What It Means to Go Viral and How Your Company Can Do It

When you talk about going “viral” in a marketing capacity, it doesn’t include a computer virus or a viral infection, but the concept is extremely similar. You essentially want to “infect” someone with your campaign in such a way that they can’t help but “infect” others by sharing it and talking about it. “Going viral” takes your business marketing information on a trip, traveling across the internet and being viewed by, hopefully, millions of viewers. Taking your marketing viral can bring the possibility of new opportunities for your business and open doors to a new and improved business venture and new promise for the future.

Nowadays, your business may not survive if it is not involved in social media marketing. Internet marketing strategies are different than traditional marketing methods as they help you position your market and bring customers to your site, but are missing the element of human interaction.

So how do you generate an idea, turn the idea into reality and then implement it into the social media community and bring business exposure, customers to your site and create a noteworthy buzz? What do you need to go viral?

• A business idea – if you are thinking of going viral, you probably have a business idea or a business in place
• A marketing goal – Set realistic goals and focus on them because it can be easy to get carried away into the social media world too quickly and just get lost.
• Create a viral website – Register a domain name (anything that is followed by .com, .net, .biz, etc.) with a hosting company and create a landing page (Uniform Resource Locator)
• Create social networking – Start with one site and focus on it (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, etc.). Don’t do too much at once because it can get overwhelming.
• Generate traffic to your website – There are certain ways to do this including PPC (Pay Per Click), SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Management)
• Create an email marketing plan – Outline your purpose and plan of action in relation to generating email subscription and defining your audience.
• Create online public relations – There are editorial calendars and contacts to research that can be an asset to building your online interest. There are press release submissions and placements, writing tools and monitoring tools that can push you to the top of the internet search engine list as possible clients search for sites on your ideas.
• Create link building – This is one of the most important aspects of your market building, as link building increases the quality and number of links to your website.

Going viral is almost a necessity in marketing your business and generating interest in your ideas. People tend to do most of their research online and being “one up” on other companies in your business realm can increase your name, your sales, the interest in your company and, if you do it right, can create a buzz amongst people that can drive your business sales and reputation to meet the goals you set for yourself, and, hopefully, surpass them.