Social Media

Helping a Local Business Go Viral (and get links)

on March 29th, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

One of the areas of focus for a local business is to get links from other sites around the web. I will always suggest a local business have a company blog, and it is a great way to start getting links. However, a ho-hum blog post is not going to attract attention and links. A viral blog post, on the other hand, can!

Matt Siltala of 97thfloor.com goes through ideas for a viral marketing campaign for a local landscaping company. It’s a good read, and a great example of how practically any business could do a viral marketing campaign and get some attention and links.

Whatever local business you own, there has to be some part of it that would be interesting to some large audience. One of the shows I used to watch a lot was “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery channel. It did help to have an amazing host of the show (Mike Rowe), but it was fascinating seeing what “ordinary” jobs have involved in them. They took something that wasn’t something you would just start talking to your neighbor about to a tremendous following of the show.

The trick is to figure out what that might be, and then release it into the right audience that will appreciate it. There are social news sites for almost every group of people now. Some are huge and have millions of users, others only a few thousand. Getting your viral piece out to both wide audiences and niche audiences helps the campaign have more chances for gaining traction.

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