MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Admit it or not, you like to be in the know... If you hear some interesting gossip or do a great discovery, you want to share this with as many people as you can, people that will all admire you for knowing stuff they don't.

And this doesn't limit itself to Miss Hilton's social antics, there's a million things out there that a lot of people are interested in. That's why word-of-mouth is such a powerful tool.

Internet history is filled with stories of great products that conquered the world solely on word-of-mouth. Think Hotmail - the free email service that spread like wildfire and was eventually acquired by Microsoft for $300 million. Or Google...the dominant search engine that grew into a company with a market value of $100 billion without ever having to buy an ad on TV.

These ideas spread through a process called viral marketing. You use a service you like - discover to your delight that it's free and tell your friends about it. Your friends tell their friends and soon the idea or product gains publicity like wildfire as its user base spreads like a virus.

You don't even have to come up with a brilliant idea to take advantage of viral marketing.

It's amazing how simple concepts can conquer the net. Take a look at the example of GoGratitude.com.

End 2005, Stacy Robyn launched a site called gogratitude.com. The idea behind the site was that by expressing gratitude, people would enhance their spiritual lives.

Stacey quickly designed a very basic site build upon her idea of gratitude. She included an amateuristic flash video, 'the gratitude master key'.

You can view the Flash video here http://www.gogratitude.com/masterkey/

Despite being really basic and amateurish, the video resonated with people. In fact, maybe it resonated so well precisely because it was basic, amatuerish, honest and so non-corporate.

After viewing the video the visitor would see a simple page congratulating them for taking in the mssage of the video and asking them to forward it to their friends.

Here's a screenshot of that page

Stacy urges people to expres their gratitude by forwarding the video to their friends. This was the forward email she used:

She also asked visitors to subscribe to her free 42-day experiment, a type of newsletter from which each email urges people to share the concept of gratitude.

Somehow Stacy's honest and open idea resonated with people. Results of her experiment were amazing. After only 3 months 433,000 people had viewed her flash video and over a third of those had subscribed to her free newsletter.

This is pretty darn impressive. I know that other websites in her field of self-improvement typically pay up to $1 per subscriber and it takes years to get a mailing list of 100,000+ names. Stacy accomplished this in 4 months for absolutely nothing.

So if you're looking to increase traffic, it might not be a bad idea to look into viral marketing.

Why did Stacy's viral marketing idea work?

A Formula For Viral Marketing

Seth Godin, one of the Internet's top marketers, developed a simple formula for viral marketing. Here's Seth's formula, in his own words:

"For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received."

According to Seth

No one 'sends' an idea unless:

1. They understand it
2. They want it to spread
3. They believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
4. The effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits

No one 'gets' an idea unless:

1. The first impression demands further investigation
2. They already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
3. They trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time

This explains why online ideas spread so fast but why they're often shallow. Nietzsche is hard to understand and risky to spread, so it moves slowly among people willing to invest the time. Numa Numa, (a video of a teenage kid doing a funny song and dance routine that was downloaded over 1 million times in 2005) on the other hand, spread like a toxic waste spill because it was so transparent, reasonably funny and easy to share.

Simple and elegant isn't it?

Stacey's GoGratitude.com presentation spread because she made it easy to understand. It was a simple idea zen-like idea - be thankful for what you have and you'll be happier!

Second, she was successful in motivating people to spread this message. The principal of gratitude is a folksy, spiritual idea that resonated with many people. It also made people feel good sharing it.

And finally - with the forward form she developed, she made it easy to spread (to quote Seth, the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits).

Seth's formula can be applied to many ideas and products. How can it be applied to your site?

The easiest way to use viral marketing is through a simple forward form. If you have something worth forwarding like a free course or newsletter just include a forward form on your site and in the messages to your subscribers. A forward form could be as plain as this:

Implementing A Forward Form On Your Website

Here's the code you'll need. If you are not familiar with basic PHP, you can simply pass this code on to your web designer for implementation.

You can see a simple working copy here.

The code consists of just 3 files.

1. First, you'll need a sign-up form. Here's a sample form you can copy and modify. This form will forward the recipient's email addresses to a PHP script that will process the addresses and send out the emails. The form also checks for common email errors such as forgetting the '@' symbol.
2. The second part is the actual code that sends out the email. This is in a file called forward.php.
3. The last file is called forwardmail.htm in the same folder. This is the actual email that gets forwarded on.

These 3 files, when used together, will allow you to have your web designer quickly implement a forwarding form on your site. You have full permission to further modify these files to suit your site.

To get started you can download the 3 files above as a zipped file.

This might be an hour of work with a huge payoff. For our sites, forward forms like these have boosted sign-ups with up to 13%.

Ok, so I guess the forward rate of a controversial story about La Hilton would make this 13% look rather insignificant. Well, I challenge you, if you have any creative ideas, use them! I'm confident you can do a lot better than us.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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