Apparently I turned out to be the one that spoiled the entire election…
Now this is what I call viral marketing at it’s best 
Creative content is the key to creating buzz
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dean Hunt from the UK. Dean is one of the leading experts in the field when it comes to buzz marketing… and he’s only 26 years old! He’s truly a marketing genius and knows how to get people talking.
For those of you who have been a subscriber of mine will probably know that I’m a BIG fan of viral marketing and I happen to agree with many of the stuff Dean said. It’s all about creating CONTENT that will turn into link baits - whether its humor, quality tips, controversy, value etc. Read the interview below:
1. What did you do before you stumbled across the internet? And how did you eventually got started with internet marketing?
I have done everything from graphic design, to being a professional golfer. I squeezed a lot into my youth. I stumbled across Internet Marketing really without knowing exactly what it was. I created a sports betting forum in 2003, and basically I wanted to make it popular, so I just experimented with lots of techniques. It was only later that I realized that what I was doing was actually called “marketing”.
2. What initial obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?
Lack of funds were my main issue early on, so I overcame them by being creative, utilizing contacts, and learning how to get noticed.
3. What is the difference between buzz marketing and viral marketing?
For me, buzz is the action and viral is the result. For example, if I stand in Time Square New York naked and sing ‘Like a Virgin’ by Madonna, then I will create a buzz, later, if people tell their friends about it, then that is the viral stage. So really, viral marketers are actually buzz marketers who are looking to go viral, they just don’t realize that yet.
4. How did you become known as the buzz marketing expert?
Again, kinda by accident. I started my blog as simply a way to keep my thoughts and ideas, it wasn’t really something that I wanted to share with the world, but then I started getting traffic, and when I analyzed that traffic, I noticed that people responded most to anything that was creative, different, funny, or edgy. A pattern soon emerged, and I discovered that creative content is the key to creating buzz.
I also have managed to have huge success over and over again on sites like Digg.com, so that has helped cement my place as the leading buzz marketing expert on the net.
5. Could you perhaps use a case study of yours and walk us through a step-by-step process to a successful buzz marketing campaign?
I actually have done a few case studies, you can download one of them here: http://www.webtrafficorgasm.com/casestudy.zip or signup for free at www.buzzprofits.com and I will send you them all. They show EXACTLY how I did it.
6. What do you exactly do to monetize your buzz marketing efforts?
I use what I like to call “down the line monetization”. What this means is that I don’t look to profit from the traffic straight away. Most people don’t grasp this concept, and that is why they have to work a lot harder than me to go viral.
Say for example you create come killer buzz content, and you get 100,000 visitors in a one day period. The usual method is to plaster your site with loads of adverts, and if you are lucky, you can make $200 from adsense.
That is what most people do.
However, for that $200, you now have 100,000 people who think your site was annoying, spammy and crap. So you will never see them again.
What I do is don’t look to monetize instantly, in fact, I have been known to strip all ads off my site when I detect that I am about to go viral, and my personal blog has zero ads on it. Then, when people come, they read my content, they check my other stuff, they subscribe to my newsletter, they add my feed to their reader, they bookmark me, they email their friends etc… and I build a relationship/following with them.
Now, as well as dramatically increasing the popularity and value of my site and brand, these extra followers can be sold to at a later date, hence why I call it “down the line”. I sell to them later down the line.
It might even be 6 weeks later.
7. What else do you do to make money online apart from buzz marketing?
I recently started doing consultancy services to web businesses that want to dramatically increase the popularity and profits in their company. I do this with my awesome biz partner Barry Dunlop (BarryDunlop.com) and it is going well. I don’t normally plug, but if anyone is interested in our services, please contact me ASAP at my personal email: deanhunt08@gmail.com as we only have two places left on the program.
8. You have an very interesting blog with tons of personality in it - the bunnies, the $1 million dollar review, the 6 billion RSS reader etc. Tell us a bit about these and why do you do those wacky stuff. It’s certainly not things you see normally on a typical blog.
That is why I do it. Most people don’t get why I do it, but it is the same reason that people where bright clothing… to be noticed and remembered. I read hundreds of blogs per week, and I forget about 99% of them. The ability to stand out above the crowd, get noticed, and be remembered is the essence of buzz marketing and branding in today’s world.
9. Any final comments? Plans for the future?
I know there are a lot of businesses struggling out there at the moment, so I would strongly recommend that they contact us ASAP and we can discuss some exploits, techniques and strategies to improve their Internet Success (deanhunt08@gmail.com). Thanks for your questions, and I hope that this has been useful to your readers.
Dean (www.deanhunt.com)
There are three critical elements to any effective and profitable viral marketing campaign:
More of this is covered in my Viral Marketing Blackbook.
Enjoy 
Stanley Tang
Once you have written your free report and inserted links to various products offered by your affiliates, the next task on your list is going to be finding a home on the Internet for your free report.
You will also want to develop strategies for promoting the free report so you can generate some interest in both the report and the affiliate links contained therein. Here are some ideas to help you make a permanent place online for your free report, as well as publicize the report in the right places.
First off, you must have your own website. These days, it is very easy to get excellent pricing on the joint purchase of a domain name and a basic hosting that will only cost a few dollars a month to operate.
The advantage of having the free report on your own web site and hosted on a remote server is that you can update the report whenever you like.
Also, you have control over which affiliates can post ads on your free report pages, and certainly can update the links in your free report whenever you like. This makes creating free reports very simple, as you can have several free reports that are posted under one domain name, just on different pages.
Once you have a permanent home on the web for your free report, you can begin the process of promoting it. Here are some ways in which you can promote your viral report:
1. Classified Ads
Write a short blurb, no more than a paragraph that will let the reader know what your free report is about. Include something that will serve as a teaser, catching the interest of the reader. Include the link over to your free report. Try to use classified ad web sites that rate high with the search engines. This should produce some traffic to your free report in just a few days. Here are some sites:
E-Book Directories
Another alternative is to get your free report listed in listings of E-book directories. Look for directories that focus in some manner on topics that are related to the subject matter of your free report. This will make it easier for people to come across the link to your free report while looking for information online. This approach is a little less direct than the classified ads, but can still lead to some excellent traffic for your free report.
Article Marketing
Another avenue of promoting your free report is to target web sites that invite authors to write articles on a variety of subjects. Write a two hundred to five hundred word article about a topic that involves some aspect of the information found in your free report. Include a link to the free report either in the body of the article, or in the author description. Make it a point to go with one of the article sites that tends to rate high with the search engines, and you may find some great traffic coming to you from that angle. Here are some good article directories in which you may distribute your articles:
Making sales with your free report involves three basic elements:
Enjoy!
If you found this blog post useful, feel free to share it with your readers and subscribers
Stanley Tang
Technorati Tags: internet marketing, article marketing, ebook directories, classified ads, viral reports, affiliate marketing
One of the reasons why you would write free reports is to circulate affiliate links. Here is some background on how to go about inserting a link into the text of your free reports, and making good money from your work.
One of the first things you need to do is make sure the positioning of the links within the text of the free report makes sense. The idea is to have the reader discover your link while reading through the body of the report.
The presence of the link will be obvious, as it will normally appear as a blue font that is underlined. What you want to happen is that the reader comes across the link, sees it is relevant to what he or she is reading and decides to click on the link before continuing.
This is not something that is as likely to happen if your links are not named in such a way as to hold the attention of the reader. Using link names that jars the reader away from the content with no apparent purpose will probably mean that not only will he or she click on the link; the reader may also stop reading altogether and move on to another page on the web.
When it comes to the sheer mechanics of inserting a link into your report, here are the basics of completing this procedure:
First, you will want to make a source document with your links already set up. To accomplish this, open a blank document in your word processing program. Also locate the site you wish to have the link take the reader to and have that up in an open browser.
Highlight the URL you want to create as a link, then right click on the mouse or use the “Control” and “C” keys on your keyboard to pick up the URL for copying. Switching over to your blank word processing document, paste the link onto the page. Continue this process by cutting and pasting over all the links that you want to use for your free report.
In effect, you are creating a source page that you will be able to use in the next phase, which will involve inserting the links into the text of your free report.
For the second stage of your task, write your report. Include the keywords that you plan to use as the names for the links in your text. This will provide you with the easiest manner to work with the insertion of the links, as you will have the places marked out in advance.
Keep in mind that you want the text to flow naturally, and hold the attention of the reader. The links should come along as an obvious part of the report, not as something that seems to have been stuck into the body for no apparent reason.
Pay close attention to the way you construct the report and you should be able to include quite a few links, as well as important keywords that will help your free report to show up in searches.
Next, begin the insertion of your links. You can accomplish this by reading through your finished report. As you come to a place that is ideal for the insertion of one of the links, toggle over to your saved source document, and locate the link that you want to insert.
Highlight the link and use the same procedures to copy and paste as you did when creating the resource page. The link will appear in the body of your test, either highlighted in blue font, or underlined, depending on which criteria you have selected.
Note that if you are using a Microsoft Word document to create your free report, that you can simply highlight the text in your free report that you want to use to lead to the link and then click on the “Insert Hyperlink” tab on the toolbar.
From there, you will have a screen appear that allows you to paste in or type the URL you wish to associate with the word or phrase you selected. This will automatically create the link in your document for you and provides you with the option of using any key word or key phrase to lead out to an affiliate ad or site.
Make sure you save your document once the links are inserted. From this juncture, it is just a matter of converting the document to PDF format. You can do this through Word or you can download http://www.openoffice.com and use the word processing program.
All you have to do is simply cut-and-paste your report; and then click the “PDF” icon. Once you’ve done that, all you need to do is find the right home for your free report and begin to promoting it. From there, you will realize some income from your efforts in a short time.
Creating free reports as a way to make money online with affiliate ads is a common practice. The trick is to come up with a free report that people want to read; and that you can easily distribute to large groups of people.
Here are some tips to help you write a free report that will capture the attention of people searching the Internet.
Also, you will find ideas on how to entice readers to click on links within the body of the free report as well as ads that reside on the pages of the free report.
One of the first things you need to do is determine the content of your free report. To a degree, this will be governed by the affiliate products you want to spotlight either within the text of the report or in the ads that accompany the report. At the same time, you want the subject matter to be focused enough that an informative article can result, without being too vague.
As an example, instead of writing a general article about office management, you may want to go with a narrower topic, such as Seven Effective Ways to Deal with Habitually Late Employees. In focusing in on one aspect of office management, you help yourself in two ways.
First, you have created a topic that will easily find its way into search engines. Second, you have laid a foundation for a whole series of free reports that can focus on other aspects of effective office management.
One thing to keep in mind with your content is that people love to read stories. That does not mean you have to provide a full-blown story with each point you make. Just keep in mind that quick illustrations can make your points and still play like the recitation of a story in the eyes of the reader. This will motivate your reader to keep going, so he or she can see what mini-story you will present with the next point.
The focused topic also will provide you with the ability to include links and ads that will be relevant to anyone that is interested in helping an office run smoothly. Placing the links so they make sense in the course of the text is very important.
Failing to do so will simply derail the train of thought and possible lead to the reader switching off before giving the links and ads any consideration. Keep in mind that your money from the free report is going to come from people clicking through the links to either merchant sites or ads and in some cases buying a product.
If the link is positioned properly within the text, it will seem almost natural to click on the link and investigate what is on the other side.
Circulating your free report can be as easy as offering the report on classified ad sites that allow you to post for free; or as easy as putting a link to it in your signature and posting on forums.
By making sure that you use the classified ads sites that actually generate a lot of traffic; you can easily set up a process for people to either click over to your free report on a web page or receive the free report by email.
Keep in mind free web pages that will allow for the inclusion of ads on the page as well as links in the text is available. If you cannot afford to set up your own web site for this sort of thing at first, you can begin to generate some income and eventually move the free report over to your own site.
Placing your free report online, advertising it at online classified web sites and also making sure it gets massive amounts of exposure on forums and places well in search engines to will make all the difference in the world in how much success you will have with the free report method. Why not try one out today and see how much money you’ll make online over the next month?
There are many viral marketing strategies. Some items lend themselves better to being viral content than others.Articles are one of the easiest and most reliable methods. Basically, you offer free information regarding the use, history, or other information of interest surrounding your product. Not only will this boost your search engine ranking, you will be able to include some vital viral pieces on the page. The first is the link to your store, or other contact information. The second is permission for the reader to use the information on the page for their purpose, as long as they leave your contact information intact.
Free eBooks are another valuable tool to viral marketers. Ideally, the free eBook contains solid information that readers will want to pass along to others. Within the ebook, there will also be links to related products. These can be from your own store, or from the stores of others. One of the most satisfying aspects of viral eBooks is you can form an affiliate network that will make money for you.
Finally, free softwares can also be a valuable promotional aid. You may want to include a demo version of software, along with links where the reader can purchase the full version. Some other software related items include free screensavers, skins, cellphone ring tones, and desktop wallpaper.
Your choice of transmission method is critical. Because you want to reach large numbers of people, there is the potential that your viral sales literature will become as useless as spam to the recipients. As an example, the foolish viral marketer might try to bombard guestbooks with links to their information. Not only will his/her links be deleted, the webmaster may well make a point to never buy the spammers product!
With a little bit of care in the choice of transmission methods, the issue of being a spammer is easy to avoid. Making effective use of groups, message boards, and other communication structures is vital to the success of any viral marketing campaign. While you can make your own message boards and groups, it is easier, cheaper, and faster to place your literature within the established groups of others. Since all people that might be interested in your product don’t belong to all groups, posting on many forums gives you the opportunity to reach new people.
Your objective is to induce others to pass your information along. Thus, an understanding of human motivation and behavior is also important. While rewards and incentives are helpful, you need to see what else you can use as leverage. As an example, you might look at the current news items, and see if there is something there that can be turned into a joke or comical image.
When carrying out a viral traffic marketing campaign, you will also need to make sure that your server can accommodate the increased traffic. Together with that, if you are selling a product that needs to be manufactured and shipped, that each member in the chain of delivery can handle the increase in orders.
While there are a number of items you need to keep in mind before launching a viral traffic marketing campaign, the rewards of a successful venture are limitless. In addition to the basic design of the viral sales literature, you will also need to make sure that your business, and that of your suppliers, can handle all of the new orders that will come as the result of your viral marketing efforts.
Technorati Tags: viral marketing, internet marketing strategies, make money online
Here are 12 strategies to create buzz for your internet marketing campaigns and make money online:
1. New
2. Inspirational
3. Edgy
4. Engaging
5. Innovative
6. Controversial
7. Funny (Humorous)
8. Heart Warming
9. Taboo
10. Secretive
11. Anticipation
12. Suspence
For more viral marketing strategies, visit http://www.viralmarketingblackbook.com or the viral marketing posts
Technorati Tags: internet marketing strategies, viral marketing, buzz marketing, make money online
Being a big fan of viral marketing, this presentation by Seth Godin blew me away.
Make your products and internet marketing strategies remarkable - something worth making a remark about
Technorati Tags: seth godin, internet marketing strategies, buzz marketing
Finally, the long awaited blackbook has gone live!
It’s time to open the floodgates of traffic to your
websites!
http://www.viralmarketingblackbook.com/
Look at what some of the top internet marketers
had to say about The Viral Marketing Blackbook:
“The Viral Marketing Blackbook starts off slow
but gathers speed… and then takes off! I
learned some useful things from the simple
explanations, and found a few ideas that can
be put to the test quickly and easily.”
-Dr. Mani
eZineMarketingCenter.com
“I just finished reading The Viral Marketing
Blackbook and I must congratulate you on an
outstanding piece of work. For any web business,
viral marketing is the key to success, and
you’re really helping people out with your
in-depth account of how to use it here.
You can sell it for 10 times the price and it
would still be a sound investment. I recommend
anyone who is seeking ways to leverage the true
potential of the Internet to get hold of a copy
of The Viral Marketing Blackbook and read it
straight away.”
-Tim Brocklehurst
TimBrocklehurst.com
“I’m a big viral marketing fan so what you’ve
covered was solid. Nice work Stanley. I highly
recommend The Viral Marketing Blackbook to anyone.”
-Aurelius Tjin
AureliusTjin.com
“Well-written and presented ebook. This should be
a primer for anyone wanting to expand their marketing.”
-Kevin Riley
ProductCreationLabs.com
“…excellent, no-nonsense guide to learning the
ropes… well written, concise and a definite
must read.”
-Michalis “BIG Mike” Kotzakolios
Niche-Mania.com
“An easy, educational read… A complete A-to-Z
guide”
-Frank Bauer
Goto-Pro.com
“If you think you know everything there is to
know about viral marketing and you haven’t read
The Viral Marketing Blackbook by Stanley Tang,
you are probably wrong.”
-George Wright
HowToPullMoneyOutOfThinAir.com
Do not miss this Stanley. Get your copy now:
http://www.viralmarketingblackbook.com/
Enjoy your traffic!
Stanley Tang
