Grand Master Style Sheet

So far, we've established in our last blog posts how to begin architecting a web viral marketing strategy. You will notice that we haven't even touched content development or marketing creative. This is because your infrastructure must be in place before you spend a single penny on the actually marketing pieces.

Before we get too far. You and I both know that since you have a collection of email addresses, you really should put it to good use. Make sure that you do NOT use these email addresses for anything self serving YET! I MEAN IT! NOTHING!

Each email must only deliver the promised notice of a new educational or entertainment series on the related to the market you are targeting. Basically, what we are doing is creating the most friendly open free range mulching grounds. This is the grand master of all processes.

Then, at a rate of about 2x a month, offer valuable unique NON SELF SERVING EMAILS. What ever your industry, i'm sure that you have some tidbit that will make you look like a omniscient oracle. Give value in short emails. 

Once you have over 2000 email addresses where you have built up a strong credibility base and good will. You can now start collecting the truly valuable online demographic data. Install an open source facebook clone web application called elgg. With elgg... you will be able to get your users to get YOU each other's demographic data.

In other words, two users will communicate about a video or how to doc or blog post or email you sent out. One user will ask another user what his/her real name is, age, location, etc. And now that they are grazing on your fields, you become the de facto beneficiary of all this valuable data. 

But don't get me wrong. For a long term success, you must never fleece your citizenry. Even when you milk them, make sure they enjoy it. I'll explain how to build in mutually beneficial ecosystems online next... 

To ask questions about collecting demographic data.

Gathering demographic and personal contact data from subscribers

Now that you know where to start your viral marketing architecture... you go where there are the most fish and fewest fishermen (huh? see last blogpost) how do you grease personal information from each of your nameless, faceless, placeless subscribers and website visitors?

You already know why it is crucial to have a personal relationship with each visitor from the first post here. 

Without boring you with the database application and business intelligence mining applications of what I'm about to tell you, hang on, if you dont already know why you will need the following data.

In order of easiest to gather to hardest to gather, the data you will need from each visitor is, 

email

sex

country

state

city

birth year
birth month

birth date

real name

phone number

credit card number

email addresses of friends

location of friends

If you are not a hard seasoned veteran business school exec, all of this information may seem invasive. You aint seen nuttin yet.

Even before we get most of this information, we will have the name of each visitor's ISP, web browsing habits, know what website they went to after they leave yours, every single time each person visits and for how long each time. We will know what size monitor they have, what OS they are running, and if they are on a PC, MAC or LINUX box. 

Heck, we will even know if they are visiting your site from within a cubicle during their officing hours. Believe me. You will have to know all this data to maximize your marketing success likelihood. I will explain the beauty of BI data mining to pinpoint marketing a bit later.

For now... since the easiest contact data to gather is an email address... Start a groups.google.com account. DO NOT USE YAHOO. Yahoo breaks the url link tags making it hard for google to find you. If you use google, well, it wont be so tough for google to find you.

Now... how do you get people to give up their email address? It's called BONUSES and NOT Bait and Switch. An example of bait and switch is when you create an ongoing series of how to blog posts like these and then when we get to the climax, I require that you enter your email for the last key blog post. THAT is not cool. 

You want to build rapport and support. NOT an adversarial relationship. So... what you do is deliver value consistently as promised. Whatever you are selling or marketing, ask yourself why you feel what you do is valuable. Then talk about it in a way that is entertaining, valuable, and memorable to your market. Finally, when you are done with a series on a topic, simply say,

"To be notified directly to your personal email when we begin our next series, Please go to mysite.com"

Be direct about requiring their email address. Being shy about it makes you look sneaky. Now lets talk about how to gather the other key personal information and why it is crucial to yourviral marketing success.

To ask questions: http://sparkah.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8