SEO is an important part of viral marketing and link building is a vital ingredience of any SEO activity.

This article outlines how to use CV (curriculum vitae) communities for “demi-evil” back-linking purposes:

SEO Kung Fu: Using CVs for linkbuilding-purposes.

The Austrian elections are an excellent example of how not to harness the power of the web. While some of the smaller parties simply lack the power of scaling to mobilize enough people, the big parties exclusively relied on display-ads and one way communiation.

Some Austrians even claimed that those parties were actually misusing if not raping services like Twitter and Facebook. A succesful viral campaign needs to anticipate the reaction of its target group. And more than that, it needs to adopt to those reactions and change accordingly – and this has just not happenend. Another chance passed by, better luck next time.

A look at Austria might prove pretty instructive these days: since the government announced re-elections this fall, all the political parties have gone hysterical over the short period of time: how do you organise and manage a campaign in the short timeframe of only two months?

While the two big parties will probably rely on classical, agency-based campaigning, some members of the green party have started thinking aloud about a “crowdsourcing” campaigen: User are asked to design sujets, and my guess is that a lot of green politicians will start twittering all of a sudden. How can the power of direct communication be harnessed during these times? The next weeks will show if Austrian politicians make good use of Youtube, Facebook and Co. to reach out for the teenagers. This seems more useful than ever, considering that .at just lowered the age barrier: this is the first election where 16-year-olds are granted a vote.

In the last month, I’ve quite irregurlarly posted news on viral marketing affairs. The site has been properly indexed by now, so it’s time to start the real deal: I live in Austria, I’ve been blogging in German for quite some time now and as much as I enjoy it, there are definitely audience limits for a non-English blog. So I decided to publish my casual ramblings about viral marketing *and* the blogosphere (there goes the slight change of focus) on this very blog – in English and effective immediately.

Pls excuse my grammar mistakes, my written English is a bit rusty, but I promise I’ll do my best to polish it up. Since my Austrian blog has reached to top position amongst Austrian blogs last week, I think it’s definitely time to try something new. I’ve also been working as a music – or I should rather say – poop journo for over a decade, so the casual netlables story might drop in from time to time as well. So bear with me – you won’t be disappointed

Aight, before I forget to mention it: my main blog is datenschmutz.

Yep, yep, yeah – it’s that time of year again. The Halloween Costumes situation is knockin’ at your door and you don’t wanna be the big loser like last year? Basically, there’s only one thing you can do: Dress up like a NFL star.

Have you ever considered before that NFL Uniforms from Franklin Sports make great Halloween Costumes? My son has been buying Stuff from NFL since he turned 14 – lucky, now he owns his own credit card. Everybody knows that there ain’t nothing scarier in the whole world than a good bunch of drunk NFL players. And nothing sexier than a cute blonde with a large NFL helmet.

Halloween originated under the name of Samhain as a Pagan festival among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Nobody knows for sure if those guys liked to wear NFL uniforms as well. Other western countries have embraced the holiday as a part of American pop culture in the late twentieth century. So get your costume right away!

Halloween, known in Scottish Gaelic as “Oidhche Shamhna”, consists chiefly of children going door to door “guising”, i.e., dressed in a disguise (often as a witch or ghost) and offering entertainment of various sorts. If the entertainment is enjoyed, the children are rewarded with gifts of sweets, fruits or money. There is no Scottish ‘trick or treat’ tradition; on the contrary, ‘trick or treat’ may have its origins in the guising customs. And then, there’s grown ups guising and gulling, but that’s a totally different stiggedy-story.

The Internet takes this ancient form of “buzz” and promotion and amplifies it with a global network of people connected digitally. “Word of mouth” now has an Internet version called “word of mouse” (word of computer mouse). With greatly increased speeds, people refer things to their friends and families spreading the word through the Internet and to the far-reaching corners of the world.

Many smart marketers and publicity people have learned to harness the power of viral publicity with Internet “Refer-A-Friend” promotional techniques and tools.

Viral “Refer-A-Friend” techniques can be used to promote just about anything under the sun. For example, Audri Lanford conducted a giveaway contest at her new website where she gave away 4 Sony PS2’s before Christmas as a website promotion. According to Audri, she gave people who had entered the Giveaway the opportunity to get additional entries and additional chances to win by telling a few of their friends on the Thank You page…

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Virtually every successful internet marketer uses some sort of viral marketing in his or her business. According to Viralbuzz a viral marketing agency, viral marketing can be defined as any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Basically, viral marketing can be considered “word of mouth” marketing. How many times in your life have you tried out a product or service because someone you know recommended it? Viral marketing is and can be a very powerful medium for your business if you learn how to do it properly.

Free web-based email account companies like hotmail.com and yahoo.com use viral marketing to increase their free subscription base of email users to millions of people all around the world. Viral marketing is a great strategy to use for the internet marketers with limited funds to spend on advertising. Some forms of viral marketing that may be considered with your internet marketing business are writing articles, free ebooks and courses, e-zines and newsletters, and free polls and surveys. Let’s take a closer look at each of the above forms of viral marketing.

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Interesting Article by Seth Gooding:

For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.

No one “sends” an idea unless:
a. they understand it
b. they want it to spread
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits

No one “gets” an idea unless:
a. the first impression demands further investigation
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time

This explains why online ideas spread so fast but why they’re often shallow. Nietzsche is hard to understand and risky to spread, so it moves slowly among people willing to invest the time. Numa Numa, on the other hand, spread like a toxic waste spill because it was so transparent, reasonably funny and easy to share.

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We all receive viral videos like this in our Inbox that make us yell, “Holy #$%@*, that’s insane!” Then, like the good Internet soldiers we are, we pass it on to our friends and colleagues, with the subject line “Check this out! It’s crazy!”

Thus enters the “viral” part of viral videos. But what makes us furiously forward one video, and instantly delete another?

In my experience, those that click are over-the-top and unexpected, rather than simply clever. Think about it: You’re more likely to forward a viral video of someone surviving a plane jump after their parachute doesn’t open, than, say, those “Priceless” Mastercard ads.

My point is, people like to see shocking things that leave them in disbelief. And for businesses looking to get their own viral video going, your efforts should be just as bold.

The good news is you don’t have to have a slick Hollywood production to accomplish this. Plenty of videos on YouTube and other video sites are very low-budget, yet pack the shock appeal that makes them go viral.

So it’s unnecessary to hire a huge production company to make the video. Leave that to the big boys who are making “clever” video spots. Instead, go to a local college campus’s film school to find students interested in filming something over a day or weekend.

This approach ensures you get people who want to create a good video for their film school portfolio, while building their name recognition. And film school students are bastions of creativity, just waiting to create that one totally original masterpiece — a hunger many big production companies lack.

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Creativity is a must if you want to stay a head of the competition of an online business. Every method of marketing available must be used. If people don’t know you exist or can’t find you, it won’t matter if you have a killer website and product. People have to be able to find you if you are going to make it big and not become another internet business failure.

Viral marketing is one of the many methods and schemes used by ecommerce sites that can still add an extra boost in the popularity ratings. Viral marketing or advertising is a technique used to get your name or product out to the masses with out the hard sell tactic.

Simply put viral marketing is using the preexisting social networks to increase awareness of your name (brand) or product. This method of marketing depends on your ability to present your self in a manner that will compel people to pass around your information by means of a story, game, software, or whatever to all there friends and acquaintances. 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.

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