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Nothing markets a site better, spreading it like wildfire, than having a viral product, tools or processes. And nothing makes it more capable of generating revenues than being sticky, because people only part with their money after they are comfortable with a product, after they've seen it a few times and interacted with it somehow.
The great news is that your site can start becoming sticky and viral right away by employing a few simple tools.
Email To A Friend
On every page on your site, you should invite people to send that page to their friends. Most people will look at something their friends send them. The number one rule of making something viral is making it easy to spread. Make sure that each page has a clear link or icon that invites the user to send the page to a friend. When they click on it, they should be able to send simply by entering their name and their friend's email address - keep it simple. The only other bit of information you may want to ask them for is their friend's name for personalization purposes. To add such functionality to your site, you will need to download a free script. There are plenty to choose from. You can find one in the Webmasters Specials CGI Scripts category at Aboutwebmasters.com.
Free Products To Pass On
Offer a free version of your product, or something else free. Make sure that it's useful, otherwise no one will really care about it. Ensure also that it's very easy for users to pass on these free products to their friends. Something you can quickly make is a screensaver and wallpaper, using software from Download.com and some decent images.
Forums, Chat, Community And Office Tools
Provide ways through which your site visitors can add content to your site and communicate with each other. Have forums, chat, and possibly instant messaging. One way to easily add this to your site is using www.everyone.net. Offer free office tools such as calendars, file sharing, to-do lists, group tools, and more. You can do so easily and for free by signing up with Myevents.com.
Postcards
People love sending postcards. Blue Mountain Arts made history when it was acquired for over 800 million dollars, yet all it did was allow people to send electronic postcards to each other. The magic here is that if someone sends a friend a card from your site, that friend will almost always want to pick it up, and to do so they have to visit your site! That's a great way to get new users. To start a free postcards service on your site, all you need is to buy a CGI script that will do all the work for you. It's very easy. You can find one in the Webmasters Specials CGI Scripts category at Aboutwebmasters.com.
Newsletter
It's very important that you have a newsletter (or mailing list). Newsletters work wonders for sites that use them well. Give an incentive and a reason for someone to join your newsletter. People are not willing to just hand over their email address with no idea what they will be getting in return. The newsletter should always carry relevant, useful content, nut just advertising. As long as it is useful, people will love it and pass it on to several friends. Again, remember to actively ask them to pass it on. If you don't ask them to pass it on, even if they are willing to do so, they may just forget or not even think about it. To start a newsletter, all you need is a mailing list server. You can get a free one from Listbot.com or Egroups.com, or use a commercial one you pay for, such as Sparklist.com.
Free Email
Be another Hotmail. Give away free email accounts. Every time someone sends email from them, a small signature goes out to the recipient with your URL and a short description, just like Hotmail. And whenever they check their email they have to visit your site. You can quickly set up for free as an email provider at Everyone.net.
News And Articles
Your site should always have relevant and ever-new content. One free way of achieving this is to sign up for iSyndicate's (Isyndicate.com) or Moreover's (Moreover.com) services. These push relevant news and articles to your site.
Link Away
Provide easy ways for other sites to link to you. Have a page that showcases a variety of different banners and other links that webmasters can place on their sites. Offer the HTML for each of those links to make it easy for webmasters to copy and paste on their sites. Also offer an affiliate program so you can reward the performance of webmasters who link to you. Do all you can do to make it easy, profitable and interesting for people to tell others about you.
Recommend This Site
Other than an email-this-page and an affiliate program, one more thing you can do to get people to tell others about you is to add a recommend-this-site button. Most people will never click on it unless there is something in it for them, so offer them something free in exchange or a chance to win a big prize. You can sign up free with Recommend-It (Recommend-it.com). They will give you a neat button that tells your users to recommend your site in exchange for a chance to win $10,000 - and they supply the prize money!
These are some of the tools and principles that created and continue to create businesses that thrive in the new economy. you can implement all of them on your site in a day if you put your mind to it, and for very little money (if any). The benefits will be immense if you do it right. More than anything else, stickiness and a viral nature are the most important elements of marketing online businesses, arguably even more than branding and advertising.
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