How to drive thousands of people to your site for little or no money

By Dina S Good

Every client I have ever had has asked that one burning question; "now that I have a great site, how do I get traffic to it?" You spend thousands of dollars and countless hours to polish up your copy, submit your site to all of the search engines and hope that you can muscle your way to the first page of Google, only to find that you don't stand a chance unless you have 10,000 meaningful incoming links from related sites.

Before you throw in the towel and hire some overpriced Guru to charge you an arm and a leg for the unethical promise of a top 3 placement, let me tell you 2 magic words that can create a flood of traffic to your site; Viral Marketing.

Viral marketing is any type of advertising that is self-perpetuating, spreading itself around the net like wildfire. Let's take for example Hotmail. How did they get 12 million subscribers in their first year and a half of business? Viral Marketing. At the end of every outgoing message Hotmail included the following message: "Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com," thereby advertising to everyone who received an e-mail to sign up for this new free service.

Viral Marketing is used by many large companies to create awareness for their brand by often times using cheeky, funny, and sometimes risqué animated clips on the hopes that you will send it on to all of your friends for a laugh. It is an effective, inexpensive way to reach an audience that otherwise may have never seen your product or service. If you like to mess around with video or animation, I highly recommend you adopt the strategy used by companies such as Mazda, Red Bull, MasterCard, and Universal Studios. If you are not an animating guru you can still reap the benefits by hiring a Flash designer who can help you story board your idea and create an animation for your own little 'viral ad' campaign.

Always keep in mind your product or service and be sure to target the audience that consists of your potential clients. For example if you sell Medicare supplementals, an ad that relies on sophomoric college humor may be passed around all of the campus emails but you would not be reaching your potential buying audience. Know your target market before sitting down to map out your campaign. A well thought out animation hosted on your site can create more awareness for your product or service than any paid email campaign could ever hope to attain.

Does it really work? My seventy two year old mother while on a road trip down the coast read an ad in the newspaper talking about a singing turkey animation, so she wrote down this abnormally long web address, came home and emailed it to all of her friends and family. Now THAT'S great marketing!

About the author:

Dina Good is the founder of Flash Consortium, an industry leader in web site design and marketing. With a strong focus on web sites for business and ecommerce, they have successfully designed and marketed sites internationally for over 9 years. They are different from other Website Design companies because they believe marketing is a fundamental component of good design. www.FlashConsortium.com



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