Over the past 12 months I’ve been watching the internet for any truly viral marketing successes so I can use it as a word of mouth case study, and I’ve finally found one.

It came out in that classic lull that telemarketers, publicists and online marketers always want to take advantage of,  Christmas Day (apologies to devout Christians.)

Viral marketing means marketing that spreads like a flu epidemic, by passing from one person to many others and from those people to many more again.

It takes planning and skill to make viral marketing explosions happen deliberately.

For example, I’m on the Board of Advisors for the American Association of Business Professionals and Entrepreneurs™ (AABPE™) that launched Jan 1.

But just look at the comparison here…

The webprosperity site has raced up. (Remember this scale is logarithmic, which means on a normal graph it would be shooting up even faster like a stunt motorcyclist hitting the ramp.)

Keys to making something go viral really fast online and offline are…

• Have an offer that directly matches a market that is just waiting for this
• Include immense credibility to give people enough trust so they can act immediately
• Make it really easy for people to join
• Make it easy, and give incentives, to spread the word (this is where most people go wrong.)

In this case all of this is helped along by 3 other features of a product launch…

• Signing up is free – okay not my favorite recommendation, but when you want to go viral quickly this is pretty much mandatory.
• The January 6 noon Deadline, with a countdown clock – that’s a reliably brilliant play on scarcity [and they have gone one better by at the last minute extending the deadline by 7 days to Tues Jan 13! Nice one.]
• The Social Proof – notice the names of the last 4 people to sign up are listed at the top, often only seconds ago, which makes it much more impactful than most sites where I’ve seen this.

WebProsperity is an internet marketing service I could use if it comes up to scratch, and there are some very, very clever marketers behind this so I’m watching for what they come up with next.

You can’t visit the site without a link so here’s mine so you can check it out…

word.webprosperity.com (no longer links because I stopped with it.)

Can you go viral too?

[Jan 12: Now they have released some more details as an FAQ on their blog, I have enough to say I will be joining up. And yes the viral spike on Alexa continued.]

[Apr 16: The products didn't turn out to be as complete as was necessary for all the build-up claims eg that you can be "selling like the billion-dollar companies with no learning curve...". Pity, because they have managed to keep a good flow of traffic ever since so they must be doing something right. Oh well.]

-Martin Russell

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