Word of Mouth vs. Viral Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Word-of-mouth marketing or viral marketing? What’s the difference?

Recently I shared with you a few tips on how to generate word-of-mouth marketing for your business. I received a few emails as well as comment post on the difference between word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing, so I figured what better time to explore the differences in these two types of marketing.

Word-of-mouth marketing is when a business does something and their consumer tells five to ten friends. Word-of-mouth marketing has an echo affect. The initial sound is loud and then it fades into the background.

Viral marketing unlike word-of-mouth marketing has a compounding affect. A consumer tells five to ten people and then those five to ten people tell another five to ten people. The driving force behind most viral campaigns is the passion a consumer carries. It’s like a virus that continuously infects more people and spreads without requiring anymore marketing effort.

While the two are similar as you can see they are not the same.

Word-of-mouth marketing is a key component to the growth of a small business. It’s often word-of-mouth marketing that keeps small businesses running in the early days of operation when there is little to no marketing budget. The consumer shares their experience with your products or services and they share it with their family and friends. This increases your consumer base and increases your sales.

Viral marketing is more about reaching out and touching the passion point of your consumer, so that the passion drives the message and the message continues to reach the masses without assistance from you. You can orchestrate a viral campaign, but very seldom are viral campaigns that are orchestrated as successful as those that are just driven by the passion of a consumer. In order for it to reach a level of success

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Want to read the whole article? Click on the link below:

http://marketing.about.com/od/marketingmethods/a/womvsviral.htm

Aside of being a guru, Alex is also a determination figure with his story of his own past: coming from nothing, Alex was broken with only a computer and a access to the internet. After hard research with perseverance although some failure, he finally elevate himself to one of the most authoritative guru today.

Today, Alex Goad is actively at the head of his own company located in Montreal, Canada leading the most and efficient staff with his support team from Google conquest, still producing new stuff, idea and concept. You can visit Alex at his own blog called NetFrontierMarketing for further investigation.

Then imagine if instead of getting only one keyword people are searching for, you get thousand of those! Seems pretty interesting? Wordtracker can also give you undiscovered keyword allowing you to be the first to exploit the niche, import your keywords list, customize your research, save your project for later and allow you to check the keywords competition on multiple search engine.

You can take their 7 days free trial if you want to test their service or if you already set your mind, you can order for monthly or annual subscription which worth the investment that pays for itself quickly. If you have change your mind, they offer a within 30 days money-back guarantee.

I personally use Wordtracker and have ordered their full years membership and strongly suggest to buy one of their membership. If you can’t afford to buy the full-years subscription then you should consider to try at least their monthly subscription. Especially if you are doing SEO, Wordtracker is an asset you can’t pass over as you want the same for your ROI (Return Of Investment)!

Information Overload

Data is like food. A good meal is served in reasonably-sized portions from several food groups. It leaves you satisfied but not stuffed. Likewise with information, we’re best served when we can partake of reasonable, useful portions, exercising discretion in what data we digest and how often we seek it out.

Unfortunately, we often do the opposite, ingesting information constantly to the point of choking on it. The risk of information asphyxiation touches all of us — managers, Web surfers, even lazy couch tubers.

The most obvious locus of information inundation is the office: e-mail, voice mail, phone calls, meetings, business journals, faxes, memos, manuals, Web research. The list goes on. Far from bringing about the anticipated “paperless office” and reduced work load, technological innovations have increased both areas.

David Shenk, in his book Data Smog, reports that between 1980 and 1990, paper consumption in the U.S. tripled to 1,800 pounds per person. Sixty percent of the average office worker’s time is spent processing paper documents. Additionally, “the typical business manager is said to read one million words per week.” That’s the equivalent of one and a half full-length novels per day.

Diminishing Efficiency

Information technology, in fact, often diminishes workplace efficiency. Scientific American (”Taking Computers to Task,” July 1997) pointed out that despite the $1 trillion spent annually across the globe, “productivity growth measured in the seven richest nations has instead fallen precipitously in the last 30 years … Most of the economic growth can be explained by increased employment, trade and production capacity. Computers’ contributions, in contrast, nearly vanish in the noise.”

Blame can be pinned on everything from sound cards to solitaire, that numbing front-desk babysitter.

Also at fault, however, is the medium and people’s lack of training in how to effectively use it. When employees use e-mail to communicate with someone 50 feet away, there’s a problem. Saving customer quotes in a general “user” directory is just asking for the document to become lost among hundreds of other files. Inefficient inventory software yields frustration where a simple list on paper would do the trick.

Outside the Office

The problem continues even outside the office. A Sunday edition of the New York Times carries more information than the average 19th-century citizen accessed in his entire life. Billboards smother our roadways and buildings. In some cities, advertising is even stuck to the sides of police vehicles. (Imagine a patrol car advertising a “run for the border.”) Cable and satellite TV offer dozens of channels of meaningless drivel. The check-out line at the supermarket proffers a host of magazines “educating” the reader on such wide-ranging issues as “10 Ways to the Big O” and new photos of a biblical ark discovered on Mars.

We accept all this input with a tired, sometimes even curious, smile.

Information Fatigue

David Lewis of the International Stress Management Association originated the phrase “information fatigue syndrome.” The barrage of data to which we are constantly exposed carries a cost, both physically and mentally.

In many ways, it is a bona fide addiction. I can live without the Web for a week, but I start getting antsy after a single day without checking my e-mail. At night, I read constantly from the dozen or so periodicals to which I subscribe while my wife channel surfs.

This is our relaxation time? My spotty memory and short attention span are notorious to all who know me. I feel tired constantly, despite regular exercise, yet continue thinking about the day’s information load all the way to unconsciousness.

David Shenk sites psychological studies spanning thirty years and lists several of the symptoms which accompany information overload:

• Increased cardiovascular stress, due to a rise in blood pressure,
• Weakened vision, siting a Japanese study which predicts a nearly universal near-sightedness in the close future,
• Confusion (see below) and frustration,
• Impaired judgement based upon overconfidence,
• Decreased benevolence to others due to an environmental input glut (which may very well account for part of the “brusqueness” which is commonly attributed to big-city dwellers).

There is a common piece of wisdom which holds that any given fact can be twisted to fit one’s needs. Witness the nutrition dilemma. Based on this week’s reports, is milk good or bad for us? The answer, of course, depends on whose report you read. There are so many conflicting reports emerging constantly that one is left not knowing what to believe, a condition sometimes referred to as “paralysis by analysis.”

This phenomenon may account for some of the decline in American health. Angelo A. Alonzo, a professor of medical sociology at Ohio State University, told USA Today Magazine (October 1994), “Health educators may well face a significantly desensitized population, segments of which are immobilized by fear, indecision, and confusion.” When there is no clear method for improving our lifestyles, many adopt the course recommended most often by our mass media: fast food, material consumerism, and apathy.

It is not enough to flee from the problem. Researchers at Israel’s Tel Aviv University studied 76 electronics industry clerks and found that the sense of relaxation and happiness derived from a vacation began to fade only three days after returning to work. Pre-vacation levels of stress and burn-out returned within a mere three weeks (Journal of Applied Psychology, August 1997). For those who remain “in touch” via pagers, cell phones, laptops, radio, and TV, the results will be even more dismal.

On a society-wide level, the dangers of information overload are enormous. The engendered feelings of helplessness, confusion, and anger will erode work efficiency, family functioning, and most likely increase crime rates. We will lack the information-processing skills needed to elect responsible leaders or counter the myriad waves of propaganda pushing our dollars this way and that. (Of course, the argument could be made that this has already happened.)

If an individual’s consciousness is formed by the information and stimuli he experiences, then the influence of data glut on our thinking is undeniable. Buy our food, says the McDonald’s ad, because “it’s not your fault you had to get up this morning.” In accepting this, a media-programmed individual gives up responsibility for his independent actions and is more susceptible to suggestion.

What To Do

So what is to be done? The situation is not at all hopeless. Just as we require food, we similarly need information. The critical thing to remember is that we still have control over the information in our lives. Following are some suggestions on how to exercise that control in the different areas of our day. Overall, the maxim to live by is, “decrease quantity, increase quality.”

1. At the office
   • Be careful with your phone time. Don’t tolerate sitting on perma-hold, listening to elevator music and even more stupid radio commercials. Leave a short, efficient message which indicates precisely what action you want taken and move on. Remember: when in doubt, hit 0 for the operator. A recent Reuters survey found that 20% of all voice-mail time is spent fumbling through menus.
   • Reduce paper. An old boss of mine told me to touch a piece of paper only once. Either use and file it or toss it in the recycle bin. To help facilitate this, switch to a fax/modem instead of a regular fax machine. There is no paper involved, and the “delete” key really can be your best friend.
   • Get organized. CorelCENTRAL or Microsoft’s Outlook are good examples of utilities which will structure your time, clear your desk of neon sticky notes, and maybe even consolidate your fax and e-mail functions. Also check out 3M’s electronic Post-It program, a marvelous jewel which will do wonders to clean your desk.
   • Keep meetings short, sweet, and focused. Make it known from the outset what your time limitations are and confirm beforehand the presence of a constructive agenda. I can’t count the number of precious home hours I’ve lost to a company-bought pizza and managerial meandering.
2. At home
   • Kill your television — or at least make it hard to use. Some families keep just one TV and leave it in the closet except for occasional viewing. Before sitcom stupor sets in, ask yourself, “Is this a good use of my time?” Even television news is mostly fluff designed more to sell commercials than to educate the public. Weather and commercials now account for half of each hour’s broadcast. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services has published findings that TV might actually cause learning disorders (really?!), so try instating a family reading time instead.
   • Keep your phone number unlisted to reduce solicitation calls.
   • Sick of junk mail? Contact the Direct Marketing Association (P.O. Box 9008, Farmingdale NY 11735) with your exact home address along with all the permutations on your name currently in use by junk mailers. Ask to be removed from all the direct mail lists with which they are associated.
   • Prioritize your phone time. It’s taken years, but friends and family have learned to call me with planned discussion items and then not take it personally when I shove the call to a conclusion.
   • Develop a hobby. Many of us feel that we don’t have the time or talent for a hobby, or maybe that was something our parents did — and God knows we don’t want to be like them. A hobby, however, besides having its own inherent rewards (not to mention a second possible source of income) will take time from otherwise wasteful brain drains like TV. Exercise can be viewed as a hobby. It may take an hour out of your nightly rerun ritual, but think of the extra 20 years of health you gain on the backside.
3. On the Net
   • E-mail can be a virus in its own right. Only drop your address (especially on Usenet) when essential, because software robots will see it and automatically add you to marketing lists. Respond to junk e-mail messages indicating that you wish to be removed from the mailing list or else you will contact the sender’s Internet provider (usually postmaster@provider-name.com). Also, you can usually tell which messages are worth your time just by scanning the header. Dump the extraneous ones. Respond to non-important messages as infrequently as possible since correspondence tends to increase exponentially. Finally, take 30 minutes to download and install a good spam filter from Tucows.
   • Newsgroups can consume your life. I used to lurk and contribute in half a dozen groups. Today, I only visit Usenet for research, targeting specific answers and ignoring all other conversation threads.

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Want to read the whole article? Click on the link below:

http://www.gdrc.org/icts/i-overload/infoload.html

What is a Google Slap?

The Google Slap is a term used unaffectionately by mainly small businesses that rely on AdWords accounts through Google to drum up business for their sites. AdWords for Google allows people to have their advertisements for their own businesses on pages with keywords or subjects that relate to their products. Normally people who hold AdWords accounts pay per each time someone clicks on their ad, usually at about $.05-.10 US Dollars (USD) per click.

However, if Google finds or determines that the page that potential customers visit when they click on the ad is not related, is poor in quality, or even loads too slowly, they may take punitive action in the form of a Google Slap. Basically, the Google Slap accomplishes several things at once. First, it drives up the price of your pay per click amount, sometimes asking as much as $10USD per click, which most small vendors cannot afford to pay. Second, they may reduce your page ranking (PR), which will automatically mean you have to pay more to have your ads featured through AdWords.

Google obviously has a right to determine which pages represent the greatest quality and most match to keywords, but in 2008, a round of Google Slap actions on small vendors took considerable toll, driving many companies out of business quickly. Many argued that their pages conformed to Google’s AdWords recommendations for pages, and yet they still receive very low PR rankings. This meant the enormously high pay per click fees were prohibitive, and comparable to banning certain vendors from using AdWords, though searches for information on these pages might still be revealed in a regular Google search, just not in ads.

When some companies receive a Google Slap, just about the only thing they can do is completely change their domain because it is very difficult to challenge Google on their ratings or assessment of pages. There are Internet horror stories on known pages, with excellent authoritative and original information being slapped, and being unable to recover. If you decide Google AdWords is for you, you should definitely read all information about what Google looks for to avoid receiving a Google Slap.

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Want to read the full article? Click on the link below:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-google-slap.htm

The Past and Future of SEO Writing

Dear Colleague,

have you ever tried to attract more visitors from search engines by writing and publishing keyword focused articles?

Actually, I don´t write many articles myself, most articles are written for me by ghostwriters. But it doesn´t matter if you are hiring ghostwriters or writing yourself. If you want your articles to do well in the search engines, you or your ghostwriter must know how to create the perfect article.

In order to give you an edge over other internet marketers, I´ll tell you today how SEO articles used to be written in the past and how they should be written today.

This is how it used to be done:

After a keyword research at Wordtracker, I got a list of thousands of keyphrases. Then, I filtered the list for long keyphrases with few competing pages and a reasonable search count.

The next step was to select between 20 and 50 keyphrases and write one article for each keyphrase, trying to optimize each article to rank well for the given phrase.

How an article used to be optimized in the past (this is how many SEO ghostwriters and internet marketers still do it):

- keyphrase in the title
- keyphrase once or twice in the opening paragraph
- keyphrase again in the middle and once towards the bottom

Unfortunately, repeating the exact keyphrase several times throughout the article doesn´t work anymore to optimize an article. And in many cases, an article like that doesn´t read well. Though it might be unique (remember: uniqueness is one important criteria for an article to do well in the search engines), it´s still a poor article.

The future of writing seo articles:

Well, this future has already begun some time ago, when major search engines started to apply “latent semantic indexing” to their algorithms. LSI or LSA (latent semantic analysis) is quite an old technology – patented in 1988.

Simply put, a search engine that applies this technology doesn´t only look for words that make up the keyphrase for which an article is written, but also looks for other words that are closely related to the topic.

For example: in an article about “professional tooth whitening”, closely related words would be:

- bleaching
- zoom
- teeth
- dental
- gel
- kit
- laser

Though they do not directly appear in the keyphrase, these words are relevant to the topic of “professional tooth whitening” and therefore, a search engine which uses LSI in its algorithm will give an article containing those related words a better ranking than a poorly written seo article focusing mainly on the primary keyphrase.

I have a short PDF report for you that talks about the advantages of writing quality articles and compares the quality of the content on webpages that rank well and those that rank poorly for the same keyphrases. You can read it online or download it here:

The Past and Future of Affiliate Marketing

You will notice that writing quality content is pretty easy for you if you know well the topic you write about. Because when you naturally write an article about something you know well, many of those secondary words will be automatically included.

But what about your ghostwriters or articles about topics you don´t know well enough?

Many ghostwriters do a little bit of research on the topics they are not familiar with before they write your articles, but most of them will still try to optimize their articles around primary keyphrases. If you hire ghostwriters, there´s a great tool you can use to analyse the ghost-written articles for their quality and easily improve them – Dr. Andrew William´s “Fat Content Creator“.

“Fat Content Creator”

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Want to read the whole article? Click on the link below:

http://www.thejunglemarketer.com/blog/newsletter-archive/61

Aaron Wall

If you are interested to know more about Aaron Wall, his blog, his products and services, here a informative reviews that may

greatly help you in your research.

Aaron Wall Review

Aaron Wall is one of the most respected professional SEOs in the industry and has been running his site SEObook.com since 2003. He is the author of one of the most popular search engine optimization books SEO book. Aaron and his company have been mentioned in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Wired, USA Today, Business 2.0, as well as many popular marketing sites for his expertise

For the past 6 years, Aaron has given some of the best search advice on his blog at SEObook.com. The site has been the go-to site for people who want to build their own SEO campaigns without hiring an in-house SEO or spending money with an expensive SEO firm.

While SEO is one of the best ways to get traffic, it is hard to get reliable information the produces results. Aaron has been one of the industry leaders and been in the forefront, keeping up with all the changes in the major search engines and providing constant updates to his strategies. He has knowledge on all parts of SEO from site building, keyword research, content development, link building, algorithms, and on page factors.

His popular SEO book is a 220+ page guide that teaches how to write for the search engines, use effective PPC strategies, build links to your site, and measure results. He also developed a popular tool called SEO for Firefox which is a Firefox plugin that helps you research your competitors while browsing through the search engine results.

Aaron is now offering a membership site for $150 a month, replacing his popular SEO book. The membership has over 100 training modules from keyword research, site building,

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Want to read the whole article? Click on the link below:

http://www.theimalliance.com/im-gurus/adwords-marketing/aaron-wall-review.html

Want to know more about Internet Marketing Terms? Follow the link!

Step By Step – How to get the MOST out of an Ezine Article!

I am constantly reading the posts on here and everyday (usually multiple times a day) people have article marketing questions. There is no problem with asking questions. Questions are how you learn.

What I’m about to share with everyone is a step by step method how article marketing has worked for me, and I hope it can benefit everyone. If you don’t implement it, maybe it can give you some new ideas of your own.
This is my opinion on how to get the most traffic from an article.

Okay – this method is assuming you submit all of your articles to EZA, with a good title, good article content, and a good resource box.

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1st Step: Open up Word Pad – or whatever you like to use. The program you use must be easy to copy and paste that is really the only requirement.

• Type out the keywords you are going to target in your article and separate them with commas. — press enter a few times
• Create your title — then press enter a few times.
• Create your article summary — press enter a few times
• TYPE THE ARTICLE —- and press enter a few more times.
• Then of course type up your resource box.

Each part of writing an article is equally important do not neglect anything. Once you are done SAVE YOUR ARTICLE TO YOUR COMPUTER.

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2nd Step: Submit your article to EZA. (ezinearticles.com) This should be easy because you just saved it to your computer. (The reason for pressing enter a few times between the different parts of the article was to help you stay organized.)

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3rd Step: Wait one week – my favorite step for my method to market an article

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4th Step: After that week has passed you are going to do some more with that article. Go back to your original article which you saved on your computer and copy your resource box. Then yes you guessed it press enter a few more times and paste it below the original one.

You are going to make some slight changes – on this resource box make one of the links point to your approved EZA article, and let the other still point to your webpage. Once you have completed this…

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5th Step:

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Want to read the full article? Click on the link below:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/24242-step-step-how-get-most-out-ezine-article.html

Want to know how to find a venture capital strategie? follow the link!

Adsense or CPA offers? Which will make your website More $$$$$$?

I get asked this question all the time by people:

Should I use Adsense or CPA offers to monetize my websites?

My response varies but there are some general rules you can follow to help determine which will be more profitable.

1. What geographical traffic does your site receive? If most of your traffic 70% or better is from the United States then CPA’s could be an option. The reason I always ask this is I hear people get thousands of unique visitors daily but yet can’t get a CPA offer to convert. I come to find out only 10% of the website traffic US. The reason they don’t convert is 90% of CPA offers I am aware of are US only! So keep that in mind.
2. Are there CPA offers available that would appeal to your website visitors? Many people say they don’t know until they join a network. All Networks I have joined (See My Top 5 CPA Networks) are willing to provide a list of offers up front. This way you don’t have to signup to find out no offers will work on your site.
   1. Unsure if the offers would appeal? Check out sites similar to yours or your niche see if they are running any CPA offers. If they are try to figure out from their ads which CPA network it is (most don’t masks their links, although more and more people are starting to). Or you can do a search on Google for the offer and work from the source.
3. Do you have quality traffic? This Question is much tougher to answer. The reason I ask it as many friends and marketers have tried running some CPA offers, only to be asked by the network to stop running the offers. Why would they do that? Well it uses the same principle Adsense uses except instead of paying less they ask you to stop running the offer. Basically the information/lead your site has been providing to the network is poorly converting or not converting at all for them. Example. Mortgage lead offer – you send them 100 leads but in the end none of those leads get a loan or even a prospect of a loan. This could cause the company to talk with the CPA network to either improve quality or they will stop advertising through them. Then the CPA network figures out who has been sending the “poor quality” leads then either tells them not to run it or asks them to improve leads.
4. I have majority of US traffic, there are offers that would appeal and my traffic is quality, but I can’t get CPA offers to convert. Well you have one of two problems. Either your site really isn’t a fit for CPA offers or you are promoting the CPA offer in the wrong manner.
   1. Example – a Site that is making 1 to 3 dollars a click from Google’s Adsense may not benefit or be able to improve earnings with CPA offers.
   2. Example- Site is promoting CPA offer by using banners only. This is one of the BIGGEST CPA promotion mistakes. Many people put up a banner and expect it to convert. Sometimes it does but in my experience and many others TEXT works the best. Maybe trying doing a review of the offer or help get your visitors attention and give them a reason to check it out and signup (many offers allow incentives).

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Want to read the whole article? Click on the link below:

http://www.cpa-affiliates.com/2006/09/18/adsense-or-cpa-offers-which-will-make-your-website-more/