28 Secrets For Achieving Viral Collaborative Value (VCV)

11/20/06 • 9 min

Viral Collaborative Value (VCV) is the value your content brings to the social community which it serves. With valuable content focused on a specific social community, you will create a viral instinct for the content to be shared. The money will come through building value for your community. The optimization of web site content for social collaboration is about providing value for a community through good tools, portability and aggregation. In the Web 2.0 world, value is derived from social collaboration by aggregating that content into a social community. To achieve Viral Collaborative Value you need to: *Collect Email Addresses! You need to collect as many as possible. Email your list each week. *Be contactable. Put your contact information on every page of your site. *Be active in your web community. Be active everyday in your social community. *Be a giver. Make sure that you are constantly giving value to others without the hope of receiving. *Stay motivated. Make sure you are at the top of your game in positive energy. *Be in the know. Don’t be just active. Be active with purpose. Are you just going through the motions? Have a pulse on this community. *Create content of value. Make sure that the content you are creating is valuable to others. *Make every interaction a valuable one. Every time you interact with someone through a message board, podcast, or blog post your content should be right on. *Have patience! It takes time. *Get off your high horse! Not everyone is where you are, make sure you can bring them there. *Have Integrity. Don’t offer something you don’t believe in. Don’t recommend something you haven’t used yourself. *Have Wow Factor! Make sure people say Wow! every time they hear from you. *Go above and beyond. If it’s as good as the other guys, it’s a loser. Make sure you are adding value above that of your competition. *Make it easy for people to share with others. Add buttons to your content that allow people to share your content with social sites like Digg, Technorati, Furl to name a few. *Make it fresh! Don’t let your content get stale. Go back and read your own stuff, change it. *Submit yourself! Submit your content to social bookmarking web sites and search engines. Be the first to get your content out there. Make sure every time you post to your blog you are pinging the world. *Reward those that link to you! Drop them a bone by either selectively linking back to them or by doing it in some ever changing short list of top linkers to your content. *Reward users who contribute! Create a community points systems. Sometimes being at the top of a list is all a person needs. *Podcast! You should have a podcast running right now. *Blog! Where is your blog? You need one. *Forums! You need forums on your web site. *Make it portable! Your content needs to be portable to others. If you allow others to share your content in the way of podcasts, video, PDF or similar portable formats you will be able to create a viral type marketing effect for your web site. *Make it useable by others! If you provide some type of syndication so others can use your content. One great way to do this is through the creation of articles that others can post of their web site, as long as your BIO with your link remains in tact in the article. Make it easy for others to include your podcasts or videocasts into their web site. *Help others make money! Affiliate program for your products. *Aggregate to infinity and beyond! Become the aggregation source. Turn part of your site into a message board, wiki or other social aggregation platform where the value is in the aggregation of the content. *Tools! Be an active user in your own tools. Drink your own cool aid. Eat your own dog food. Make sure what you are providing is of real value and if it’s not change it. You are the master of your own tools. *Measure! Measure! Measure! Figure out what is being used and what is not. *Try something new! Don’t be afraid to fail. Make sure you get the basics down and start trying new things.

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Getting started in Internet marketing over the next 90 days

Quick Tip: Go add yourself to wikipedia. Add a page about yourself. Add links back to yourself. Add information about your products. So Chris, What is it that you do? I create search engine optimization software that allow me to promote affiliate programs through search engines by creating highly optimized web pages. I also create information products and I promote these products in the same way. So Chris, How did you get started doing this? That's very easy. Back about 1999 I was working at a very large mortgage company, who is now a household name now, you see their name on TV alot now. They were paying $10 per application to affiliates for anyone who was referred to their web site who would complete a mortgage application. I didn't know anything about Internet Affiliate Marketing back then and it sort of supprised me that we ended up owing a guy $100,000 for the month. He had referred 10,000 people at $10 a piece who completed a mortgage application. So the marketing people within the company came to me and asked me if I would investigate how this person was able to do this. So I went out and found at what this person had done. He had submitted thousands of web pages to MSN search for different keywords. All these web pages redirected the web surfers back to a 5 page web site. At the time Internet Explorer always defaulted the home page to MSN search. Unless someone installed another web browser on their machine or manually changed their home page, they were using MSN search for search results. So what happened was for personal loans, auto loans, mortgage loans and lots of other searches this person was the first 100 links in MSN search for those keywords. When anyone searched for these terms they would end up on this person's web site. He had cornered the market on MSN search. So the mortgage company asked me to put this system in place. We did and started making alot of referrals to our primary web site. We ended up getting alot of traffic and people filling out mortgage loans for free. The affiliate income was never a steady income I could depend on, so I kept a full time job and did affiliate stuff as a hobby. I made $189,000 from a one page web site. So how do you know if Internet Marketing is for you? The only thing I can say is to try it. One of my favorite things is from Dan Kennedy's book on direct marketing. He has a list of things that every direct marketing system should have. Everyone should own his book "No B.S. Direct Marketing". But basically it follows the path of lead generation, making offers, how to respond, tracking conversions, cross-selling, upselling and follow up. If you send someone a letter, somewhere in that letter should be an offer. You don't want to just send someone a letter and educate them and then say by. You should always make and offer in every item you produce. So that customers can keep the conversation going by taking action. It always easier to sell to someone who has purchased products from you before. So market and measure responses. Keep following up with your customers. One of the techniques for selling is going out there and creating copy for customers who are close to buying a product. But they have a few questions in their mind. You want to cater to their emotional brain. They probably want to know if the product can produce the results that it says it can or if others have seens good results by using the product. Is this product a scam, is it for real, etc... One of the thing that you need to do if focus your copy to the emotional brain. If you were going to build an affiliate page for mortgages, you want to sell the vision. If someone is looking at getting a mortgage are they getting one to have an extra payment every month? Of course not, they have some underlying want or need that is causing them to pursue this product purchase. You want to cater to that emotional want or need. Are they buying this home to pursure the American dream, is their family growing etc... Surround your offering with pictures, the big house, the green grass, the white picket fence, two health adults with two healthy kids, nice car, nice neighbor, etc... That's what these people want. They are looking to make a deposit in their emotional bank account. You want to tell that person hey, I have what you are looking for. People will make an emotional decision twice as fast as they will make a logical one. They will get to the logical part sooner or later, let them make that logical decision after they have left your affiliate page. You want to cater to their emotions and get them on and off your site as fast as possible. People will act on emotion twice as fast a logic. What are the top 5 areas you should focus on in Internet Marketing? 1. Blogging - focus on creating real value everyday. Write several high quality blog posts each day. If you can't create good content, goto elance.com and find someone in India who will write the stories for you. You can usually get an 400 word a...