Viral Marketing

One aspect of my job as the founder of a software company that I find surprisingly interesting is marketing. I have no marketing budget, but I informally committed to using viral marketing to generate traffic to my website. I knew I couldn't afford magazine ads and I wasn't ready to pay for Google Adwords or banner ads on industry websites.

At first, I just used an online forum in my industry that reaches my target audience. I looked for posts where I felt that I could contribute something to the discussion, but I never mentioned my company or my products. I didn't want to be spammy. I put my name and a link to my website in my signature, though, and I started getting traffic to my website from the forum. In the beginning, about 40% of my traffic came through that website.

Then, a guy on that forum with a website and blog dedicated to the product I develop for noticed my freebie and e-mailed me, letting me know he wanted to post something about my product and my company. He put a link to my website on a page where he has other links to products related to the product I develop for and he posted an announcement on his blog. I got a handful of links from his site every day for a few days and even though it has been months since his blog posting, I still get a few referrals from him per week.

Better still, some other bloggers who just re-broadcast other people's blogs in the same industry made mention of my website. I was surprised by how quickly news spread about my product and company. I had heard of viral marketing, but didn't realize how successful it could be, with very little effort on my part. Back in December, 35% of my web traffic came from the online forum I mentioned, and another 25% came from blogs. I had 234 visits from 166 unique visitors

But recently, I've gotten the product managers for the product I develop on to announce my product releases on their blog and when they do, I get flooded not only with web traffic, but I'll have a dozen people register per day on the site after their post and download the freebies (vs 10-20/week on average). And since they have the most popular blog for my client base, other bloggers and forum users from around the globe then re-broadcast their announcements and now I'm getting referrals from all over the web.

Looking at my stats for the last month (ending yesterday), during which I had two product releases (one was just an update for the new version of the product I develop on), I had 726 visits from 459 unique visitors. More than 50% of my traffic was direct (in part because I sent out e-mail notices to my list of users). 23% of visitors came from the product managers' blog. The rest of the traffic is split up over many sources - 37 more to be exact. Various blogs, online forums, and a few things I cannot decipher.

24 visits, or over 3% of total visits, originated from google searches (not counting google searches from foreign google websites like google.co.uk). I never implemented a Google Adwords campaign because people googling the terms I would use are already finding my site for free.

Viral marketing is my new best friend. Some days I wonder if I might like my next career to be in marketing. Until I started this company, I never would have guessed how interested I would be in marketing. Especially viral marketing where I can watch the message spread over the Internet. It's fascinating!