Freeware, Shareware, and Other Tricks that Pay
Viral marketing is one of the easiest and best ways to generate large amounts of inbounds links (which those search engines love) and traffic to your website. And the best thing about it is, you can employ viral marketing methods to gain fast, easy traffic for a very small investmenteven free!
What is Viral Marketing?
At its most basic, viral marketing is nothing more than the spreading of information from one person to another. It is based on the concept that on average, a person will tell three others about a product that they like. So for every client you please, there are three more potentials following behind. In web circles, this has been applied in a broader sense to include not just word-of mouth campaigning, but actual programs that get passed around and enjoyed; and when those mini-programs link to another, more useful website or product, the viral effect continues on to eventually net the end-goal, which in this case is traffic to your website, and conversion of traffic into sales of featured affiliate products.
Using Freeware and Shareware in Viral Marketing Campaigns
People love getting something for nothing. That is why freeware and shareware are so popular on the web today. By giving away a free version of a complimentary program that fits in with your affiliate product, you can generate a large amount of viral traffic into your site. What's great about this kind of traffic is that it is independent of web searches. In other words, the viral traffic from freeware is in addition to organic traffic generated by search engines.
The basic method that is employed here is this:
For example, you might prominently display feature articles with detail useful information for bodybuilders. Naturally, the articles that are linked will be those hosted on your main product affiliate site, which is already set up to convert your visitor over to your merchant's page.
You can use Shareware applications in such the same way, only instead of promoting an affiliate program you are promoting a program that you own or have created. It starts as a free version, but only works for a limited amount of time before it times out, or has limited functionality. The goal is to get your users to fall in love with your little program so that they do buy the additional features or purchase the program after the trial time (you'll recognize this as the MO of many leading software companiesget them to rely on your product so that they have to buy the full version).
Useful Tricks and Tips for Distributing Freeware and Shareware Easily
To try to submit your applications to all the major free download centers would be entirely unmanageable. The only way to really do this is to use a submission program of some kind. There are different options out there, such as FastSubmit, PromoSoft, SharewareTracker and many more. These types of products help you submit to between 400 and 600 download sites automatically or semi-automatically, depending on the program you choose. Many of these rely on your having created a PAD file with the needed information the download sites will be using, so you should learn more about PAD files and creating them if you plan to use mass-submission software
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