Viral Marketing Tips
Viral marketing is a lot like a high stakes poker game — there’s a small financial cost, a massive branding cost, and some huge potential payoffs.
Extending it even further, once the cards are dealt and the marketing message is out of the bag, there’s no way to retract it, no way to push it further, and no way to turn a partial failure into a success. Everything rests on the quality of the hand — in this case, the video or marketing message — and everything extends from the initial bet.
If you’re building a viral marketing strategy, invest in these nuggets of wisdom and make sure that they’re part of the DNA of your campaign. These five tips aren’t poker tips, but they’d surely translate.
The Effect of Spam on Business
Spam, or junk email, is one of the largest frustrations for Internet users. For businesses, this frustration adds up to a significant amount of dollars spent trying to prevent it. Reports estimate that spam costs U.S. businesses more than $132 billion in lost productivity in the last year, which equates to over $1000 per employee. According to FastCompany.com, 89% of the 107 trillion emails sent in 2010 were spam. Of those 89%, most were sent for pharmaceutical promotions – as virtually anyone with an email inbox can attest to.
HTML5 is The Future of the Web
Steve Jobs was recently quoted as saying “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5″ igniting interest in HTML5 and sparking numerous debates online in blogs and forums.
Jobs’ prediction that flash is dead invokes memories of the famous Mark Twain quote “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. While the debate rages on over the future of Flash, HTML5’s destiny is assured.
It’s not just Apple pointing to HTML5 as an internet revolution, Microsoft, Google, Opera, Mozilla, W3C and even Adobe themselves agree. In fact HTML5 may become historic for that very reason. It is arguably the only time Google, Microsoft and Apple have ever agreed on anything.
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Common Marketing Mistakes
If entrepreneurs and small business owners do not market themselves, chances are, they won’t be in business for long. Here are some mistakes entrepreneurs may overlook or struggle with when marketing themselves:
1. Thinking that one ‘touch’ is going to do the trick. I have recently been in conversations with someone who does workshop and he has done one mailing to 300 people and thinks that marketing doesn’t work because no one contacted him based on that mailing. I have been trying to help him understand that his first mailing didn’t even cause a blip in the brains of those who even saw it. I encouraged him to narrow his mailing list and to “mail the heck out of them.” (I think that is the language I used).
Proven Internet Marketing Strategies
I am constantly amazed by the number of people I meet who have absolutely no marketing strategy whatsoever behind their website. I am even more amazed by the number of people who believe all they have to do is buy a domain, slap a few HTML pages together and place them on a web host somewhere expecting everything else to just happen because their site or business is on the web!
It very rarely happens that way.
