What’s make a new software or a website to spread fast without any advertising or any marketing efforts? Crack this answer and you will probably crack the human nature.

A pause to those who are not familiar with the terms: “viral marketing” or “viral advertising”. Usually it’s referring to a technique that uses the consumers to create awareness for a brand or a product. Usually it’s a word of mouth. In a successful viral spread an exponentially increasing is been attained.

I was lucky to developed few products in the last 15 years that did very well using this technique. There is a good chance that you are using one of those products.

Before I begin to develop any new product I am trying to figure out the odds of the product to spread in a viral way. My strategy is simple: I am meeting a problem. I am looking for the best solution for it. I Check if it can be delivered for FREE and still make a profit. If all of my question have a Yes answer than I move to the next crucial question: Is it going to be a viral product?

What are the main keys that make a product viral?
I am not going to give you a direct answer because to my opinion there isn’t such an answer. However there are some key elements that at least one of them can be found in a successful viral campaign

One of the first mega successes of viral products is ICQ. ICQ (Mirabilis) was acquired by AOL for $407,000,000 while they had $0 of income. That does along prove how big the success of ICQ was.
What was so special about ICQ product that contributes to its big success? Beside the simplicity of the application, a crowded website that was chosen more than one time as one of the top 100 worst website design of the year, ICQ had a unique quality: If you would like to use ICQ you must tell about it to your friends, otherwise you will not have someone to chat with. Sound simple? Well… it is.

Create a product that consumers will get the most out of it if they will tell about it to their friends. It doesn’t really matter what the users will get from it. It’s could be money, joy or any king of satisfaction. As long they need their friends to benefit from the product than you can be sure that you have a winner.

ICQ was the first to use this principle. But many came after adopting the same technique. Among the most famous you can find: Skype, FaceBook etc. With all of those products you can’t enjoy them without recruiting your friends.

When hotmail was launched it offered a free web based email system. And… it was for free. When someone got an email from a hotmail user, beside the email content he saw two simple things: the hotmail.com extension at the “from” field and a sentence at the bottom of the email offering to open a free hotmail account.
How simple. Hotmail realized that when users are using their service they are actually exposing it to other potential users.

Create a product that an active user (a user who signed up to the service) use it with a passive user (a use that is not using the service). The active user is exposing the passive user to the new product while saying (quietly) “hey, it’s a great product. I am using it”.

You probably wondering what a viral product we are working right now. Well…. you can’t call a product viral until it was proven as a viral. Anyway, when I first thought about Smarty Link Exchange (almost a year and half backwards), I always thought about how viral it can be. When Smarty Link Exchange will be launched we will be offering a free service. Everyone can sign up for FREE. And yes…. For the members of Smarty Link Exchange to get the most of it, they are advised to share it with their friends. Given the fact that Smarty Link Exchange is a needed solution, I hope it will have the same success that I had with others products that I developed in the last years.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.