There is a lot of talk about viral marketing these days. It is one of the few things that sounds too good to be true, but is actually true and works. In fact when you combine the power of article marketing with the principals of viral marketing, the impact can be explosive.
Headline, Headline, Headline
Amazing stories have often been told about how a small change in one headline on a supermarket tabloid has made the difference between selling a few hundred copies and a few million copies of a magazine. Everybody knows that headlines make a huge difference. However, very few appreciate just how critical a headline is online. In fact the title of an article is much more important on the web than it ever was in print publications.
This is because in print, one has the luxury of scanning the first couple of sentences or the first paragraph at the very least. More often than not the decision on whether or not to read an article has to be made from glancing at some tiny headline link at the bottom of some page. The luxury of space and a huge screaming headline that gives the topic a sense of importance before anybody has read a single word, are just not there.
So if you want your article to have a higher chance of going viral, it has to start with the headline that you select. There are certain types of headlines that work. Like benefit-laden headlines or headlines that promise solutions to nagging problems. Studying successful online articles and the titles that were used is an excellent idea and the perfect place to start if you want to be an expert of getting the right headlines for your articles.
Humor Is Viral
Admittedly, humor is not very easy to achieve in an article. But it is well worth the effort because humor is a well-known and widely recognized viral "disease" when it comes to articles or any content. It is indeed true that if you manage something that makes your readers laugh the effect will be viral and the end result will be you laughing all the way to the bank.
And the huge advantage with the World Wide Web, which many forget far too often, is the fact that you really do not have to be too creatively original. It is perfectly acceptable to take a look at other people's ideas and then to modify them for your use. And this is one of the ways that you can always remain funny.
Viral Incentives Make All the Difference
If you want your articles to go viral and bring you tons of traffic then one of the things that will help a great deal is you give readers some incentives to share your articles with others. For example you can use your articles resource box to offer a valuable special report in exchange for referrals. This can have a tremendous viral impact on your articles and article marketing in general.
Viral marketing works very well online because the very nature of the World Wide Web is viral. Did you know that the net was started and grew to what it is today virally? And even as you read this, the web continues to spread out and grow virally. That is why we have numerous case studies of sites growing virally at a very rapid rate. The most widely quoted is that of the Hotmail email service which used a small signature link going out with all emails offering a free email account.
Then there is the amazing growth of the Google search engine. To date this service has never been advertised. It just grew virally as folks referred it to others. All that the founders did was to ensure that they had an excellent product, happy satisfied users did the rest.
There are numerous other examples but the lesson here is that with the right strategy, each and every promotional article you write has the potential of going viral and giving you the kind of overnight traffic that most people only dream about. The bottom line is how effective you are in implementing viral techniques to your promotional article.