Costs of viral marketing

The costs of viral marketing are hard to nail down exactly, but the truth is, there is very little cost. That is one of the reasons people want to master this technique so bad. The truth is that by putting together a buzz-worthy product that naturally attracts attention, you can spend your time and money working on my business instead of trying to build links to it and advertise it all over the web.

Creating a buzz-worthy product and getting the right people to talk about it can be one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising for small business owners on a tight budget. And this is what viral marketing is. So, you can see, that since word of mouth is the most honest advertising medium there is, it is also the cheapest. People don't want to hurt their friends and family and colleagues with bad information, and no one is paying them to spread the word, so basically, you get marketing without cost.

However, this is not free marketing. You have to create a product worth talking about. So, the cost of viral marketing could be called the costs that are required to take a truly buzz worthy product. The results of viral marketing are easy to track. For example, a publisher of a book can easily track that incoming link from a popular blog to find that a single blog post resulted in a dozen book sales, etc. So if you are paying for blog posts, or articles that are generating sales, then that is the cost of your viral marketing.

Viral marketing campaigns both online and off are especially important to small businesses and start-ups because they usually cost almost nothing. Like was mentioned earlier, the real money it takes to get a iral marketing campaign going is the time and effort that it takes to build a product worth talking about.

So, if your business has more creativity then money for marketing, then you can still make marketing work for you if you come up with a great enough product, and employ the viral marketing technique. If you spend your time and effort creating a really good product, both the search engines and your customers will like you, which translates into more word of mouth, or voluntary marketing, and thus more sales and higher profit margins.

This is not to say viral marketing is free if you make a good product, it is not. You still need to spend time making sure that your site is indexable by the search engines, so this can take some time and money. You also need to do some keyword research so that your site gets pulled up when searches are done. You need to do your tags right. This all takes time and money. You should also do some copy editing, as this also tends to pay off.

However, the reality continues to be that search engines are simply trying to deliver the best quality site to a searcher, and so if your product is good, and your site represents it well, you should be able to spend little other money and be successful through viral marketing. If you have a usable site, and if you offer great products, then both search engines and shoppers will find their way to your door. You can stop paying for links, etc.

So to sum up, the costs of viral marketing are what you make of them, but with a buzz worthy product you can spend next to nothing and get great results. With a poor product you will spend a lot trying to get links and get placed at the top of a search engine.