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I really love this viral marketing ad of Heineken. Check it out!

7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing

Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it… instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing – and let your fans do all the work for you. With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it. It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

But how?

There are a lot of tricks to viral marketing. Here are 7 important ones:

1: Make people feel something

The most important trick of all is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion, to express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:

• be filled with love or hate.
• be very happy or insanely angry
• be an idiot or a genius
• be deeply compassionate or an egoistic bitch

You want people’s blood to be pumping of excitement. Forget neutral, trying to please everyone, supporting several target groups or any of the many ways to be unbiased. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.

2: Do something unexpected

This one explains itself. If you want people to notice you campaign, you have to do something different – something unexpected. Forget about trying to promote your products as just being great – everybody does that. Forget about trying to make it look cool – everyone else has “been there, done that”. Remember the bear being attacked by a man? That was unexpected – and it is one the most effective viral advertisements ever.

…and above all – never be a copycat.

3: Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)

One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share – it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage – and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you! Viral marketing is all about a good story. When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen – yet everyone remembers it.

Forget about you, your product or your company. Focus exclusively in creating a good and interesting story. Sure, you can add you product into the mix, but it must not be the most important thing.

4: Make sequels People have just seen your campaign.

They think it was interesting, unexpected and their emotions has reached a high level – you have their complete attention.

Now what do you do?

If you do like most companies you will simply do nothing… and that is a big mistake. When you got people’s attention you need to act, and one the best ways of doing that is to give them more – make sequels. This can be many things;

It can be extra movies similar in concept to the first one – like BMW Films and Nissan did.

• It can be a behind the scenes look
• Bloopers
• A blog about the process (like Nissan did)
• Extra material, goodies etc.
• …or all of the above

Never leave people standing with nothing.

BTW: Forget about countdown releases – i.e. releasing a new episode every 2 weeks. People’s attention span does not last that long. Give them everything now!

5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding´

Sharing is what viral marketing is all about. Everything you do to make that easier is going to improve your campaign. That means that you need allow people to:

• Download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.)
• Allowing them to easily embed the content on their own sites (Note: remember bandwidth issues)
• Sending it to friends, either using a link or by sending the content directly.
• Publishing it on varies social networks – Digg, YouTube etc.
• Allow people to add it the bookmarking sites
• Note: This also easily be overdone. You do not want to clutter up your page with a zillion “share me, dig this etc.” icons.

6: Connect with comments

Another important element is to connect with your audience. Remember you got their attention, they are excited and now they want talk. Comments is one of the most effective ways to do this. Keep in mind that the best viral marketing campaign is one that creates a strong emotion. This means some people will really like it – while others will get very angry. You have to accept both in your comments, and you have to welcome both opinions. But, at the same time you must prevent individuals to wage war against each other. It is not a sin to delete comments from people who attack another person, or if the comment is off-topic. But, it is a sin to delete comments from people who just have an negative opinion. And, most importantly. Connecting with people through comments means talking back. Do not add comments if you do not want to participate yourself.

7: Never restrict access!

Viral marketing is also about your campaign getting a life on its own – spreading like virus. In order to do that, in order to become “viral”, it needs to be free. Never add restrictions to the mix.

• Do not require people to register
• to become members
• to download special software
• to enter “unlock” codes
• …or to do something in order to get the right link.

Viral marketing is never about exclusivity. It is about getting it out there for everyone to see. ——————————————————————————–

There is a common message in all of these tricks. It is that you need to make it right – or not do it at all. Only the best viral marketing campaigns make it – the rest literally sucks. If you have any tips of your own, I sure would like to know about them! Also, If would very like to see any cool viral advertisement that you might know.

Other cool “virals”

The Smirnoff viral One of the first really successful viral campaigns in the “YouTube age”

Dove Evolution A true viral campaign, showing artificial beauty – and it worked!

Source: Thomas Baekdal

How Much Should I Charge for my Advertising Space?

As soon as a blogger decides to play with direct advertising, the question of “how much to charge” emerges. If you charge too much, you might end up with no advertisers at all. If you charge too little, on the other hand, you will be leaving money on the table.

Unfortunately, as Brian wonders, there are no standard pricing structures across the Internet. You will need to take a look around, do some research, and experiment on your own site to find the rates that will maximize your revenues.

That being said, that are some methods that you can use to draw an initial price tag, and some specific places where you can look to cross check the numbers. Below we will cover them.

Defining the metrics: The CPM

Notice that talking about advertising prices in absolute values is useless.

Suppose there are two blogs. One charges $500 monthly for a 125×125 banner spot above the fold, while the other charges $1,000 for a similar spot. Could we say that the first blog offers a much better deal for advertisers?

Obviously not, because the value that the advertiser will get for its money depends on a myriad of factors, above all the traffic that each of the two blogs receives monthly.

If the first blog generates 100,000 monthly page views while the second generates 500,000 monthly page views, an advertiser would be better off by purchasing the advertising space of the second blog for $1,000.

As you can see, the answer to our question comes from a very simple ratio: cost of the advertising space divided by the traffic that the ad will receive.

Several metrics could be used to define traffic, from unique visitors to visits and page views. Most publishers tend to use page views though. Moreover, it is a common practice to measure page views by the thousands, so one should talk about cost per 1,000 page views or impressions. CPM is the term for that, and it stands for Cost Per Mille (Mille being the Latin word for 1,000).

Just to conclude our example, if you do a small calculation you can see that the first blog has a $5 CPM while the second one has a $2 CPM.

Now, we are not suggesting that you should tie your ad rates to the number of monthly impressions of your blog. Offering a flat monthly rate to advertisers is usually the best (and simpler) way to go. Just keep the CPM numbers in mind because they will enable you to compare your prices with those of other bloggers.

What do other bloggers charge?

Like it or not, the Internet behaves like a giant market place, and all websites are subject to the laws of supply and demand. In other words, if you set a price that is significantly higher than the one used by other blogs on your niche, the advertisers will go somewhere else.

The first thing you should do, therefore, is to take a look on blogs that sell advertising space to evaluate what rates they are asking.

The format of the ad (e.g., 468×60, 120×600, 125×125) and the position (e.g., header, sidebar, footer, blended with content) are factors that will directly influence the final price, so in order to be consistent through out your research you should pick a format and position that is popular.

Among blogs selling direct advertising space the 125×125 button ad on top of the sidebar is arguably the most used format, and it should fit our research purpose.

Let’s see what popular blogs on the online marketing sphere are charging, for instance. If you visit the Advertising page of Copyblogger, you will find that the blog generates over 1,000,000 monthly page views, and a 125×125 spot on the sidebar costs $1,500. Divide $1,500 by 1,000 (remember that 1,000,000 is equal to 1,000 times 1,000 page views) and you get a CPM of $1,5.

Similarly, if you visit JohnChow you will find that the 125×125 button add costs $500 monthly, and the blog generates 300,000 page views. Again just do $500 divided by 300 and you get a CPM of $1,66.

As you can see a CPM of $1,5 for the 125×125 buttons is a good average. Even TechCrunch charges a similar rate ($10,000 for 6,5 million page views monthly, converting to a CPM of $1,53), so let’s keep that number as a starting point.

Adapting to your own situation

All the blogs mentioned are viewed as authorities on their niche, which affects how much advertisers are willing to pay to get exposed to their audiences. If your blog is new or if you are just beginning to experiment with direct advertising, therefore, you probably should start with a lower CPM.

Start asking a $0,5 CPM, for example, and as your blog grows and more advertisers come along you can gradually raise it. If you have a blog generating 100,000 monthly page views this would translate into $50 monthly for each 125×125 button placed on your sidebar.

If you are going to use other ad formats or position the ads on other locations of your website just estimate how these factors will affect the traffic that an advertiser will end up getting. Placing a 300×250 banner on the sidebar, for instance, is similar to having 4 125×125 ads, so you could charge 4 times the price of the 125×125 ad ($200 monthly if your blog generates 100,000 impressions, converting to a $2 CPM).

Similarly, increase the CPM if the ad is on the header or blended with the content, and decrease it if the ad will be displayed below the fold or on the footer.

Keep in mind that you should consider real page views for these evaluations. Most web stats programs and software tend to over estimate the traffic on your site. Google Analytics is usually the most reliable one.

Cross checking the numbers and experimenting

In order to cross check the numbers with an external source you could join an advertising network (either CPC based like Google Adsense or CPM based) and use it on the spots where you plan to sell direct advertising.

If you are planning to sell a 300×250 banner spot below your posts, for instance, you could firstly put a Google AdSense unit there and measure the CPM that it will give. Most direct advertising deals should bring you more money that what advertising networks do, mainly because you are cutting out the commissions and negotiating directly with the advertisers.

Finally, remember to experiment endlessly and draw your own conclusions. What works for one blog may not work for another, and vice-versa.

Source:  Problogger, but was originally written by Daniel Scocco on Daily Blog Tips.