Internet Strategies, Internet Business, and Website development

A short time ago, my son, Justin, added an article titled Buck Anderson Runs for President. We decided to take the video application, he mentions, and put it to the test of using a political article title to attract visitors to our website,  JustNorth.com and create a candidate running on the Fishing Party platform - Trout Whisperer.

What is Viral Marketing?

According to Wikipedia:

"Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.[2] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

It is claimed that a customer tells you and others an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like.[3] Viral marketing is based on this natural human behavior.

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along."

On JustNorth.com, one of our Jive Media Group websites, we have a noted outdoor columnist named Trout Whisperer.

We took the political news video, mentioned in Justin's article, and created the video for Trout Whisperer and added it as an article on JustNorth. Trout Whisperer Runs For President?

Within minutes we were receiving phone calls and comments regarding the article.

Today, we decided to take it one step further.

I created a second article titled, Barack Obama and John McCain Challenged to Fishing Contest by Trout Whisperer.

I created a third article using video resources at JibJab.com. I named this article, Washington Reacts to Barack Obama and John McCain Fishing Challenge.

JustNorth usually gets picked up by Google searches with 24 to 36 hours. It will be very interesting to see what kind of traffic we get from the search engines on this article.

This is a good case in point. When Paris Hilton was jailed, we tried a similar article with the title mentioning Paris Hilton. It produced thousands of visits.

Taking a popular media craze and capitalizing on it with a well defined title can truly increase traffic to your site.

If you want to try this yourself, go to Justin's article by clicking here. Follow the instructions on the create video website, add the generated code to an article with a popular political title on your site, and see what happens.

Editors note: We are also using the Ventrian NewsArticles, Social Bookmarking template, available in the DNN Professor downloads library. This template includes Google Adsense ads which, if the article goes viral, will generate additional income.

Keep me posted on your results,
Buck

FYI - since I released the marketing campaign, yesterday, i have already been contacted by a Minnesota newspaper that wants to run an article campaign on the Trout Whisperer. This could be fun!