You Need User Recommendation to go Viral. So Go Find Those Passionate Users.

The title is really long. But I will try to keep the post as short as I can.

My previous post is supposed to be part of a series I am working on about "Nigerian startups and how they fit in Globally". I will continue with the series shortly, however, I need to squeeze in this post in-between due to some recent happenings in my startup's social media marketing.

Back to today's post.

Today's post is focussed on the power of Passionate users (people that love your product or idea) and how it can push to the roof your marketing, the efficiency of your product development and your market understanding.

How do you find or make passionate users? The truth is, you don't even need to have a product to find people passionate about what you are working on, some people can fall in love with your product the moment they hear about the idea. And they will talk about and recommend you and your product to everyone they know.

To increase your chances of having such passionate prospective users, you need to be active on the social networks. Facebook, Twitter and may be LinkedIn. You need to engage and discuss with your target audience. Some of them will hit you with a conversation, while the rest you will have to talk to first before they respond.

So what makes users passionate and how can their passion help you and your business?
They are mainly your perfect customer. The perfect fit for your product. The people that reallyyy need your product. The people you thought about when you came across your product idea. They may be just like you with the same interest and same perspective on the market.

Above describes exactly what makes up a prospective passionate user of your product. But you need to bring out the passion in the users by connecting with them, discussing with them and getting to know them on a personal level(very important).

They can promote your business across social networks and the rest of the web, they can get you content from friends, may be, and they make good team members because they share your belief and enthusiasm.

Your passionate users will do a lot for you and every business needs them.

HOW TO GO VIRAL!!!!

Going viral is the ultimate peak of every marketing and the number one rule is, NO BUSINESS, IDEA OR VIDEO CAN GO VIRAL WITHOUT PASSIONATE USERS.

I don't believe there is another way around going viral than utilizing your passionate users.

To create a viral campaign, you have to have people (passionate people) that will share whatever you want to go viral with all their trustees and friends on the various popular platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and more. This will ignite the initial spread of the viral campaign.

(The post is becoming long, I need to round up).

Ok. Now, before you reach any conclusions, building a viral campaign can not be complete with only passionate users. You need more than that, You need to build a strategy. But you can't do it without passionate user.

Finally, the only thing that guarantees you of getting many passionate users is a much needed product (product with high demand and if you are a first mover), or any great idea.

Spend most of your time on making sure your product rocks before you invest your time in any viral campaign.

3 things that will make Google penalize you for pagerank or Link fraud

Cross linking all your sites or blogs: Dont try to cross link your sites or blogs inorder to boost your Google PR. Back in 2005, I had about 9 blogs. Some of pr 1, about two with a pagerank of 2 and of course some with a pagerank of 0. Inorder to raise their pageranks, I decided to link to all my blogs from each one of them. A few weeks later, all the blogs lost all their pagerank.

Buying tons of links: Never buy 500 links or submission to 150 directories because if you do, it will send a signal to the Google spam filters that your site should be in the sandbox especially if it is a new site. Focus on getting links from blogs, forums and Authority sites that are related to your site.

Replicating the same content: Google has content filters and will make sure it drops any multiple contents you have (especially if they are linked to each other, or linked to from thesame website.)
If you have to post a single article more than once, make sure you reword atleast 40% of the content, completely change the title and the first few paragraphs of the article.

Dont be lazy.

Discuss on blogs, forums, email bloggers, write and update your site all the time and do some web2.0 marketing. But DO NOT SPAM because it will come back to you.

I have a site about african entertainment which is now 2 years old. I have been link building slowly with blogs, forums and article posts, I was even lucky to be featured in some tech blogs. With the recent Google pagerank update, the site is now a solid PR 3. This is considering we haven't been sending PR releases or asking to be featured. We are totally focussed on rolling out the product.

Happy Birthday to the African TV project.

6 signs that your startup needs a new marketing team.

Here is a post that outlines 6 different things that may be a sign that your marketing team is not fit for the Job.

1. Whenever someone Googles your startup's name, pages about your site on websiteoutlook, compete.com, alexa, about.com come up in the first results page.

This means your marketing team has only been updating a few wiki pages and checking up the value of your site instead of getting you valuable users.

2. Whenever someone googles your startup's name, they don't get press releases about your startup on the first page, and hardly one profile for your startup from either myspace, facebook, folkd and definitely not twitter.

Your marketing team is not leveraging the power of press releases and they are so web1.0.

3. Your startup is less than a year old and traffic increase has been less than 30% in the recent months.

Growth is very slow, its time you put your marketing on steroids.

4. The only links you can find about your startup are the ones you put up yourself, obviously no blogger thinks it is worth writing about.

They are not sending the right message about your company.

5. Your webmaster's inbox is always empty, seems nobody bothers to know where you headed.

They lack creativity.

6. The Google Pagerank of your just months old site is thesame after 2 Google Pagerank updates.

They have never heard of authority sites. They have been link building for a while but hardly get a link from any site that is not a low traffic directory.

Internet Marketing that has worked for me.

Tips on promotion techniques that have brought traffic to my site for free.

>>> Google.
Google will always be on top. Atleast since I don't have a Yahoo! directory listing. Back in 2004 when I cleverly got my website listed in the Yahoo! directory for free, Yahoo! used to be my biggest traffic source.
Now even if I do secure the listing, I don't expect my Yahoo! traffic to exceed the one I already get from Google. My site is doing really good on the Google SERPS with top 10 listing and even #5 listing for my best keyphrase and #1 for many other keyphrases. (Atleast 3 more).
Well incase you want to know what my secret is, content. Content is the key, build more pages, link to them from blogposts, Digg them and more traffic will come from Google.

>>> Yahoo!
I am doing decently well on the Yahoo! search, (though I don't know how well I will still be doing since they turned to Bing). The thing is, this time around my site doesn't have a Yahoo! directory listing so I don't expect Yahoo search to favour my site in it's result so much.

>>> Nairaland
Participating on the Nairaland forum has helped me a lot scoop up some home website traffic. I get significant traffic to my site from 2 of the threads I participated in on the forum.
Here are some tips for participating on Nairaland.
- Respond to threads that have lots of activities, with responses into the hundreds.
- Some Google PR of 1 or 2 would do.
- And please say something reasonable. (it's ok to include a link on your response or add a sig file).


>>> Twitter
As long as you follow the right people and get followed on twitter, you will get some traffic to your site and lot's of mention about you. participate in discussions, send @replies, follow the right people and update your status regularly. Just logging on and listening to what others are saying will give you the idea on what to say.


>>> Digg
Digg it, don't spam it.

>>> Stumbleupon
Make friends with people on related industry, stumble their favorites and make sure they like you so they stumble yours too.

>>> Hubpages
This is really a great service. all you have to do is write and publish articles, ping them and add them to other social bookmarking sites and watch the traffic grow and Google Pagerank rise. You can publish a good article and it can reach a Google Pagerank of 2 in a few weeks. You can also network with people in related industry so they know when you publish a new hub. You can publish weekly, though publishing monthly isn't bad at all.

>>> Blogging
I started blogging early, probably around thesame time that blogging experts like Yaro Starak started. It was really great then back in 2004-2005 doing wonders with blogs and pings.
Well blogging is not like it used to be. I have had blogs with close to a thousand daily visitors. But now apart from this blog, I only use blogs for some link building.

>>> Reciprocal links
links I requeted from other webmasters.

New techniques I will be using

Press release
article marketing ( I have done this to some extent, but not big time).
squidoo lenses
paid ads