“Stephen Pierce was SHOT!” He almost died.” That was the subject line of the email and I thought he got shot again! I opened up the email, read it, followed the link and, man, am I glad I did.

Stephen’s accomplishments are a truckload and his teenage years marked by stories of bullets and bankruptcy. Okay so what? He’s one of those internet marketers who boast of how they began with nothing. I am not going to attempt to retell his story but what captivated me was his passion to help and his earnesty. This guy inspires me. You’ve got to see it to believe it. But the purpose of this post is about the man himself but to let you in on his very special $1 Promo MRMI Super Cash membership (Usual Price: $97).

Okay, bullet-point breakdown, a membership at MRMI Super Cash gives you:

* Weekly coaching sessions – Live weekly webinars where members can get their questions answered.

* 12 Instant Income Machines – These are 12 ready-to-go websites where members “Just Add Traffic” and keep 100% of the profits.

* Proven Success Diagram – Takes you step-by-step through the process of making money online.

* 5 instant traffic expert videos, checklist and process maps – These are the key to bringing visitors to your website again and again.

* Free software, worksheets, guides and more.

* 70 minute “Real Money, Real Fast” video – Footage of a dynamic presentation given by Pierce.

* 12 “Google Cash Creators” – Members “Just Add Traffic” to these ready-to-go websites and make money from Google without selling anything.

* And much more!

YES, take me to the MRMI Super Cash System for just $1!

Words from Stephen:

Oh, and before I run off, Stephen is also shipping you his free book, Make Real Money on the Internet, worth $19.95, if you act now.

(Click on image)
(You will be taken to the free book page before the promo)

People like to share funny emails, funny pictures, funny stories, funny videos, funny blogs. Why?

There is no complicated, structured or academic answer to that. It’s simple – when you combine a hilarious piece of information with a tinge of notoriety (or vice versa), people talk about it. Firstly, it tickles their funny bone and secondly, this is I believe is a social impact of viral marketing, your credibility and likability goes up when you spread a piece of genuinely funny news.

In 2006, the Daily Mail documented history’s Top 10 Viral Videos that had been the butt of endless jokes.

Top 10 Viral Videos

1 Star Wars Kid (900 million)
2 Numa Numa (700 million)
3 One Night In Paris (400 million)
4 Kylie Minogue for Agent Provocateur (360 million)
5 The Exploding Whale (350 million)
6 John West Salmon Bear Fight (300 million)
6 Trojan Games (300 million)
8 Kolla2001 (200 million)
9 AfroNinja (80 million)
10 The Shining Redux (50 million)
- Taken from the Daily Mail

If you do a Google search on any of the video titles, you will realise that the top few results are all video results. What you can derive from this is that videos, especially YouTube videos, are a very effective way of gaining favourable positions in the Google search engine. Simply cut and paste a video code into your blog or website and you’re a notch up in Google’s favour.

*Can you imagine the number of hits on your website if you were the originator of L.M.A.O videos like these?  Well, it doesn’t have to be crude or notorious, it can be smart funny or tongue-in-cheek.

Go to YouTube and look up the Star Wars Kid. The comments are fresh! As of time of posting, the last comment for the video below was 9 hrs ago. A different variation (and there are many variations) of this video had its last comment 22 mins ago. There is no ephemeral quality to videos and especially a video with good content, it becomes timeless.

Now here’s how Ghyslain Raza became the Star Wars Kid:

I don’t know about you but that sentence has some pretty strong impact on me. A self-manifesting system where the “knowledge of your existence self-propagates”.  That is just the essence of the “viral” in viral marketing isn’t it?!

Now, you look at the column right of this post. I have put up a free ebook by highly-respected Clickbank guru, Harvey Segal. This book is an example of a viral marketing process/technique. I strongly recommend that you download this ebook, read through it and see if you can learn any viral marketing strategies from it.

To define the term, I am going to take the two words apart and construe  them both as separate terms.

“Viral” is an adaptation of the word “virus”. No matter what the dictionary’s definition of virus, we know that the word is usually exemplified with the terms “infectious” and “replicates”. A computer virus for example is a computer program that replicates itself and infects an anonymous computer without the permission or knowledge of the owner. An infamous example would be the legendary Trojan Horse that creates more Trojan Horses through replication and piggybacking on the collaborative nature of the internet.

With this in mind, “Marketing” is a management process through which  infomation and services are translated from concept to customer, thereby exchanging a service or product for an agreed sum of money.

Of course, when we put the two together, we try not to see the amalgamation in such bellicose terms. “Viral Marketing” simply means to convey an information, service or product from concept to customer through the exponential spread of the word. It’s synonym – word-of-mouth.

Its Infectious Lure

Now that we have defined “Viral Marketing”, what makes viral marketing so successful even though it sounds like a bad case of flu? Do you remember receiving obscene or funny emails in your inbox, calling for you to forward the email to your friends if not you will go into a streak of bad luck for the next 14 days? Or even fraud emails that threatens to delete your system if the email is not forwarded to 5 friends in the next hour! This is an example of successful viral marketing though it’s intent is almost unnecessary.

People/Readers/Users/Seekers fall victim to this marketing system because these marketing messages usually have a certain emotional appeal. They leverage on the wants of people, or the insecurities, promising hopes of good rewards and come on, if a viral message is good enough, who wouldn’t forward it?! Everyone’s got their own email lists, whether you’re in a business or not, you have a stored address book that allows you to accomplish one-click forwarding. It’s so simple and too effective to let slip.

There are various types of viral marketing, remember we’re focusing on online marketing here. Forums, social networking sites, videos, articles etc. are great viral marketing methods. The internet today is almost scripted for viral marketing effectiveness because almost everything on the internet is shared. If you saw a funny YouTube video, what would be the first thing you’d do? Let me guess – post it on Facebook, forward the link to a friend on MSN, post it on your on online journal, or embed it in your email and forward it to a couple of friends. Your friends will then do the exact same thing as you did because the internet trend today is a one-way street. Either you’re in it or you’re not. Brilliant isn’t it?

Almost a decade ago, Tom Hespos wrote an article entiled “The Power in Viral Marketing” on Clickz. The article describes the value and limitations of viral marketing circa 2000 and is still pretty relevant in its context today.

In my next post, I will discuss some examples of successful and failed viral marketing campaigns, both online and offline.

You got to give it to the genius of viral marketing though, and come to think of it, this system is probably the guru in marketing, the most important part of the selling process. It has a goal, to form a harem that increases exponentially. And it’s way of doing so? To piggyback on other hosts and tap on their resources to expand his tribe. Wait, he doesn’t even have to lift a finger.

His First Time

There has been much documentation and debate on the origination of the system but I am not going to dabble much in this as most of the research can be found on Wikipedia. I am however going to talk a little about the first time this phenomenon hit the internet.

The Ponzi Scheme

I am sure some of us remember the Ponzi scheme and the Pyramid scheme. To briefly describe the term, the Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that deceives those with little knowledge in the subject to partake in an investment opportunity that offers a high return, for example, a 20% profit + capital, with every sale they make to an “investor”. These investors then come of the high payout and engage in making sales themselves, selling these high payout investment plans to their own network of “investors”, resulting in exponential growth. This scheme relies on the vicious flow of money in its own cycle. The catch is, once investment slows, the promoter is unable to fulfill payouts, resulting in the scheme’s collapse. And because there is no real “investment” on anything, the promoter is often unable to produce claims when questioned by legal authorites.

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)

This is not to be confused with the above, though some can be deemed fraudulent in its nature as well. The different between MLM and the Ponzi scheme is that the promoter cuts a profit from each investor and the investor’s investors. This strategy creates an exponential network growth, known as “downlines” and also as exponential growth of income for the promoter. Till date, the MLM scheme is still one of the surviving money making opportunities on the internet.

Hotmail

Hotmail is believed to be the first free email service providers to spread the launch of their service through viral marketing. By embedding a simple signature that says, “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” at the end of every free message sent, Hotmail was able to spread its service through its users. Friends of users who sign up for a Hotmail account will then propel the message to their own network of friends, rapidly increasing the subscriber count for Hotmail.

So what then is viral marketing and why is it so successful? This, I will discuss in my next post.