Viral Marketing: Does it work?

Posted 6/13/08 - Joshua

So before any of us can think about ads and dollars we must figure out how to get traffic to our blogs. There are many ways to do this, and we can do just about all of them for free.

First and foremost create a separate myspace account for your blog. Sure, friend it to you own profile and keep it in your top friends. Once you get a blog myspace, do a search for people interested in what your blog is about. For me I did racing and then NASCAR. Then sign into that account everyday and set a number of people to invite, when I started I was doing 25 a day. When we launched Fantasy Insider Online we were adding at least 50 friends a day.

In the end I would say about half of the people we invited to be friends on myspace became traffic to our sites and my blogs. Remember that when setting a number of invites per day. Half is a pretty good number, but I would bet the average is around a third.

Once you have a blog myspace account you will need an avatar and a banner with a link to your blog. There are several sites online where one can customize their own banner and avatar, or you can try and get a buddy of yours to make it for free.

For me I used a different viral marketing method to get my avatars and banners made. I joined livejournal.com and found many communities where up and coming web graphic artists where looking for stuff to do to help promote their skills.

In fact my corporate logo and the logo’s I was using to promote my own football venture came around this way. It can be a very useful tool.

Once you have a myspace blog account, an avatar, and a banner with a link, then we must find a social network site that is specific for the sport we are covering. Since I do mostly NASCAR stuff I joined Infield Parking and used a similar strategy there.

I searched for sports social networking sites and came across this article, on “Sports Social Networking Sites"; hopefully there is something there for you to use. I am willing to bet there is a specific sports networking site for everything one can think of. In fact there is infield parking which is run by Dale Earnhardt Jr. and The Race Space which is run by part time driver and Hollywood stuntman Stanton Barrett for racing alone. I have profiles on both and use them to drive traffic to my collection of blogs and websites.

With the exciting news delivered by Kellex about Yardbarker teaming up with Foxsports.com, submitting articles to Yardbarker is a great way to drive traffic. My first 10 or so articles for Fantasy Insider Online were submitted there and he positioned me as a fantasy racing expert.

Now I get many emails from sites wanting a specific article and the great thing about that is they pay. Starting this year I teamed up with Mock Draft Central and was offered a four article run every January as a fantasy NASCAR preview. They pay 25 bucks an article, and hey money is money.

The main point here is there is an unlimited amount of free ways to help promote your blog. Make use of as many of them as you have time for. You will be quite surprised at the effectiveness of them.



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