Viral Advertising Demystified

Viral advertising is pretty popular these days.

In general terms, anything viral means that you only put a little initial effort into the project, and then other people promote it for you. They promote it because they get some benefit out of doing so.

The sort of viral advertising I’m talking about today is that used in sites like Free Viral, Traffic Digger, and T2000 Ultra.

All of these sites promise 1,000,000 visitors to your website (or some other outrageously high figure). I’ve see a lot of people sign up to them, and then complain a month later when they haven’t seen any visitors. The problem is that they don’t really understand how the sites work.

When you sign up with one of these sites, you have to visit some number of other sites to get activation codes from each. Once you have all the activation codes, you can get your own account. With your account, you get an advertising URL.

Here’s the most important bit: you must get people to visit your advertising URL!

The way you get your million visitors is by getting other people to sign up for the advertising site through your advertising URL. That way, your site is one of the ones they visit to get their activation code.

And since these sites always list half a dozen or so sites, when one of your referrals refers someone, your site is in the number two position. By the time your site gets to number six (or ten, or however many the site uses), the referral tree has grown large enough that you might very well get your million visitors.

But it all starts with you getting referrals to the advertising site. You won’t get any visitors without that step.

How useful is this sort of advertising?

I consider this sort of thing to be just like another traffic exchange. Provide an offer that’s attractive to the average person trying to make money online with little investment, and you might get some takers.

For the typical personal blog, though, it’s probably wasted effort.