Word of Mouse Pitfalls Controversial

Bulls-Eye! She got it, I’m interested!

What’s the article about?

It’s about how to avoid pitfalls of viral marketing and turn it into a windfall. Well, I thought some parts of what the article says is a little…

What is viral marketing to you? I’m going not to be bombastic with words, it simply means spreading through word of mouth.

Here’s an example of a problem associated with negative sites or people that the article discussed. You are a online book retailer with an affiliate program installed. Anyone that signs up as an affiliate with your program and makes a sale will get a cut of commission. The problem is (as described on the article) that it is troublesome approving every affiliate, creating guidelines and monitoring - bottom line is it’s time consuming.

Their solution is: Choose who is worthy of the virus (I think they mean viral marketing of the product or services), limiting relationship.

Use a moderated approach. Send surfers (I think they mean their affiliates) the information directly on how to link and what graphic to use. This gives a better control of the graphics and more direct communication with those who would use the program wisely.

Ironically, they say it’s time consuming approving affiliates and creating guidelines, when their affiliates can create thousands of sales for them. Hmm? So it’s troublesome to have more affiliates spreading the word around making more money for you? I thought you only need to create just one set of guidelines and put it online for your affiliate to download? How much trouble can that be?

Internet have make it much easier, the owner only have to put it up online and let their affiliates to either view on their browsers or download the PDF file.

Use a moderated approach? (Their solution) When they say their problem was having the need to moderate or approve their affiliates, what do they mean actually? It’s time consuming to approve affiliates and now the solution is to use moderated approach? Ain’t the both the same meaning?

I have to agree that using a generic marketing tool for their affiliates is one of the best ways to “control” the overall marketing and branding. Most business owners will have their affiliate marketing tool in place for their affiliates. It only makes sense to provide the necessary information to your affiliates when they are going to spread the word around for you.

Frankly, I wouldn’t mind anyone sign up my affiliate program. The more affiliates promoting your product or services the better. Ain’t what the affiliate program is there for? The more the merrier? If people want to join your affiliate program and advertise your product on unrelated sites, they can always submit in false information about themselves and where they will promote your products or services.

So why bother?

Get the basic and necessary information and approve their sign ups. Simply just get anyone off the affiliate program once they are catch with abusing it.

Here’s an screen shot of Amazon’s affiliate back office. An array of marketing tools.

Here’s another problem they mentioned.

Too much of a Good Thing

Viral tactics are designed to grow exponentially. It’s so easy to click “Forward”, add 10 addresses, and hit “Send”. When you are dealing with Web promotions, the action might involve the respondents hitting your website, registering, downloading a large file, requesting, a freebie or buying something.

Is your Web server ready for a 10 to 100 fold increase in traffic within a day? Is your response staff ready? Is your budget ready?

I shall not write down what the solution the article gave because it ain’t a good solution.

It’s a no brainer anyway.

If your traffic increases simply just increase your bandwidth with your server hosting.

If you require a bigger server simply just call your server hosting.

It’s a good problem to have! The more traffic you have to your website the higher the chance of selling your product or services. Most hosting plan are able to handle a surge in traffic. Unless you are some big website expecting exponential amount of traffic then you should have bigger server instead.

If you are looking for a hosting server, I would recommend you to use Hostgator which is the one that I’m using.

After all, I had a good read about this article. It’s interesting to know what other thinks about viral marketing. For me, it is one of the best marketing strategy around and probably the earliest form of marketing.

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