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It all
starts with a simple story.
A few days ago,
I came across Seth
Godin's new e-book, "Everybody's
An Expert" (it's free, and you can download it from
here). It's about a new
way of finding information on the web - through recommendations
and peer reviews. At 32 pages, it's a quick read. Through the
e-book, Seth promotes his new project, Squidoo
(don't worry, this is going somewhere).
To quote from the Squidoo blog:
"We've built a platform that makes it
easy for anyone, even a newbie, to teach people about topics they care about.
We believe that everyone is an expert about something, and the Squidoo.com
platform is designed to make it easy to do that."
Fairly interesting - and the best part
about this is, it's a fresh and extremely useful way of
raising your website's search engine rankings.
While we wait for Squidoo to come out of beta (it was launched on Oct 17, but is limited to beta users only), there's an important lesson in all this. The marketing.
Seth has, perhaps better than anyone
else, perfected the art of viral marketing
- in essence, how to spread information / news about a product or service
through referrals and word-of-mouth publicity. Despite a strange name (viral
isn't immediately a friendly term), viral marketing has proved remarkably
successful in drumming up news coverage and publicity for newly launched
products and services.
For Squidoo, Seth used a relatively
simple but powerful publicity technique known as
buzz marketing. Essentially, it is a viral marketing tactic that
creates instant value for the product by restricting
access to only a few "selected" people in the target audience. By
deliberately choosing "targets" who can easily
influence their peers (say journalists, industry leaders, experts,
business owners, etc.), buzz marketing creates a word-of-mouth campaign where
consumers (flattered to be included in the elite group of those "in the know")
willingly spread the word to their friends and colleagues.
Remember last year,
when
GMail
was launched? It was an invite-only offering, and that instantly
created a natural "buzz" about it on the Internet. People were
talking about it in chat rooms, on blogs, on their websites, everywhere.
GMail invites even went for sale on EBay!
Back to Squidoo.
The e-book promoting Squidoo ("Everyone's
an Expert") was posted
on Seth's blog on Oct 7. Today, almost two weeks later, I took
a quick look around the blogosphere to check its popularity:
-
Did a quick search on
Technorati
(leading search engine for blogs) and found 249
posts talking about Squidoo already.
-
In the top 10 for searches done at Technorati in the
past day (we're talking tens of thousands of searches here).
-
Checked the track backs (people linking to Seth's post
promoting the launch) - 46 so far.
Think about it. Within two weeks, this launch has already been covered by over 250
blogs, each with a readership of its own. Within two weeks, this launch has
already been read about by tens of thousands of people, most of them content
publishers / business owners who are looking to reach the largest possible
number of readers.
By now you're probably thinking: "But
Seth is a well-respected, well-read marketer. He's already published so many
books. It's easy for him to build
this kind of a buzz this quickly."
In other words:
"How the heck does this help me?"
Let's find out.
What happened when websites and blogs started talking about Squidoo?
Within a week, the site received
249 new links - all one-way,
in original, user-generated content.
Not even ONE reciprocal link exchange.
This is organic marketing at its best.
Instead of getting 500+ reciprocal, low-value links, you get 200+ very
valuable, very powerful one-way links.
Looking at this in another way, think
about the niche Squidoo is competing in. Content
publishing. They're going up against powerhouses like Blogger, Typepad,
WordPress, MSN Spaces (to name just a few). In addition, because this will be
an information-rich resource, they're also up against Wikipedia, About.com and
other content giants.
A heavy-hitting market to jump
headfirst in. And how are they building their search engine rankings?
Entirely through
organic marketing.
Now I'm not saying that everyone
should do that. Seth's a big name in marketing, and for the rest of us,
building organic, one-way links is a long-term process that involves
meticulous content building.
So don't give up your reciprocal link
campaigns just yet. For most websites, buzz marketing is not enough to create
massive search engine rankings, and you'll still need the rest of your
marketing strategy (content-building, link exchanges, article submissions, etc)
in full flow.
But if you're looking for one-way
links - links that bring you added link
popularity AND targeted traffic
- then give buzz marketing a serious try.
The
Internet is a powerful
social medium. It allows people to offer opinions and recommendations
on different topics almost instantly. Buzz marketing is about
harnessing this power and using it to promote your own product
or service.
It's crazy how
quickly news can spread across the web by word-of-mouth - or in this case, through websites, blogs, emails and IMs (instant
messengers). Squidoo is just one example - in the past few months, several new
product launches have been promoted just through word-of-mouth advertising -
consumers creating a "buzz" by recommending the product to their friends,
reviewing the service on their blogs, creating affiliate pages on their
websites - in short, word-of-mouth advertising works, and it works well.
But exactly
how does it work? Here
are the necessary ingredients:
Identify Your Target Audience
If
you maintain a niche business such as knitting, you might think
it's impossible to create a "buzz" about your new service or product
on the Internet. You'd be wrong. Any topic / niche that has a
market (otherwise why would you be in business to begin with?)
is a prime candidate for your buzz marketing campaign.
Figure
out who your target audience
is (people looking for information on knitting - patterns, equipment,
technique (you can tell knitting isn't my strong suit)) and brainstorm
on how you can tailor your campaign to capture their interest.
In
addition, you'll also want to look at the
"authority" websites in the niche - the leading blogs and
websites in your industry. These can be used as launchers for
your word-of-mouth campaign - once the big names review / take
part in your new product launch or service, you are guaranteed
exposure in that niche.
Give
Something Away For Free
This
could be a free e-book (like Seth did with Squidoo) for everyone
who visits your website or a product / service offering to a select
few (an invite-based online membership to your special knitting
club - ok, so maybe that might not work in such a small niche,
but you get the idea).
The
core idea here is to give
something valuable to your readers for free - a report, a
membership, limited access to an online service or a demo version
of your latest software. Make sure that the freebie is of value
(in terms of information or usefulness) to your consumers, and
just as important, structure that freebie to promote your actual
offer - a book launch, product launch, or a service launch.
Give
Them Bait
In
your marketing campaign and in your freebie, give enough information
to generate interest in the subject, but
don't give them everything. If you are promoting a book, you'd
give them a free copy of the first chapter, a bonus report about
the same topic as the book but NOT the actual book itself. In
the same way, if you were promoting a new online service, you
might want provide minimum "marketing" information, and then let
users find out for themselves (either through the "invite-only"
strategy or just by allowing a limited number of people to sign
up at the beginning).
Leave
enough gaps in your
message so that the early users can fill them in for you. This
may sound counter-intuitive, but it's pure gold. People on the
"outside" - everyone without access to the information - will
be looking to the people on the "inside" - people with access
- for more details. And people love to talk, especially when they
know they have select knowledge on the subject. This is key to
creating the "buzz" - interested users discussing and describing
your offer on their own websites, giving you instant credibility,
link popularity, traffic AND best of all - they're
doing the marketing for you.
Easy
To Share
Google
hit gold with their marketing strategy for GMail - allow a select
group of people initial access to the service, and then make it
"invite-based". Suddenly, the value of a GMail account skyrocketed,
and everyone clamored to get one.
A
critical component of the GMail marketing strategy was the ease
with which you or I could send "invites" to other people - just
enter their email address and poof, an email is sent.
If
you want your buzz marketing campaign to be effective, make sure
that your freebie is easy
to share - whether it's an e-book (or a link to it), an invite-only
service or even audio clips from your next seminar.
|
Buzz Marketing - Just A Tool. |
Whether you
follow the advice in this lesson or not, remember that buzz marketing
is just a tool - it's not a complete marketing strategy, and it
should never be taken as such. For any online business, a marketing
strategy involves a lot of different tools (content-building,
SEO, PPC advertising, etc) and buzz marketing is just one of these
tools.
If
you use buzz marketing for your website, make sure you're not
abandoning your marketing strategy.
All the best,
Brad Callen
Professional SEO
SEO
Elite: SEO Software
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