Is it really possible to generate exponential list growth using the Internet? It has been tried many times and with some success. Perhaps the very first membership site to grow exponentially (at an accelerating rate) was Hotmail which, following launch in 1996 grew to 8 Million users within 15 months. Then it was acquired by Microsoft for $400 Million.
So what was the method Hotmail used to grow so fast? Well the financiers, who struck the deal with Microsoft, called it Viral Marketing. It was the first time the term had been coined.
Viral Marketing is what we used to call word-of-mouth marketing. Basically put, it is the means of spreading your customer base by using your customer base as your mouthpiece.
Hotmail did it by simply placing a single line at the bottom of every email sent through its service:
“Sent from my free Hotmail account. Get your own free web-based email account Here!”
Every time someone used Hotmail’s email service to send an email, they were advertising the service at the same time. Looking back, when Hotmail was the only web-based email service, it was a no-brainer for people to sign up and get a free hotmail account. The advantages and convenience of it by far outweighed the process of obtaining an email address by normal means.
The most important characteristic of Hotmail’s success with viral marketing is the seamless ease with which its message was passed on. In their case, it was so compulsive that the service couldn’t be used without doing so. The question we should ask now is, how transferable is it to my own product or service?
A common, and highly effective way of spreading a message virally on the Internet, is with rebrandable ebooks (sometimes called viral ebooks). These devices are so called because they perform a valuable extra function than a normal downloadable PDF can do.
Rebrandable ebooks enable your readers to stamp their own affiliate links for your product within the pages of the ebook. By doing this, they are the ones who will earn commission on any sale their copies make so they are motivated to rebrand and pass-on, rebrand and pass-on etc.
Viral growth with rebrandable ebooks is the method of automated growth that has been systemised with My Viral Spiral (MVS). This is a membership site script with inbuilt functionality for uploading and rebranding unlimited numbers of ebooks. When you use this software to create a membership site alongside your other web properties or affiliate programs, you are granting your members the ability to grow independent lists of their own using your in-built autoresponder, whilst at the same time, they are growing yours.
MVS has a unique combination of viral factors built into it which together enable anyone to build a list from scratch without needing costly traffic and hosting fees. It also adopts a 3-dimensional rebranding feature which means that every new member immediately has two ways to make money from each new member they generate.
Some people think MVS is an affiliate marketing script, like Butterfly Marketing, or Launch Formula Marketing. But they are mistaken. There is nothing else like MVS. Its purpose is to automated the traffic-gathering front-end of any website. It is a script which generates and accumulates more traffic by using the activity of its members. Basically, it multiplies whatever traffic it is fed to increase signups and sales.
However, not everyone has experienced success with this program. Even though there are many whose lists have grown very quickly, others appear to have had disappointing results because of low member activity.
One member even claims to have got 1,200 signups in the first five days he had the program running.
Perhaps the most likely key to success with this system is to run it alongside a blog – preferably Wordpress. Then, using regularly updated keyword-rich articles and posts, the site can expect to draw every-increasing levels of targeted visitors from the search engines.
Then, with the signup widget from MVS installed in the sidebar of the blog, a percentage of this organic search traffic will join, rebrand their ebooks, and pass them on by driving their own traffic to the squeeze pages they are given by the system.
Following a review of methods used for engineering exponential growth, MVS has impressed me the most with its productive mix of viral motivators, viral slip, viral seeds and viral triggers. When an MVS site is used well, all of these functions work closely to power viral list growth and automatic sales.