“How to Viral Market” Webinar & 75-Page Toolkit for Just $97!

I can vouch for this webinar, it’s great. I’m always asked by clients how does viral marketing apply to my business? I think the great marketer Dean Hunt said it best, “Here is the secret that no other viral marketers seem to understand… getting 10,000 visitors of which 20% are targeted is BETTER than getting 100 visitors where 100% are targeted.”

Internet history is filled with stories of great products that conquered the world solely on word-of-mouth. Think Hotmail – the free email service that spread like wildfire and was eventually acquired by Microsoft for $300 million.

Hotmail spread by a process called viral marketing. Hotmail offered free email accounts for everyone. Anytime someone would send an email from their Hotmail account this marketing message would appear at the bottom: “This email was sent from a FREE Hotmail account. To signup for your own FREE Hotmail account visit http://www.hotmail.com”

We can adapt Hotmail’s viral marketing technique by using the “recommend a friend” or “tell a friend” PHP script.

The idea behind viral marketing is that you use a service you like, discover to your delight that it is free and tell your friends about it. Your friends tell their friends and soon the idea or product gains publicity like wildfire as its user base spreads like a virus.

This is one of the reasons why it is so important to offer something free on your website in exchange for a prospect entering their email address.

A tell a friend form is the most commonly used form of viral marketing. It is also very easy to implement.

You need to have a web host provider that provides PHP. Most do. Next you need to upload the PHP file that instructs your web server to send an email and you need to modify your webpage to include the html form code.

There are many free tell a friend PHP scripts on the web. You can pick whichever tell a friend script is the easiest to drop into your web page. Just keep in mind that you want a tell a friend script that can accept at least 3 email addresses of your customers friends.

I see many websites that have the tell a friend form in the wrong place. Remember, you are using the KISS principle of web design where only one option is presented to your prospect at any time. That single option is THE option that you want them to take. Adding a tell a friend form on any webpage that displays before you close the sale violates the KISS principle of web design.

Most marketers will tell you to place your refer a friend form:

1. On the subscription confirmation page.

2. On any page where you offer a free lesson, free audio or downloadable software.

This is simply not correct. Think about it. If you place the tell a friend form on the same webpage as your sign up for a free subscription, they have not actually signed up yet. This means they do not know the quality of your subscription and so they certainly are not in a mood to refer you blindly to their friends.

If you place the refer a friend form on your free download page, that is even worse. Your prospect wants to download your software as quickly as possible and start using it to see if it meets her need. She has not even tried your software yet so why are you asking her to refer it to a friend?

The best web page to place the refer a friend form on is the thank you for purchasing web page. If you are using Paypal to accept online payments, then it is the web page that you tell Paypal to return your customer to on successful completion of their order. The refer a friend form should be displayed to your customers only, never your prospects.

For example, let us say that you are selling a software program. Your landing page from your Google ads should have on it a free trial version of your software offer if they enter their email address into your autoresponder form. Your prospect receives his download URL from your autoresponder in which case he downloads and uses your software for 3 days after which it expires. Your prospect clicks on the order button within your software which takes him to an order webpage. Your prospect fills out the order form and buys your software. He is taken to the thank you for purchasing web page that explains he will receive a serial key for his software program in about 30 minutes and a refer a friend form is displayed.

He has to wait to receive his serial key which he is told will take about 30 minutes. He can go out and take a smoke break while he waits to receive his email. He can also put in friends email addresses in your refer a friend form.

My own statistics show that 20% – 30% of your customers will put in at least two email addresses of a friend when presented with the refer a friend form at the precise moment I described above. Why is the conversion rate on a refer a friend form so much more successful when placed here than anywhere else? Because if he bought your software, it means he actually tried the trial version and likes it. He is much more likely to refer a friend after he uses your free trial version than before. Further, he is not trying to do something else when you present him with the refer a friend form. In fact, he has been told that there is nothing more for him to do but wait 30 minutes for his serial key to arrive by email. This timeout that you force on him after using the trial version and buying, and before actually receiving a serial key to unlock his software via email, is the perfect time to display to him the refer a friend form.

@Andy – Thank you sir, it’s an honor coming from you. When I told a friend about your awesome marketing blog, he said, yeah, Andy Beal is famous, I bet you don’t get to actually talk with him though. I bet him a large pizza that I would get to talk with you by posting something extremely valuable for everyone to read in your blog. I’m going to cash in on our bet, I’m thinking a combination with extra cheese! Thanks again.

@Lance. Great job. This will be the best tasting pizza this year. You should try to get a large RootBeer with it. lol.

So, Lance, in summary you are saying that is is worth the $97 )))

@Andy – Not posted anywhere else. Feel free to turn it into a blog post.

@Ken – LOL Oh man, I knew I forgot something! I’m texting him right now to add a pitcher of rootbear with that pizza.

@PS3 – LOL.. yes, worth the $97. I think we are all engaged, at some level, in viral marketing whether we realize it or not. To realize it by categorizing certain aspects of your marketing as such, it lets you then take steps to encourage and push the viral marketing process. One of my favorite viral marketing strategies is to take a YouTube video that was popular years ago but has since died off. Wrap the video up in my own wrapper and reframe the context of the video using my own copywriting skills, give it a billion dollar headline, and let it back out on YouTube. Some stick and some don’t. The ones that do stick are the ones with outrageous headlines that peak curiosity, like one I did for an affiliate program I’m maketing: “Dumpster Diver Creates Revolutionary Solar Power System”. Now is the guy really a dumpster diver? No. He just sort of looks like one and he happened to mention that he found a giant TV lens, like the kind that people throw away, to create this solar power system. So my wrapper (Camtasia Studio and Power Point to create video frames) for the video was what “THEY” don’t want you to know about solar power. How a conspiracy exists to delay and outright stop homemade solar power and how even this dumpster diver (homeless guy) was able to pull garbage out of a garbage bin and create something better than GE and all the billions of dollars in research they’ve been doing for years without any meaningful results. Now whether I, the marketer, believes in this or not is irrelevant. I’m calling out the paranoid (1 in 8 Americans think someone is out to get them) people with my video and driving them to my blog. The video shows this guy making a solar power system by using a TV lens so it does have some educational “How To” value. The video has over 300 views in about 3 weeks and continues to climb. Viral marketing is taking place by way of bloggers placing my YouTube video on their own green blogs because 1 in 8 Americans love conspiracies.

I made 8 affiliate sales in the first week the video was on YouTube for a total of $264. And I really didn’t create anything. All I did was take a video that was popular years ago but that now was not, and I used psychological triggers with my copywriting by creating a wrapper for the video which reframes the context to my affiliate product, and uploaded back to YouTube and let viral marketing take care of the rest.

I think that the Internet is one great big, huge, study in viral marketing.

@George – LOL and perhaps this comment is the second!

Thanks guys.

This is just soo cool. First of all, thanks for the webinar link and second of all, this whole comment page gave me a very warm feeling. With as a result Lance getting a post. Truly cool. Mind you it is sound advise.

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It seems like a nice deal, I’ll check that out thanks.

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