If your campaign is set up correctly, small elements, when put into a Viral Marketing Campaign, can mean the difference between building 200,000+ members in a short amount of time and more money than you can imagine, or a site that is dead and will remain dead.

What is viral marketing? In 1996, the owners of Hotmail, (before they sold to Microsoft) realized that they could offer free email and use the ‘email service’ to advertise itself. This was never done before and yes, it spread thru the Internet like a virus, which is why it is called VIRAL.

Never before was there FREE email, and now, every time someone sent an email to a friend, they were told “Get your free Hotmail Email Account. Click Here.” Soon, Hotmail had over 100 million members. Almost zero advertising was needed to get to that 100 million after the initial launch.

There are a few things needed for something to go viral.

The thing must be extremely useful to the person that is told to check it out.
The topic must be ‘Buzz Worthy.’ By that I mean it must have something to inspire people to pass it on.
There must also be a reason why they would want to share it - WIIFM (What’s in it for me.)
The final thing that is needed is the advertising mechanism. It must be easy to be self-advertising, like Hotmail, or easy for people to spread the word.

A managed membership site with certain tools was used to get all this done.

One more thing I need to mention is the Viral Exponent (Vx). Without going into complex mathematics, here is the explanation. So let’s say that today you get 40 new people to join your site. For it to survive on autopilot, you need to get 40 people tomorrow, 40 people the next day, and 40 people each day for the rest of time. That would mean that your Viral Factor is at 1.0. That is what you want to go for.

1.0 is very hard to reach but can be done if your site is set up to focus on reaching that. It could be at 1.01 or more, if your site is set up even higher, based on buzz and great copy and a great focus on WIIFM (What’s in it for me) as the members sees it. Sites such as Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook and PayPal all had a high x-factor in their Vx.

The Viral Effect