First Published: 26th of September, 2020
Viral marketing is the art of marketing by harnessing the power of the masses. The idea may have existed long before the internet and is derived from the idea of an infectious virus. The influenza virus, for example, jumps from one human host to the other through infected droplets. That is, it enters the body of one person, that person coughs next to another person, the person inhales it and becomes infected.
In the same way, a person may purchase a product and boast about how awesome it is. By doing this, he convinces or inspires the listener to also purchase the product. The other person then purchases it and convinces two more persons. And it goes on and on until the product has been saturated throughout the entire population. We can say that the merits of that product has “gone viral.” In such a case, viral marketing benefits the manufacturer of the product and not a particular vendor since the consumers may purchase from different vendors when looking for the same product. Nevertheless, a product that has “gone viral” brings in revenue to all or most of those who market it as well.
The internet has taken the idea of viral marketing to a whole new level. Nowadays, on the internet, content often “go viral” through social media, especially Facebook. With Facebook’s unlimited “share” feature, this has especially skyrocketed. Facebook gives the option of paying for a particular content to be circulated to specific audiences, but some content go naturally viral. If you can create an article or image ad that quickly goes viral on Facebook, you can drive a lot of traffic to your business. But this isn’t always easy to do. Often, people would burst their brains out trying to create a post that they hope would go viral, and it would only be shared a few times. On the other hand, someone randomly throws up something not knowing it would make its way around the social media world. It’s kind of funny the way people think and share posts!
The other day, a posted a picture of a police officer and bandit who looked almost indentical. I captioned, “the police asked the victim to describe the bandit. She replied, ‘he looks just like you.’ lol.”
Well, suddenly that post got shared and then it went viral. I would say it went super viral. What this means is that it went exponentially viral. That is, it appears like a fixed percentage of people who saw it was inclined to share the post. We can say for example, that in the first hour, the post got 100 shares, in the second hour, 200 shares, in the third hour, 300 shares…it so it kept going upwards.
This post was unlike the others which hit a climax and stopped. This one kept getting shared exponentially. How did this benefit me? As more people shared the most, a fraction of those liked and followed my “Humour, Jokes and Funny Stuff” page on which I shared the post. I actually think it will launch the page from less than 1000 followers to over 1 million followers in about 1 month. And that would definitely give me the a new job as Comedian!
Well, I can then post and reach a vast audience, drive traffic to my humor website and sell advertising space to Google Adsense. This all ties in with my “content network” idea whose ultimate aim is to rake in six figures by selling advertising space and other forms of revenue. It’s a dream, but it’s coming true.
Harnessing the power of this great exposure, I can subtly share a few links or put a few “related” ads here and there to drive traffic to my other blogs. So how else can I bring in revenue through a popular facebook page? How about creating a jokes book or ebook or selling it? With the advancement of internet technology and information overload, books and ebooks just don’t sell like before. But the universe (I prefer to say God) keeps giving us new and innovative ways of raking in that two cents…such as, getting hits and selling advertising space, creating print on demand merchadise etc.
