My First Viral Campaign

After publishing Fearful To Fearless I made my first attempt at an online campaign to help spread awareness. The campaign was patterned after similar campaigns I’ve seen and actually participated in myself.

The crux of the campaign was this;

  1. First, you need to provide your visitors the opportunity of receiving a free gift, something of value. In my case I was offering free copies of Fearful To Fearless to 10 individuals.
  2. You need to make sure you spell out the rules so there is absolutely no question. My offering required participants to complete the next three steps, and made sure they understood that the decision of who wont was entirely up to me based upon why they wanted a copy of the book.
  3. First, engage people to have them tell you why they want the product. I directed visitors to enter the information in a comment that is visible to all visiting the site.
  4. Next, a method for people to provide their contact information so you know where to send the prizes to the winners without the information being publicly displayed. This is important because the name people leave comments as is different than there real names. This is where you need to make sure they provide the name they used for the comment so you can sync up the comment to the real person.
  5. Lastly, and this is most important, require participants to spread the information on one of their social networks. This info can easily be verified by utilizing some of the functionality already built into many blogging packages, using Google Alert, or many others.

Obviously you can come up with your own requirements but this was a popular method I was already familiar with and easily implemented.

The Results:

Honestsly, it wasn’t quite as successful as I had hoped, although a number of people did submit comments for the free book giveaway which remain on the web page at http://fearfultofearless.com. Perhaps extending it longer would have resulted in increased results, although I suspect that the people who were aware and interested in the offer were a bit older and perhaps less tech savvy than younger folks. I would estimate that only about 30-40 percent of those that submitted comments followed through with completing all of the necessary steps which were intended to be the catalyst for spreading virally. Feedback from others who have implemented similar campaigns report up to 90% of those submitting comments follow through with all of the steps outlined in their offers.

Not that it was unsuccessful either, I have received a considerable amount of traffic and the facebook fan page numbers continue to increase. I’ve got a couple other thoughts and will work on them soon.