Viral Marketing Strategies – Tips to get free leads to your business

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” It’s a great saying. If only it were true.

Getting leads to find out about your blog or website isn’t easy.

I’ve seen stunning sites with amazing content get less than 10 visits a day for years.

Getting a lot more visitors to your site doesn’t have to be hard. All you need is to borrow my viral marketing strategies below.

The fastest and easiest way to participate in viral marketing is to create a PDF report.

There’s no need to create something slick or fancy. Just create a document that solves a common problem or frustration of your typical prospect.

Successful viral marketing campaigns all have the following in common:

It’s easy to pass around – Adobe’s PDF format continues to dominate the electronic book space. It’s easy to include your PDF report as an email attachment. And printing a PDF is super simple… just hit the print button. It couldn’t be easier.

Competitors recommend your report – When written the right way, it’s easy to have your competition actually recommend your report to their prospects and customers. It’s true.

Web 2.0 loves viral content – Users of social marketing sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Digg aggressively seek out free PDF reports to help their friends and colleagues find free treasures of information. And once featured, the copycat effect kicks in… it’s not unusual to have your report passed around over and over again in just minutes (even seconds) after showing up in a Twitter post.

Getting your report to spread virally is the easy part…

… But writing your viral report is a bit harder (especially if you’re like most and hate to write).

Here are a few viral marketing examples to use to help you create your next viral report:

Success stories – Your prospect and potential customers LOVE to read about successful case studies. Whether you’re selling saunas or software, nothing beats a great story.

Here’s the best part… finding success stories is a cinch — just scan your testimonial file.

If you don’t have many testimonials, don’t fret. Simply scan message boards related to your business and cherry pick testimonials that are general in nature. For example, if you sell a weight-loss product, create a viral report showing before and after pictures. These are very inspiring.

Or if you sell a stock-picking newsletter, you might grab case studies about how a successful stock picking customer banked a profit using a widely-known technique.

Yes, it’s best to use your own case studies unique to the product you sell, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Guest authors – You’re going to be AMAZED how easy it is to find popular authors willing to write content for your viral report.

All you have to do is ask. Most will reply with, “Yes!”

You can easily get 5 to 10 experts in your field to send you up to a 2,000 words of wisdom by simply asking a few simple questions.

Imagine that… creating an amazing viral marketing ebook and you’d hardly have to write it yourself.

And the best part is when you’re ready to promote your viral ebook, you have a built-in salesforce ready to promote it for you… just give your guest authors a copy of your new PDF and watch your viral report spread very quickly.

Answer popular questions – Every business gets the same basic 10 or so questions asked time after time.

Answer these popular questions and you’ve just created a very special report. You’ve also helped slashed the number of customer service requests at the same time.

Tell ’em what to do AND how to do it – Marketing “experts” (notice I wrapped the word “expert” in quotes) suggest teasing your audience that tells the reader what to do, but not how to do it.

I find people are catching up on this scheme and growing tired of it.

I suggest the opposite. Tell ’em what to do AND how to do it at the same time. Your viral report is going to stand out from the crowd, get passed around a lot more often and ultimate generate more leads for your business.

The insider’s secret to find hot-button topics – Finding what to write about is a cinch. There’s no need to guess. Instead, let your marketplace tell you EXACTLY what problems keeps them up at night.

Here’s my nifty little secret: visit a popular message board in your industry and scan the titles of each post… specifically looking for pain points within each title.

For example, the words “frustrated” or “problem” indicates an obvious pain point.

Copy each of these “painful” titles into a word document (line by line) and sort by pattern.

Another hot place to find pain points is a search at Twitter. Simply search for a phrase and append the word “problem” or “frustrated” within your search. In nanoseconds Twitter displays real-time, live discussions based on your search topic. You’re literally getting inside the mind of your prospects — seeing what they’re upset about.

For example, if I’m searching for “internet connection”… I’d append the word “problem” and search Twitter for “internet connection problem” or “internet connection frustrated”.

I created a tutorial on how to find our prospect’s frustrations in just a few clicks of our computer mouse… click here to read more about how to gather customer pain points (I’ve been told this is my best tutorial ever)…