Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing is a simple matter of finding the correct combination of audience, message and products. In simple terms build a clean, well maintained site that is full of information and products that are of interest to the market you have chosen. Once you have done this your marketing efforts become quite easy and very inexpensive. As visitors come to your site and find that you provide them with what they are looking for in an easy to navigate site they will spread this news to other colleagues, friends and family to let them know of the great new site they have found.
To help these visitors in their mission to promote your site for free you need to have a few easy to install tools available for them. One of these tools is the most important and one of the simplest marketing tools of WOM that is overlooked:
The Tell a Friend script. Quite simply this is a script that website owners install on their site for free in many instances and allows their visitors to send an email right from the site they are visiting to others telling them about the site and letting them know to visit it. Since this is an opt-in marketing technique it cannot be considered spam. Finding free Tell A Friend scripts is easy and one can be found at: TamingTheBeast There are many others that you can purchase, but when you are first starting your site there is no real need to do this and quite simply with the number of free scripts on the Internet that easily installed with no return links built into them there is no real reason to pay for certain scripts other then features you might want.
Book Marking Script. While you might not think of this as a WOM Book Marking can be considered WOM and is quite an effective tool in helping you to build your site for free. When a visitor Book Marks or in other terms adds your site to their favorites it shows their friends and family that your site is worth the time and effort. These friends and family may be visiting and using the computer and come across your site in the favorites list. Many of us check out the favorites list when we are on some elses computer to see what type of sites they may have found that may be of interest to us. This also serves as an easy reminder to the visitor of what your address is so that they can easily find it when someone asks them about any cool new sites they have found. If yours is in their list then they are more likely to let others know, thus increasing your chances at more free WOM advertising. You can find an easy to use WOM script and instructions at TamingTheBeast.
Branded ToolBar. Many people would not think of a toolbar as an effective way of advertising your website by WOM, but it is one of the best ways to do this. Most Internet users these days have a search toolbar attached to their browsers, with most of these toolbars being powered by one of the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. So the question is why not offer one to your visitors for free? The argument from many website owners is that the cost is prohibitive to try and compete with these same large sites since you must buy a script or have one made that delivers content directly from one of the search engines. However, this is just not true. While it is true that you can buy a script for several hundred to even a few thousands dollars that will allow users to put branded toolbars on their home computers it is not necessary. One of the best toolbars that are free is from EffectiveBrands and allows you to place banners or text links on your site that lead the visitor to a download page that is customized with the look you desire. In fact the whole toolbar can be customized with your logo, links to your site and others you may own or start in the future and also allows you to add other features such as popup blockers, news, weather and more. One of the best features is that you can send out real time updates about your websites directly to all your toolbar users via the control panel. This shows in their toolbar as news to read and is not considered by people to be invasive or annoying. Another great feature is that you can choose what search engine will provide the results to your users. This allows them to have the same great features and results as if they got the toolbar from Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Many sites have used word of mouth to promote and create a brand image for thier site. Some of the best known over the years have been YouTube, MySpace, HotMail and many others of which a few of these have since been sold to the likes of NewsCorp, Microsoft and others for large sums of money. YouTube for example is relatively new having only had its domain registered in February 2005 and its actual site being placed on the Internet around the end that same year. Since its inception the site has used WOM as its medium of advertising and has become the 39th largest website in terms of monthly visits. This is simply amazing considering that the site has only been on the Internet for approximately 6 to 8 months.
The effective use of your website to create a buzz can have a rewarding effect both to your visitor count and your advertising revenue you generate from these visitors. Sites with huge pageviews and visitor counts can demand and get large sums of money from advertisers who wish to market their products to your visitors. A great example of this is MySpace which generates around $15 million per month from advertising to its 85 million plus users. This is up from $2.5 million when NewsCorp bought the popular site.
Advertising your site should be easy and rewarding. However, if you are building your simply to turn a quick profit and this is you goal then you should consider finding a site that is your hobby. Sites such as though mentioned above were successful because the owners found it rewarding both as a fun hobby and monetarily later on. While they expected to make some money on their labors it is most likely assured that Tom (the founder of MySpace) would never have dreamed that he would have been offered over $500 million dollars for his site after only a year of being in business. This just goes to show you the effectiveness that WOM of advertising can have on a site and its perceived value to others when it comes time to sell it.
Kevin Grames has been writing articles on the Ineternet for several years related to marketing, business and other areas of interest. He is currently the editor of ArcadeSupport.com which provides news, reviews and other information for the gaming industry.
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