(Article) Using sub viral marketing to market your site
 

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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.

To "push" your parodies along, try posting the links to the following:

1) Bulletin boards

2) Fan sites

3) Blog comments at the bigger "opinion maker" blogs out there

4) Funny joke yahoo groups

5) Joke lists at Topica & Lycos

nice read! :thumbsup

another great article man =)

Yet another from $5 Submissions....

This guy could be the GFY MVP!

Another thing... you can save your Viral flash video as an AVI and distribute it over Kazaa. It won't be clickable but hopefully a seeding of say 100 will exponentially increase as other users download from each other. The key here is to get some cheap branding going to your spoof site which DOES have links.:2 cents:

great article :thumbsup

hmmmmmmmmm

Thanks, Rob!

another great article as always

nice article $5 submissions

I still have to think of my tittles for them :thumbsup

Very helpful article, as usual. Thank you! :thumbsup

good read mate:thumbsup

Great info as allways:thumbsup

great article as usual gene, bookmarked the archive page

another good article :thumbsup

I thought this was gonna be hacking thread!

Where to buy interactive stuff that are customizable?

Nice article Gene! Always putting out good info. :thumbsup

No doubt :thumbsup :thumbsup

To add to the distribution list: another good place would be guestbooks. Add your downloadable stuff's link so you it is not obvious spam

great article :thumbsup

Good stuff.
I actually made a few sales off my parody:
http://www.ogreporn.com

http://banners.wildrhino.com/fofb/dial.gif
That post was a flash of fucking brilliance. The author of this post has earned $20 from FLASHCA$H and our eternal gratitude for making time spent on the boards more worth while. THANK YOU!

Email [email protected] or ICQ 261-416-675 to arrange for your cash.
http://www.flashoffuckingbrilliance.com

What he said. Good ideas and good articles definitely make it worthwhile to filter through the fluff. Good job!:thumbsup

Now, where do I get a good flash designer?

Nice!!! :thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup

$5, here's my contribution. Use these sub-viral modules to promote your site via contests (free site content giveaways, etc). Contests push modules really well!:thumbsup

Useful posts as always $5 :thumbsup