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Using "Subviral Marketing" to promote your site
by Gene (aka $5 Submissions) from
www.webmasterlabor.com
Subviral marketing involves creating parodies or tangential take offs of your ads and distributing them over the Internet to create a buzz regarding your product/service. The many differing versions (official and unofficial) of Mastercard's "Priceless" campaign are examples of this marketing approach. Not all (indeed, some indications point that most) of these 'spoofs' are even sanctioned by the official site but they do create brand awareness.
This is different from viral marketing where the official site directly sanctions and designs the materials that users will push to their friends. Moreover, your brand is CORRECTLY identified in VIRAL marketing. Example: You have a large breast fetish site--circulate a flash game (with clickable links) testing the user's ability to test which breast is enchanced or natural. Another example: run a picture test of penises and ask the user to identify if it's enhance or not--and end the flash segment with a link or ad to your penis enhancement site.
Subviral marketing thrives on spoofs or irreverent takes on one's brand. The best source for these obviously is your existing user base. Example: create an area in your site for "Fan Art" where your users can post their impressions of your content/favorite stars, etc. Make these areas easily accessible to the public at large and easy to spread (via "Send to friend" cgi scripts).
Another approach is to create spoof versions of your sites and "viralize" the areas where people can send their friends your spoofed marketing materials.
Subviral marketing also provides a great benefit to your marketing strategies by allowing you to create spoof campaigns that leverage existing trends like the current "OWNED" trend.
Concrete steps for sub-viralizing your site:
1) Look at your logs and figure out the areas of your site that gets the most traffic.
2) Do a content analysis: which item on the page get the most views/clicks?
3) Either ask your surfers for their fan art based on the particular page or create your own spoof Flash animation or picture
4) Put a link on the trafficked page to the spoof
5) Add a "Forward to your friends" script on the spoofed page
6) Ask for feedback
Remember, these steps are just suggestions, feel free to tweak it so that it works best with your existing content and operations.