Posts Tagged ‘Business’

Seventh Lesson – Viral Marketing Crash Course

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Well we have come to the final lesson in the Viral Marketing Crash

Course. I sure hope you have enjoyed your lessons.

Today we are going to talk about folksonomies (tagging) as a viral

marketing tool.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social

classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice

and method of collaboratively managing tags to categorize

content.

The fairly new consumer phenomenon is called “tagging”. Tagging

is powerful because consumers are creating an organizational

structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people

to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with

others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Here’s how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us – a

bookmark sharing site – and Flickr – a photo sharing site -

consumers are collaborating on categorizing online content under

certain keywords, or tags.

For instance, an person can post photographs of their iPod on

Flickr and file it under the tag “iPod.” These images are now not

only visible under the individual user’s iPod tag but also under the

community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are

generating and filing under the keyword. Right now Flickr has

more than 3,500 photos that are labeled “iPod.”

You can also use Digg.com. All of digg’s content is created,

submitted, and judged by its audience. If your page, blog or online

article is good enough to be “dug” by digg users, you could

receive literally hundreds of unique visitors immediately. The best

thing about digg is that it is so popular that many submissions can

instantly dominate some keywords on search engines like Google.

Another site is Technorati.com. If you have a blog, Technorati

should become one of your favorite search engines. Because

many Technorati Tags are beginning to dominate the search

engines. You can easily add your blog to technorati’s tagging

system. Just like digg, even if you only happen to get a small

amount of traffic from technorati it will increase your site rank in

the search engines.

There are many sites that can help you with “tag syndication.”

Web applications like TagCloud integrates RSS and tagging

while wikipedia.org is method of allowing social webpage and

content development. All these methods and many more have two

great things in common

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to

search. Type the word “blogs” into Google and it can tell if you

are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to

read blogs, or just what. Large and small sites alike are already

jumping on the tagging train. They are rolling out tag-like structures

to help users more easily locate content that’s relevant to them.

Here are some other sites that you can visit to start using tagging

as part of your viral marketing campaign.

A1-webmarks

http://www.a1-webmarks.com

All My Favorites

http://www.allmyfavorites.net

Ambedo

http://www.ambedo.com

Blinklist

http://www.blinklist.com

Socialmarker

http://www.socialmarker.com

And that is a very short list. There are literally hundreds of sites

that

you can use to increase your visibility through tagging. I especially

like to use socialmarker.com, because it allows you to instantly

add your information to multiple sites without visiting and manually

submitting to each one individually.

Well, we’ve come to the end of this short course. I hope you have

learned the basics of viral marketing and that you will be able to

use the information to start your own successful viral marketing

campaign.

Good luck with all of your viral marketing ventures,

RAUL BENITEZ ALVARADO

rabealva@gmail.com

http://www.rabealva01.ws

 

 

==========================================

Legal Notice

The Publisher has strived to be as accurate and complete as

possible in the creation of this course, notwithstanding the

fact that he does not warrant or represent at any time that

the contents within are accurate due to the rapidly changing

nature of the Internet.

The Publisher will not be responsible for any losses or

damages of any kind incurred by the reader whether directly or

indirectly arising from the use of the information found in

this course.

This course is not intended for use as a source of legal,

business, accounting or financial advice. All readers are

advised to seek services of competent professionals in legal,

business, accounting, and finance field.

No guarantees of income are made. Reader assumes Responsibility

for use of information contained herein. The author reserves

the right to make changes without notice. The Publisher assumes

no responsibility or liability whatsoever on the behalf of the

reader of this course.

Twellow

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Twellow, at

The main page shows you all the categories, which then have sub categories as well. You just click on a category and the list of people in that area are displayed.You don’t have to be registered with Twellow to be displayed, but at the time of writing there were nearly two million people showing on the site, so you will have plenty to choose from. By all means though, register yourself and set up a profile so others can find you.

When you click on a category, Twellow displays a list of people in that category and they are ordered by the number of followers they have. If you are already logged into Twitter via the web, (not Tweetdeck), you will be able to follow people directly from the screens where the profiles are displayed.

http://www.twellow.com is another great way of finding people to interact with. People here are categorized into all different areas and you can search for those with similar interests to your own.Mr Tweet

Mr Tweet at

It’s a really nifty little site and worth registering at.

www.mrtweet.net is another way of gaining new followers. All you have to do is follow Mr Tweet on Twitter and your tweets will be monitored for content and then you will get a Direct Message from him. You then go to the site and login and you will get a list of suggested people. You will also get a list of people who are following you that you aren’t following so you can then follow them if you choose.Grader

Grader is on Twitter as @grader, but also online at

Apart from that aspect of Grader, you can have a look at who the top Tweeple are in a particular area or even by topic using the search function.

When you use the search function, it will list the Tweeple by their score in descending order. For example, if you search for gardening on Grader, you will get a list of all the top 100 people interested in gardening on Twitter. You can see their bio from their Twitter account and if you click on their Grader score, it will take you to their Twitter account from where you can follow them. Naturally, you must already be logged in to Twitter yourself to follow anyone.

http://twitter.grader.com/ and is a site of some interest. As you get going on Twitter, you can get ranked by Grader on a score out of 100. It is based on some secret algorithm apparently so people can’t game the system.Advanced Tweeting Tips

Now that you’re all set up, let’s get into some advanced Tweeting tips and applications that can really power your Twitter usage up.

Twitter Backgrounds

We discussed earlier about setting up your Twitter background so that it didn’t just look like the default Twitter page. Leaving it like that shows a lack of care on your part. You need to distinguish yourself from the crowd and that attracts more followers, or at the very least impresses people with your professionalism.

Now if you’re a bit of a Photoshop whiz, then you can do your own background, full of bells and whistles and load it up to your Twitter profile. But if you’re not, or you just want to save time, then there are some sites out there that will do them for you automagically. To find these sites, the best thing to do is to simply Google twitter backgrounds and you will find quite a few sites offering this service for free.

My personal favorite is Twitbacs at

However, that said, if you want to do your own fiddling in Photoshop, you can get some great layouts in PSD format from

http://www.twitbacks.com/ where you can get some great backgrounds.http://www.twitterbacks.com

Fourth Lesson – Viral Marketing Crash Course..

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
Today let’s talk about using ebooks to really go viral!

An ebook that includes your marketing message and a link to

your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method

uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your

message by willing participants.

This is the same basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get

established and grow into a house hold name. When the two

founders set up their free email system, all the messages that

were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which

identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their

friends advertised the free email site.

One of the best reasons for using viral ebooks as a marketing

method is because is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s

even quicker if you use rebrandable ebooks that have been written

by others.

Finding ready to go viral ebooks is pretty easy. Just use your

favorite search engine and do a search. You will find more than

enough rebrandable ebooks that are available on whatever

subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business.

One method of distributing the ebook is to offer it to visitors in

exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to

their friends and family it will promote your business for you.

Ebooks are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited

only by the enthusiasm of the participants.

Ebooks are fairly easy to create. It’s possible to produce your

own ebooks by combining articles that you have written or have

gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.

A common approach is to use material that has private label

rights, including articles and reports that have been written

specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Using a portion of a

larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters

of a large ebook could also be used as a viral ebook.

Using ebooks as a part of your viral marketing campaign is one

of many techniques that will have a cumulative effect on your

business, by attracting more customers, subscribers and targeted

visitors to your website. Start using them and you will soon find out

that this is an excellent way to increase sales and awareness too!

Look for another lesson soon! We will be talking about how you

can use online forums as a part of your viral marketing

campaign.

We’d love to hear from you! Please let us know what you think.

RAUL BENITEZ ALVARADO

http://raulbenitezalvarado.com