Viral Adverts – Four Steps To A Billion Bucks
The rapid growth of Hotmail is widely accepted to have been one of the first, and most successful, examples of viral adverts on the internet.
In 1996, hotmail began with just 100 users and within a couple of weeks more than 400,000 people were using their email service – All thanks to one line of advertising at the foot of each email and the power of viral adverts.
So let’s examine the vital elements of a successful viral advertising campaign.
Number One: You have to provide the user with a reason to spread the idea…again and again and again!
Why did the hotmail campaign work so well?
Simple! They provided people with a free email account, when all other providers were charging a monthly fee.
They gave people a reason to send their email using Hotmail (because it was free), then used the foot of every email to promote the service to other people. And due to the nature of email, when people saw how quick and easy the system was to use, they continued to send out messages on a regular basis.
So to make your viral adverts work, you must give your users an incentive to spread the word, either indirectly (through the use of a valuable service – such as Hotmail) or directly in return for some other benefit. The most frequently used incentives are financial (for example, affiliate schemes where users are paid for referring new customers) and social (where people can boost their reputation among their peers for telling them about high quality products and services).
Number Two: You have to make it easy for the virus to spread
Anyone who received an email from a Hotmail user was presented with a link at the foot of the email saying “Click here to get your FREE Hotmail account”
If they wanted a free email account all they had to do was click on the link and enter a few basis details. It was quick and easy.
Compared to what they were going to get (a free email account when everyone else was charging) the inconvenience of entering your username and a password was minimal.
Despite their great power to spread rapidly, viral adverts are very delicate. If you make it too difficult for people to spread your viral ads, the effect will quickly die out.
So don’t make your users click twice or fill out two fields when one will do. The easier you make it for people to promote your adverts, the faster they will spread.
Number Three: You have to make your viral adverts as infectious as possible
There’s no point creating a viral advertising campaign, giving users a reason to promote it, making it easy to promote yada yada, if the adverts don’t have any effect on the people who see them.
If your conversion rate is too low, people will soon stop promoting your adverts and the whole mechanism will soon collapse. Let’s face it, if 99% of people are immune to a virus, it’s never going to become a major problem.
Here’s a quick example. If your user base increases by 2% every generation of your viral ads, after 100 generations it will have increased by 624%. But if your conversion rate doubles and your user base increases by 4% every generation of your viral ads, after 100 generations it will have increased by 4950%. Doubling your conversion rate will lead to a user base that’s eight times larger after 100 generations of your viral adverts.
Number Four: Your viral ads must have as short an incubation time as possible
The incubation period of a virus is the length of time it takes from one person being infected to the time when they’re able to infect someone else.
It’s a simple rule. The shorter the incubation period, the faster the virus is able to spread. If we begin with ten users, and the number of users increase by 50% every generation of the virus, and each generation lasts one month, after 1 year (or 12 generations of the virus), there would be 130 users.
Now if we shorten the incubation period to two weeks, after 1 year (or 26 generations of the virus), there would be 37,876 users.
And finally, if we shorten the incubation period to one week, after 1 year (or 52 generations of the virus), there would be more than 1.4 billion users.
Now let’s consider Hotmail. If we assume that the incubation period ran from the time when someone signed up for a new account, to the time when their first email was read by the recipient, in some cases the incubation period was as short as a couple of minutes.
Within the space of 24 hours, it was possible for the Hotmail viral advertising strategy to pass through many generations. 1 user, 2 users, 4 users, 8 users, 16 users, 32 users, 64 users until they ended up with an extremely big number. Within the space of 12 months, Hotmail grew from nothing to become a business worth more than $1.5 billion.
So if you want to make your first billion, all you need to do is develop viral adverts that are highly infectious, easy to spread and quick to replicate, then put them in the hands of a small group of people who have a strong incentive to spread them over and over again.
The Widgeteers are an advertising company and publisher of content on free methods of increasing traffic like viral adverts to websites http://www.thewidgeteers.com
Tags: Viral Adverts
