so I’d advise others to setup a redirect page such as http://www.website.com/emailforward so that you can count the hits on this page to track how much extra traffic you are getting.
Paddy