Viral Marketing with eBooks and Widgets

Introduction

There are a number of ways of creating a viral 'buzz' on the internet. The aim of these campaigns is for your link to spread throughout the internet as quickly as possible. Use social media and standard link systems to propagate the information about your viral 'bait' across the web.

If you are a good writer or a paparazzo then this could be a story of a photograph. But if you are an internet marketer it's more likely to be a free report or maybe an app or widget.

As a writer and a sometime programmer the eBook and the widget are my preferred methods and it's these that I will discuss here. Of course, I will use my own content as examples (which is another excuse for me to give them a plug).

The Free eBook

Giving away free eBooks and free reports has been a central marketing strategy... and it still works. The aim is to provide an eBook (you can use a mix of blog posts and fresh content) that is full of links to your website. If you have a product you can also plug that product at the end of the book.

I've done exactly this from my Free Halloween Recipes eBook. For this eBook, you just go to the link page I have provided and download the eBook, free, no strings. Most marketers want you to enter your eMail address before you grab the eBook as this lets them grow their list. But I am not that kind of marketer.

I'm a writer and the eBook has links to the other recipe books that I've written.

Basically what I'm doing here is providing something useful for people completely free, but at the end of the eBook I am providing links back to my site and links to the other eBooks I have written.

On the download page I tell people that they are free to download and distribute the eBook as they see fit. They can send to their friends or they can add as a download on their own website. This is the key of any viral campaign, get the word to spread as much as possible.

I also know a marketer who has a very large list and she will send the eBook to her list (2 million people), which is an incredible way of viral marketing.

So why don't you go over to my other site and download the Free Halloween Recipes eBook for yourself to see what I have done with it and how the process works.

The Free Widget

Widgets can also be a great way of viral marketing or of getting backlinks to your site. I wrote a JavaScript method to convert between different volume, weight and temperature measurements a long while ago. Then it dawned on me that I could package what I had done in a simple way that would be suitable for putting in the sidebar of a website or a blog. I added this to my blogs and my website and it worked well.

It was served from a central site so I could update and adapt the application, but it could be deployed anywhere. A little tinkering with the code and I had something that anyone could use.

I branded it and put a backlink to my site in there. What I eventually got was this:

Unit Converter

A classic functioning widget. I then put a 'This widget on your site' link in the widget and I wrote about it on guest blogs, saying that the code to embed in websites and blogs was freely available for anyone to use. Then I watched the code get used and the backlinks to my site increase.

Some very simple coding proved to be incredibly valuable in getting links back to my site.

If you run a recipes or food site, or a site using measurements, then you can go to my: Add the Celtnet Unit Converter Widget to your site page to grab it for yourself.

Conclusion

Neither of these two methods took me very long to write over all, but by being clever I was able to distribute them through the web. The ebook literally landed on millions of users' desktops and the widget was placed on many hundreds of sites.

I obtained lots of backlinks and lots of visitors (and sales) to my sites and products. All for a couple of days' work, all told.

Viral marketing really, really, works.