All Entries Tagged With: "Viral Marketing"

Using Articles And Bookmarks To Supercharge Your Viral Marketing

Two days ago I posted on the Blog Content Provider blog how you can use articles in conjunction with blogging to deliver a whopping sucker punch to the search engines and increase your search marketing mojo. Well, did you know you can have a similar effect with article marketing and social bookmarking? No kidding.

Article marketing has always been considered one of the forms of viral marketing. Now, with the advent of social bookmarking, you can take that viral marketing to the extreme. Social bookmarking is viral marketing on steroids.

Try this little marketing experiment for 30 days:

Write 10 articles. Distribute those 10 articles to 10 article directories, one per day for 10 days. After that, bookmark each article at at one of the many bookmarking websites online. You effectively have 100 articles (10 X 10). If you bookmark 5 a day for the next 20 days then you’ll have them all bookmarked at the end of the 30 day experiment.

I suggest that you pick 10 bookmarking websites and focus on those 10. Create a spreadsheet to track your bookmarking. On the top of the spreadsheet, list all 10 article directories where your articles were submitted. Along the left side of the spreadsheet, list your 10 articles. You can use a service like www.socialmarker.com. Go down your list of articles and pick the sites you want to bookmark that article at. It won’t take long using the SocialMarker site. When you’re done, move on to the next article. Do five one day then the next day do five more until all of your articles at each of the directories have been bookmarked.

As you are doing this, check your traffic stats daily and see how much traffic you are getting from each of the websites. If the article directories have stats that allow you to check traffic, even better. That way, you can see how the bookmarking is affecting the articles. But you should expect some of those articles to be picked up and published by others within your industry or niche. Before they publish your article, they’ll likely visit your website. Not everyone who reads your article will visit your website so be prepared for a trickle down effect. But it does work. Viral marketing added to viral marketing equals super viral marketing.

Promote Your Articles Through BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog recently added a Social Dashboard to its functionality. It isn’t direct marketing, but you can promote your articles through BlogCatalog just by submitting them to your favorite article directory then Digging them. In fact, you can run every activity you perform through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious through BlogCatalog so if you bookmark your articles at any one of those three social bookmarking sites then your friends on BlogCatalog will see that activity. It’s just another way of promoting your articles and keeping them viral.

I recommend doing this in phases to make the most impact. Write an article and post it to your blog one week. It will filter through BlogCatalog. Wait about two weeks then send it out to article directories. It will filter through BlogCatalog. The next week, stumble your blog post and it will filter through BlogCatalog again. One week later, Digg the article in an article directory and again it will filter through BlogCatalog. In another week or two save the blog post again (or the article in an article directory) at del.icio.us. Again it will filter through BlogCatalog.

This kind of phased in article marketing will keep your article circulating through the BlogCatalog community for several weeks. The rule of thumb is people must see something 7 times before they act on it. Let’s count: Your blog, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us; that’s 4 times. If you use Twitter, that’s another time that you can hit even though Twitter isn’t a full blog post. You can just leave a comment like “Saved article at such-and-such directory” with a link to the article. That Twit will filter through BlogCatalog. If you Twit each bookmarking activity as well as your original blog post then that’s a total of 9 times that one item filters through BlogCatalog. Any friends that don’t catch it on the first go round will catch it on the next one. Every time an item filters through BlogCatalog you increase your chances of getting another page view and driving traffic to your website.

How’s that for viral marketing?

Article Content Provider