46 – Other people will spread your name everywhere: Tom talks Viral Marketing

046 Viral Marketing This is my Monday weekly training session. You don’t want to miss this viral marketing training where you get everybody else to spread the word for you.
O45 Silver Rose. This I’ll say mature lady is a hoot. She’s a corporate speaker, but also a stand-up comedienne. And she swears Silver Rose is her real name and not a stripper name……She said her stripper name is Candy Cane hahaha
Please, if you like this podcast Subscribe, Review and Share it like crazy. Your colleagues will thank you for it.
Sponsor
KICK START GUIDE TO VIRAL MARKETING
How Get Thousands of People to Share Your Content and Send You Money:
In This Laser Focused 80 Page E-book You Will Learn How to Use three viral techniques to build massive email lists, create tremendous buzz and sell tons of your products and services. I’ll tell you more about it later and of course, it will be in the show notes. Screwthecommute.com/46

Let’s get into the main topic:
Viral Marketing and no I’m not talking about your crazy cat video that gets 3 million views overnight. I’m talking about specific tools and techniques now available to anyone even solopreneurs. You don’t have to get 3 million views overnight to make millions of dollars in your business using low cost and no cost viral techniques.

You now have enormous viral power at your fingertips and tons of examples in front of you every day. Any small business can afford to put promotions in to play that quite literally could, bring in thousands of leads and, of course, what we’re all looking for . . . large increases in sales.
So, buckle up. In this episode I’m going to show you inexpensive software so you can “go viral” and examples you can replicate to make it happen. Let’s get going!
So why go viral in the first place? Let’s talk about the many benefits of going viral and why you should begin going viral yourself.
When a piece of content goes viral, it naturally spreads rapidly throughout the Internet. People share your content with their friends, their friends and colleagues. They do the same and so and so on. Soon you can have a tidal wave of traffic that is naturally spreading and growing at an exponential rate. That’s just the nature of what going viral means.
It’s like having an army of people spread your product or offer for free, …spread it around all over the place instead of having to pay for advertising.

Here’s some other benefits of Going Viral
Driving Traffic – This benefit is an obvious one. As I said earlier, you can get crazy amounts of traffic when your content goes viral. Best of all, it’s targeted traffic that you don’t have to pay for.
Increased Engagement – Another result you will likely have is an increased “engagement” rate. This means more people will share, like, and leave comments for the content you already create.
Increased Sales – That’s what we’re all looking for right? Well-crafted viral content can lead to increased product sales for all your stuff. Even affiliate marketers can also use viral marketing to show the right ad to the right person to get more affiliate commissions.
List Building – Virtually all viral programs have list building features built right in. You can super charge your list building efforts. The more shares you get, the more subscribers you get. This is why viral content can do wonders for your list building. I’m going to cover list building in episode 058 so watch for that.
Gain Targeted Fans & Followers: Everybody doing social media marketing knows how difficult it is to get likes and followers. Not only that, you want QUALITY followers who actually are interested and engage with your posts and other content.
Now this can also help with search engine rankings - Google’s very secretive about exactly how its search algorithm works. We do know that it takes over 200 different factors into consideration when figuring out what search results to show a person for any search. One of them is page popularity. The more visitors you get and the longer they stay makes your site look better to the search engines and you raise in the search results.
There are many ways in which you can go viral and get lots of traffic, I’m going to talk about 3 of them in this episode. These are not just any random 3 methods. These are tried and true methods that you can begin using quickly in your own marketing efforts.
Fist I’ll give you a quick overview of the methods I’m covering and then I’ll go a little deeper on each one. The first is
Quizzes
This is the use of Interactive Quizzes. You see these all the time.
Don’t just pass them off as silly nonsense quizzes. There is a lot of marketing genius behind those quizzes. When done right, they can bring in a ton of traffic and lead to more leads and sales. They can do amazing things for your business, especially when thousands or millions of people are spreading your message for you.
Actually, there are a lot of fine details when it comes to crafting a quiz that goes viral. Things like choosing the right quiz title and using the correct number of questions all factor into your success.
Next is Contests
Yep, a good old-fashioned contest. Who doesn’t like winning a prize? Especially when it’s free to enter. Online contests are a great way to go viral because of the many built in viral features a contest has.
A contest could spread like wildfire by setting up your online contests with some viral features in place. Using methods like “Refer-a-Friend” and other sharing options, contests can spread fast when you set them up to go viral.
Content Lockers
The third way to go viral that I’ll be discussing is the “Content Locker”.
A Content Locker is one of the easiest ways you can create viral content on your own website or blog. What I’m saying is that it’s easier to implement when you compare it to an Interactive Quiz or an Online Contest. This means it also takes less to setup and can be running in a shorter period of time.
Just because it may be a simpler or easier method to use doesn’t make it any less powerful
OK. Let’s go a little deeper into each method.
Going Deeper
I’ll start with Interactive Quizzes
An Interactive Quiz gets a user to invest time into finding out a personalized outcome.
By using a little bit of marketing psychology, you can get tremendous results when using a quiz to generate leads or sales.
Just like the other methods to go viral, quizzes can help you get traffic, sell products, and build brand awareness, build your list and all that stuff.
And quizzes can work for any industry. They’re not just fluff like you might see in a fashion magazine. Whether it’s business to business or business to consumer, crafting the right quiz to the right audience can work for any niche.
You can create a helpful quiz for pretty much any topic. The quizzes can be designed to sell product or to get people to come in to a local store or just about any business purpose. Here are just a few examples.
Health and Wellness
“Are you at risk for thyroid disease?” is a quiz that could work for a local private doctor or bigger supplement company.
2. Fitness, Nutrition, or personal trainer.
“Are you over/under training?" is a quiz title that could help generate leads for a local gym, personal trainer, or online supplement store.

3. Business to Business – With a B2B model, you can ask prequalifying questions on the quiz. The answers prospective clients provide can be extremely useful before any kind of sales presentation to them. With B@B Quizzes you are also able to pull the data into your customer relationship management program CRM so all your leads go directly in your software so you can follow up on the best ones. And of course, the quiz taker will have ability to book an appointment or consultation after the quiz.
4. Real Estate.
“Should I keep renting or should I buy my first home?” is a great example quiz title for anyone thinking about buying a home. Judging by the answers someone gives when taking this quiz, you should be able to identify whether this person would be ready to purchase a new home. Or based on their answers you decide they can go on an email list for you to nurture until they are ready to buy their first house so you don’t waste a bunch of time on people who aren’t ready.
Essentially, you can now help a person to qualify themselves and have fun while they’re doing it. Then you only go after ones ready to buy. The others are put into an email list with a long drip feed of pre-made autoresponder messages keeping them interested in what you have to say until they are ready to buy. When they are ready, you’ll be the natural person to buy from.
If you’ve surfed the Internet at all, you’ve eventually stumbled upon one of those quizzes on a blog or on your social media. While these quizzes seem just like fun, they are specially designed using certain elements of human psychology to get you to take action. This is why they work so well when they are used for Internet marketing, sales, and lead generation.
Quizzes that reveal something about ourselves are by far the most shared quizzes on the web.
A BIG WARNING: Sometimes quizzes are used by bad people to get you to click and download a virus into your computer so make sure you only click when it’s a reputable source.
Let me give you some examples of some quizzes and the results they got.
Before I do that, I want to remind you that you may want your quiz to be a one of a kind, but with so many quizzes that are already performing well you should definitely look to the best performing ones for inspiration and just do what they did. Just change it to suit you. Looking at other quizzes is the best way to cure writers block and to make sure you are going on the right path when you’re making your quiz questions up.
So, I’m going to give you a few examples of the quizzes being used in different industries to build email lists, generate sales, and leads.
Results companies are currently getting.
Here’s an Example: AnnMarie
The quiz title was “What’s your skin score?”
In this example, Skin Care company Annmarie used a quiz they made with the Lead Quizzes software called “What’s Your Skin Score?”

This quiz was designed to assist their visitors in determining if they could have better skin. Based on their answers, each quiz taker was prompted with a specialized offer in the form of a coupon code, free shipping, or an informative eBook all which are designed to lead to a purchase. And remember what they got offered was different based on the answers they gave in the quiz.
Here’s the Results
In just 2 months, this quiz was able to generate $200,000 in sales and 20,258 leads that could generate additional income for years to come.
Here’s another Example: NutritionSecrets.com
Their quiz title was “Which diet is right for your personality?”
This particular quiz was designed for the express purpose of list building and capturing leads. There were no direct sales pitches anywhere in this quiz. Instead, they simply wanted to know more information about each quiz taker so they could better craft a future offer via email.
The smart thing about how this quiz was created is that each person was added to a specialized email list based again on their answers.
Here’s the Results
Using this simple 6 question quiz, this company was able to improve their lead capture rate by over 500%. Not bad for a simple 6 question quiz.
Here’s a company Sideshow Collectibles
They’re an Ecommerce store and collectables retailer. They created a quiz to increase awareness for their “Court of the Dead” brand of collectables. Which I don’t even know what that is. It’s probably some TV show, movie or video game or something. I don’t know. Maybe you all know.
In this quiz, participants were asked to discover which fictional character from Court of the Dead they were most like. Not discover really, but check off who they were like. By answering questions, the results were catered toward a particular fictional character in that Court of the Dead show or whatever it is.
The results
The quiz was taken over 20,000 times, brought in 15,000 new email subscriptions and generated 1,800 orders delivering $75,000 in revenue! And, listen to this. Of those 1,800 orders, 1,220 were first time customers! I can assure you they are going to sell lots of stuff over time to those new customers.
I’ve got lots more examples in my eBook on viral marketing, but suffice it to say, quizzes can do a lot for your business.
I’ll have in the show notes links to some of the different programs we currently use for creating quizzes because they have changed over time and they’re improving all the time.
Creating Your First Interactive Quiz

There are a few things you’ll want to consider before you begin creating your first interactive quiz.
Know your audience – know who you are trying to reach.
Have a Goal – Do you want sales, email subscribers, leads, etc.
Keep it short and easy
The goal of your quiz is to gather just enough information about the visitor to present them with a meaningful result or outcome. If you ask too many questions, the user may abandon the quiz halfway through, never to see the results page where you make your friendly sales pitch.
Try to keep quizzes under 10 questions or 3 minutes. You want the user to feel invested in obtaining the result, but you definitely don’t want to bore them.
Include a call-to-action
The final, and perhaps most important element of your quiz, includes adding a call-to-action (CTA) to your results page.
Your “Call to Action” can be a link that leads a user to learn more about your company, join an email list, learn more about services, or a specific product, or make a purchase. It can also include a promo / coupon code or other incentive to increase your opportunity to close a sale right away.
Introduction: Contests
Now we’re going to the Second way of going Viral and that’s using Contests.
Before we do I want to do some shoutout for several people who helped kick off this podcast:
Amy Sherman
http://www.amyshermancoaching.com
It’s a site for single women who are having challenges meeting and keeping their ideal partner.
For more than two decades Amy has been working in the helping field, inspiring others to live their best life. She has a master's degree in counseling/psychology from Vermont College and has worked with individuals and couples struggling with personal and professional issues that have kept them from the happiness and joy they deserve.
Ellen Violette
www.booksbusinessabundance.com Ellen Violette, multiple International #1 bestselling author, 3-time eLit award winner, contributor to Published! Magazine, and CEO of Create a Splash. She helps entrepreneurs get their message out and create credibility and expert status to make a big impact in the world and change lives by becoming a bestselling author and leveraging their knowledge to grow high-income businesses.
Joe Libby www.JoeLibbySeminars.com
Your Massive Results Aren't Brain Surgery! Ask Joe Libby How He Knows.
With 40+ years as a speaker, magician, ventriloquist, and actor, Joe Libby uses his expert knowledge of the secrets of magic and misdirection to educate, engage, and energize you and your colleagues for ☛ ROCK-STAR RESULTS! ☚
Sponsor
KICK START GUIDE TO VIRAL MARKETING
How Get Thousands of People to Share Your Content and Send You Money:
This extremely inexpensive 80-page eBook training blueprint thoroughly covers the three main techniques we use to go viral,…..and I’ll say….at will. There’s nothing hocus pocus about it. These mechanisms are proven and they work. The e-book has lots of screen captures showing you examples of all the techniques so you can build ones exactly the same only using your information. It’s got all the little details that you need to know without buying overly priced and overly hyped expensive courses. Check it out in the show notes. Screwthecommute.com/46 Or you can go direct to https://www.GreatInternetMarketing.com/viral
Why use a Contest?
Contests are great for many things like list building, brand awareness, and even selling products. What’s also great is there are many built in features a contest has to help you go viral and get traffic.
Unlike a quiz, which could potentially keep running forever, a Contest usually has a start date and an end date. This is a built-in scarcity factor that causes people to take action before a deadline. The psychology behind this is to get people to convert sooner rather than later for fear of missing out on the whole thing if they don’t meet the deadline.
List Building
From the List building aspect of contests – Each entry into the contest requires an email sign up. In order to be eligible to win the prize, each person must opt-in and verify their email address. This is how contests can help create an email list.
Social Shares
Here’s the viral part kicking in. – Each contestant can gain additional entries into the contest by sharing your contest link to their social media accounts. This helps your content go viral on social media.
Refer-A-Friend
Refer-A-Friend – Each person can gain even more additional entries by using a refer-a-friend method. More entries for the person joining can be earned for each new person who enters the contest through their link. So, if I refer a friend of mine and they sign up, I could get 5 or 10 extra entries into the contest. And so I’m building my chances of winning because I’m getting way more entries than somebody else who just joined by themselves and didn’t share it. So, there’s a big incentive built in to share these things.
Sales
OK. From the sales aspect – If a person does not win the contest, they’ll be given the chance to buy your products. Some people will even go ahead and buy your products instead of waiting around to see if they’re the winner.¬ This is really great. I love this. You could also give them a discount code or 2 for 1 or some other promotion to get them to buy now.
BIG, BIG WARNING: YOU MUST BE CAREFUL THAT YOU DON’T VIOLATE ANY LAWS WHEN YOU RUN A CONTEST. IN THE SHOW NOTES IS A LINK TO A SITE THAT TELLS YOU WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR. I WILL NOT ASSUME ANY LIABILITY IF YOU RUN AN ILLEGAL CONTEST OR LOTTERY.
http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/key-legal-compliance-considerations-before-administering-a-contest-sweepstakes/all/
So, let’s talk about how contests can go viral
Here I’ll be using a real-life example we did for a Public Speaking contest. This will be a step-by-step break down of how the quiz works to grow your email list, and to get it shared and to go viral.
This contest was setup to target people interested in public speaking. Now they don’t have to do a speech to be in the contest. They just should be interested in Public Speaking. Of course, we know that most people HATE PUBLIC SPEAKING so you won’t see the giant numbers like you would see on a general contest on Buzzfeed or some other megasite.
I will tell you though that the old saying, “The Riches are in the Niches” has certainly held true for me even though the numbers are smaller. You can still make enormous amounts of money focusing on specific target audiences.
This contest matches up the audience with targeted prizes. In this case, the prizes are different training products created to help anyone improve their skills at public speaking.
Now here’s another warning for you. Don’t just make an iPad or an iPhone or a laptop for your big prize because people will join just to get the prize and they couldn’t care less about your stuff and they’ll unsubscribe immediately if they don’t win or even if they do win. So, it didn’t help you. So, always use a prize targeted toward the interest of what you are selling.
Now after the contestant is finished referring friends we want them to refer friends, they get redirected to another landing page. Now, this is a person who has joined the contest, so they got an entry. Then they referred a friend and they got some more entries. So, then this next landing page we send them to has additional chances for them to gain more entries by helping the contest go viral. So, they’re shown options to share their contest link on their social media accounts in order to get even more chances to win. This is another great feature of contests that help them naturally go viral. Now after all that sharing the contestant is now redirected to yet another landing page.
Contests in Action
Example: Wake ’em up Video Professional Speaking System
In this example, when people arrive on the contest page, they first see a video and an email signup box on the right. This is where each new visitor can watch a short video you make about the contest and they can also sign up for the contest. This is only the first step. They’ve opted in and you have their email address, but it doesn’t end there.
Once they’ve opted in to your email list, they are immediately redirected to a custom thank you page. This page provides them with even more options so they can earn more entries to the contest for inviting their friends to come and enter the contest. For each friend that signs up and verifies their email address, the original person gains an additional entry.
Contest Refer a Friend
After the new contestant is finished referring friends, then they are redirected to another landing page. This landing page now has additional chances for them to gain more entries to help the contest go viral.
They’re shown options to share their contest link on their social media accounts in order to get even more chances to win. This is another great feature of contests that help them naturally go viral.
Contest Viral Features
After all of that sharing, the contestant is now redirected to yet another landing page. This is the final landing page they’ll see through this process.
This page simply says “I Never Win Anything” and gives them the opportunity to buy the prizes instantly with a special discount. Not only do contests naturally have the ability to go viral, they also can help sell products and build your lists right now instead of waiting for the contest to be over.
Here are the initial results.
For this quiz, we didn’t do much in way of driving traffic. We simply sent out an email to a small subscriber list to see how it would go. That initial traffic got the ball rolling.
As you can see in the results, that small email blast was able to generate 2,795 visits to our contest. Out of those 2,795 a whopping 2033 were from referral sources. That means they were referred to by another source such as a social share or an email referral from one of their friends.
Total leads ended up being 1183 from our own direct visits from people that already knew me and another 438 from additional referral traffic. That’s a 26.65% and 21.54% conversion rate for each. This was really a good promotion especially since we only put a tiny little part of my list out to get it going.
Not bad at all considering the effort put in and the results achieved. You also must consider that those 438 new people will spend thousands of dollars with me over time.
Imagine what you can do if you tried something similar. You can choose a completely different audience with a totally separate prize. However, you can still use the general flow and viral features used for this example I just showed you.
I’ll have various contest software in the show notes. This is episode 46 so it would be screwthecommute.com/46
OK. Let’s get into the third viral technique and that is “Content Lockers”
This is all done with your own content, . . . While this method is much simpler and easier to implement than a Contest or Quiz, you can still get great results. I’ll show you how you can use a Content Locker and see dramatic increases in your social shares.
What is a Content Locker?
A Content Locker is simply a piece of software that give you the ability to “lock” or hide parts of the content on a blog post or page.
This “locked” content remains hidden until the visitor takes a specific action. For example, you could require a visitor to sign up to your email list before revealing some premium resource you have Then, as soon as the visitor opt-ins, a part of the page unlocks and displays the hidden content.
Another form of Content Locker which uses social media shares as currency basically instead of an email signup. This is called a “Social Content Locker” and requires the visitor to share your article on one of the major social platforms in order to gain access to the special locked content.
The Social Content Locker makes it easy for someone to unlock the premium content. All they gotta do is click a link. After they’ve clicked on the link, the premium content is automatically revealed without having to reload the page.
Lots of websites, have share icons for social media. Yours probably do already. The problem is, your web traffic may not be using those share buttons as often as you’d like. With a Social Content Locker, you can provide your visitors with that extra incentive and give them an extra nudge to share your content on their social media platforms.
What Types of Content should you lock?

The type of content you want to lock should be complimentary to the main article or content of the page. For example, you can display a video on a page which goes through a detailed how to on any subject that makes sense for you. In addition, you provide the visitor with an offer to get a “FREE PDF Checklist” which goes with and compliments the video.
Heck we do it on this podcast and you should check it out in the show notes. We provide basic show notes for each episode, but if you want the complete transcript, you have to opt in. It’s basically a content locker.
Other examples of lockable content.
Special offers or discounts
An extra Bonus section to the article
An audio MP3 bonus version of the article.
Free Downloadable PDF or Worksheet. I said that before.
You can use articles, videos, audio, images…they have things called infographics, download links, coupon codes or any other content you have as an incentive for people to give you likes or shares or opt ins.
Just remember don’t overdo this. Not every page on your website is worthy of using a Content Locker. You must provide some value in return for the share or signup.
Example of Content Lockers
If you want to see a social share content locker in action I have a link in the show notes to a blog post article “The Top 15 Mistakes People Make on Their Websites” 14 of the mistakes are there for the taking. I gave them plenty of value. But to see the number one mistake, you have to share the blog posting.
https://antion.com/blog/top-15-mistakes-people-make-on-their-websites/
When I first put this out 225 People Total who visited this blog post actually shared the article. That includes 59 Twitter shares, 129 Facebook Shares, and 37 Google Plus 1’s. And that’s all additional exposure and traffic that otherwise wouldn’t have ever happened. People would have read the article. They would have gotten great value from it, but that would have been the end of it. All by simply using a Social Content Locker on an otherwise standard blog post I got all these other people to see it.
Conclusion
As you can see there is incredible power in using the techniques I covered here. When people tell me they can’t make any money online, I immediately think, “You just haven’t studied enough and invested in your training enough to learn about ….and how to use….techniques like the ones I just covered here.”
Decide which one of these techniques you want to do first and dive deep into picking the software and learning how to use it. Get my darn eBook on it in the show notes. Brainstorm on how you would apply the ideas to your business and then roll it out.
Don’t over think it. That’s killed more promotions than anything. I’m not saying just slap something up without thinking it through. I’m just saying taking action will get you way further ahead than just listening to me and then looking for the next magic bullet podcast to make you rich overnight. YOU GOTTA IMPLEMENT THINGS!
Think of the results you could get. You could double, triple or even quadruple your list and the people that know about you. Then you concentrate on converting them to buyers.
If you want to go all the way and get really serious about starting, running and/or improving your business I’d be glad to help. I have proven and credible training with a track record longer than just about anyone you could possibly find to help you learn these ideas and a ton more things you need to know to have a dependable and lucrative business. You may want to consider my unique mentor program where you actually get one-on-one help from me and people I’ve trained. There is nothing else like it in the marketplace. Check it out at http://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com I would love to help you achieve your goals!
You can also apply for a FREE strategy session. This will NOT be a big sales pitch for me, but the reason I’m doing it is to identify people that may want to work with me in my mentor program. If it makes sense for us to talk after you fill out the application, I’ll arrange an appointment with you. Apply here:
http://www.GreatInternetMarketing.com/application.html
Of course, that will also be in the show notes screwthecommute.com/46 or in the screwthecommute app.
OK. That’s it for this episode. If you like what you heard here, please subscribe, review and share
Upcoming episode O47 Dr. Howard Haller AKA Big Dog PhD. He’s the real deal on commercial real estate and why it’s actually easier to buy than a personal home. You can be in the commercial real estate business even if your credit isn’t great because the loans are made based on the income from the property. NOT your personal income. I’ll catch ya on that episode See ya later.
Join my distance learning school: https://www.IMTCVA.org
OR
Join the mentor program PLUS get a FREE Scholarship to the School: https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com