The key to viral marketing is infectiousness. Whether it’s something shocking, humorous, or emotionally compelling, viral marketing techniques reach out and grab the attention of the audience with a raw human appeal that instantly makes them to want to share it with others. Good viral has such tremendous emotional power of attraction or WOW FACTOR it becomes a phenomenon in and of itself; one that replicates itself over and over in peoples’ minds, much like the meme theorized by evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins.

As a larger and larger audience gets drawn into the excitement, enthusiasm and pure entertainment value of your viral piece, your message subliminally gains momentum and sweeps more and more people up into the eye of the storm, all the while hooking them into whatever product or service you’re selling.

Video Is The Heart & Soul of Viral Marketing

Video is hands down the most engaging, effective, and undeniably infectious form of viral marketing on the planet. It’s no secret that if you want to make a major splash, video is the way to go. In fact these days it might be the ONLY way to go. Hello, YouTube anyone?

If you’re an affiliate, YouTube is a great place to make, post and market a viral video. You can set up your own page, list your affiliate marketing site’s URL, and stealthily plant other key information.

Things start to really get fun when you actually get down to creating your viral video. The common misperception among businessmen and women is that you need to spend millions to make a wicked vid. Truth is that most of the best viral, totally awesome and original videos are done by amateurs. Hello “Chocolate Rain” anyone? Check it out, that bizarre and beautiful homespun croon has banked over 47 million hits!

Consider the possibilities. Since your videos will ultimately be embedded on social media sites and linked to in emails, tons of people will get funneled to your YouTube channel. When they get there, they’ll be prepped for the message and ready to visit your landing page for whatever it is you’ve got to pitch.

Ebooks: A Distant Second To Video, But Still Cooler Than Going To School

There are a slew of free programs out there that allow you to build your own ebooks. The key point again, as with viral video, is to have a magnetic topic to cover in your book. Please. Save the world from yet more boring content. Pick a subject with some flash, an original point-of-view, or some never-explored insight that will enrich the reader’s mind. Do some research on your target audience and write about a dense nugget of opinion that could spark a healthy controversy, enliven the discussion, enlighten and entertain, or delve into some cutting-edge area in the lives of the people who buy your product or service.

Word of mouth about a hot new ebook can catch fire just as fast and gloriously as a viral video, it just doesn’t happen as often. However if you strike oil on a topic that’s on point, you could be in for a groundswell of traffic to your landing pages and websites, and an ample spike in conversions.

There’s one caveat here. Make sure to refer readers to your landing page in your ebook! Put the link where they can see it. The more people that download your ebook and associate you with its stellar content, the more people will buy your affiliate wares.

Silly Rabbit, Widgets Are For Affiliates…

What the smack is a widget? Someone help me out. “Well Bob, they’re these wonderful little marvels of modern technology called mini-applications. They’re totally self-contained and can easily be dragged and dropped onto your websites, blogs and other online spaces.” Why thank you Reginald. And by the way. You better remember that definition of widget folks, because widgets are insane. In terms of affiliate marketing of course. They’re indeed blowing up as I write this.

Why? You can create widgets that highlight the products you sell. When you’re done creating them you can put those widgets on your social networking profiles. Members who see your widget and like it can then easily pass it along to others.

Lesson learned. Support your local widget makers!

Now Bust Your Creative Gut

For some final tips on viral content, we suggest taking a few minutes to descramble your brain onto the page. Come up with some fresh ways to go viral with your campaigns. Go ahead, be an internet maverick. It pays!

Here a few starters to get the fires of inspiration up and burning:
A. Make custom electronic post cards or gift cards and promote them on your website, social networking profile or other cyber real estate.  Embed a link to your landing page URL on the cards so that the consumer can click through.

B. You gotta spend money to make money. So hire a freelancer to design a simple digital game for your exclusive use. Think Brickbreaker, Sudoku or Word Mole for the Crackberry. Super easy and very catchy. Have the designer sew marketing elements into the fabric of the app. That way when users play the game they’ll be getting super-targeted ads directly to their face!

That’s it for this article. Over and out affiliates – keep your neckties loose and your campaigns rolling!

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Consistency: Setting Yourself Up For Conversion Success

The key here is to be consistent. You want to lead the consumer along a trail where their eyes see what they need to see in order to take the next step. When you’re not consistent with your keywords and messaging, you’ll lose the prospect quickly. Take Registry Cleaners as an example. An inexperienced affiliate may advertise a product, for example ParetoLogic’s RegCure, on the term “Registry Cleaners” with the following ad text:

Easy Registry Cleaners
Clean your registry 100%
Increase Your PC’s Speed
www.cheapPCcleaners.com

While the ad itself isn’t too bad, when the prospect clicks on it they’re then taken to a page with the headline “Inexpensive Software For Increasing PC Speed“, and a list of names of different registry cleaner products. The consumer’s specific search query for “Registry Cleaner” hasn’t been re-enforced on the landing page, and they’re required to take additional steps to find the product they want to buy.

A much better way to design this page would be to make it product specific page, in this case Paretologic RegCure, with the words “ParetoLogic RegCure” clearly written in large type at the top of the page in a bold header, with testimonials and awards, all immediately in plain view and directly supporting the ad from which the visitor arrived. This shows the consumer they’ve landed in the right place, and tells them that they’ve found the product they’re looking for.

Usability: Streamlining Your Visitor’s Experience

Usability is something a lot of affiliates tend to forget about. The fact is that if you do it right, you can boost your conversions for both your paid and organic traffic. The key to strong site usability is making sure there aren’t any obstacles to consumers purchasing your product once they’ve reached the landing page. Obstacles include a lack of a clear call-to-action, missing trust elements, unclear messaging, and so on.

A visitor who has just arrived at your site makes instant value judgements about all aspects of your business. At this stage in the buying process their behavior is volatile, making them likely to bolt at the slightest inconsistency or point of confusion. Ask the following questions to help prevent scaring your visitors off or losing their attention.

*Is there a clear headline stating your landing page’s main purpose?

*Is the product title and image above the fold, prominently placed and immediately visible?

*Is the buy button and price prominent and visible immediately?

*Are there complicated options, buttons or links that could confuse or distract your visitor?

*Will your visitor know immediately how to use your site and what they need to do to achieve their goal?

Pursuit of Perfection: Testing Your Landing Pages

Start with the most basic kind: A/B testing. Split your visitors into two equal and random groups, showing one group version A of your LP design and another group version B. If A performs better use it as your primary LP, and if B performs better use that one. This is the easiest way to see what elements on your page are working and which aren’t.

Remember to only test one element at a time, such as the header, body copy, button size and button color, etc. That way if you see a difference in conversion rates on each page, you know which element of design it is that’s making the difference. Small differences are very significant. A spike in conversion rate from 1.5% to 1.65% increases your sales by 1/10th with no extra advertising expenditure.

Multivariate testing works on the same principle, only you split the traffic into more groups with more variations of the original landing page. This type of testing is generally used for larger sites with high-volume traffic.

Make sure you test long enough to see statistically valid results or what experts call Level of Statistical Confidence. For more on the subject of valid stats check out this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance. Be patient. It can take up to a month to meet your standard for statistical confidence.

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Deciding how you tackle these types of problems is pretty much the art of affiliate marketing in a nutshell. To give you some tools to work with in this regard, here are some experiments you might find will help make your campaigns perform better.

Fire-Up Your Daily Budget

As much as we hate to say it and you probably hate to hear it, the truth is that maximum traction for your ads is a direct result of how much coin you put into them. Low-budget ads don’t tend to do well because when their keywords get searched, the competition beats them to the punch.

If it’s within the scope of your fiscal powers, firing up your ad budget can sometimes save an ad from having to be discarded. Usually the more money you put into an ad, the more its going to get seen (unless your keywords are just bunk). A 40-50% increase in your budget is a good margin to start with. It’s just enough to bump your exposure up, but not crazy enough to crack the bank in half.

Say you’ve budgeted $50.00 a day for one ad, go ahead and increase it to $75.00 and see what happens. Obviously you don’t want to raise it to $75 if the minimum for first page of the SERPS is $100. Be selective and see where budget increases will prove advantageous. And remember, you pay for clicks not impressions, so you have room to play with between your bids and your actual budget.

Move Your Ads To a Quieter Neighborhood

When one ad or AdGroup gets stale or seems to be doing sweet nothing for you, try setting up a new ad group and extracting some of your keywords from the poorly performing campaign. The point here is to use these old keywords in a new ad campaign that competes in a low-impression space, that way your ad is almost guaranteed to be among those displayed when one of its keywords gets searched.

Break Up Your AdGroups

Different AdGroups produce different results. Splitting your campaign into different AdGroups with different variations of keywords will cast a wider net and boost the number of impressions, ad positioning, click-throughs, and so on down the line.

Streamline Your Click-Throughs

If one or more of your PPC ad campaigns is bringing in clicks that aren’t converting at the rate you expect, you can reduce your maximum cost-per-click and/or ad position. You can then use the savings to increase your bid on other targeted keywords that are performing well.

Close the Sale, Make It Rain!

Once your ad has brought the consumer to the purchase page, it’s up to you to provide the messaging that gets them to take action (whether its a sale or a sign-up). That means your landing page needs to deliver on exactly what your ad suggested. This is called messaging consistency, and when you do it well your business will reap the rewards.

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Check out photos from the ASW show here.

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