Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part IX

Last week, we spoke about the use of certain types of viral content that can be used for easy linkbaiting. These included blogs, articles, tools, and social networking applications. Today, we will cover the others, in what is one of the last of our 10-week series on viral marketing and linkbaiting. There are still several that can be used, and they are by no means the only ones. Creativity in creating new methods is a basic part of effective advertising and marketing.

Widgets

Different than the standard application or tool, a widget is something designed specifically to be unimportant, or for entertainment purposes only. These are some of the most popular of viral types on the web, especially with the increased ability to post basic codes into blogs, journals, social networking profiles, and onto web pages. They have also increased in complexity over time, and so are easy to make, and even easier for even the more computer illiterate visitor to use.

The trick is making it easily posted onto these sources. Having several code types, for example for forums, HTML, and social networking codes, will allow it to be spread further. A link can be provided for anyone who wants to use the widget for themselves, which will also provide them with a source for the person who created this.

On the other hand, players can be used as widgets. If you have a band, a video channel, or anything media-oriented, a widget can provide an easy way to share your content. It can also be attached to existing widgets, such as in the case of the Myspace media player, which allows users to create a playlist with their favorite songs.

Badges

Badges are similar to a name tags, or perhaps security tags. You can embed them as an image within an HTML code. Not all sites can use badges, but if you can then you really should take advantage of this. Have some really cool badges for your site designed, and encourage people to put on their sites for you.

How effective these 2 options listed above are? Can be quite effective. Recently we released a free cool looking Zencart template, and we asked people to please keep the link back to our site if possible. Not everyone did, but some did leave the link where it is (which we greatly appreciate), and as the result we have seen great improvements recently in term of traffic as well as conversion rate (more potential clients contact us after checking out the site).