Guerrilla Marketing SEO Expert Launches Viral Social Media Marketing Customer Acquisition Program

Nov. 3, 2011 - PRLog -- On August 17, 2011, Brock Allen of MySEOGuru.net published a blog post titled "Free SEO - How a Small Business can Get Free SEO Services" (sic).  The post was purposely designed and implemented as a viral marketing experiment.

Within the first 48 hours, the post content had been "re-published", verbatim, approximately 98,600 times across the Internet. After just 14 days, the content appeared about 175,000 times according to Google search results. MySEOGuru is now leveraging lessons learned from that initial viral marketing experiment to attract Beta Clients for its new affordable SEO services for small business.

It should be noted that the "Free SEO" blog post did not simply "take off" on its own.  A marketing mix comprised of a number of Guerrilla Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, and other strategic marketing tactics were applied to "launch" the viral process.

The structure and composition of the content were sufficiently optimized to facilitate the challenge. Use of the word "Free" ("the most powerful word in the Guerrilla Marketer's vocabulary) proved effective. Offering information about  "How a Small Business can Get Free SEO Services" clearly has widespread, almost universal, interest.

Although the August 17 viral marketing experiment achieved a strong measure of success, it did not achieve the most significant objective - attracting new customers. One of the most  important lessons learned is that viral marketing success sometimes comes at the expense of certain "controls".  It seems axiomatic that for something to "go viral" that control, real of implied, gets sacrificed.  

The reason that the blog post content spread so rapidly is because so many people wanted to share it (one of the fundamental characteristics for most successful viral marketing campaigns). The manner in which readers were able to share the content might seem to violate, or at least undermine, some of the principle concepts of copyright law.  

Virtually all of the people who spread the content did so by copying-and-pasting the content onto their own blogs or websites - as if it were their own, except for an author attribution at the very end. In most cases the people who spread the contest "took the liberty"  of writing "By {First Name Last Name}" at the heading of the article content.

This method of "re-publishing" has recently been referred to as using "freemium content". In fact, many of the article, blog, photograph and other content directories online operate according to the "Creative Commons.org" policies of sharing content. The viral spread of the original content appears to have been done in accordance with the terms and conditions of a "Creative Commons" license.

Brock Allen stated "I am, of course, pleased that so many people apparently saw value in the content. In the future, I will be striving to improve methods of "driving" the traffic to websites or blogs of my own....So that I, too, might reap the benefits of the visitors."

MySEOGuru.net is planning the iminent release of a more expansive version of the original report about ways that Small Businesses can attract and take advantage of Free SEO, Social Media Marketing, and other services. The company plans to find a fair balance between Creative Commons's Fair Use and its own need to maintain control over the content.

As an exercise in viral marketing relinquishing control of the content may be a reasonable "bargain" to make - especially if it serves to generate publicity and awareness for a new company. To the extent that it could help attract 100 new customers to a fledgling start-up, many other businesses might accept that bargain, as well.

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MySEOGuru.net offers free SEO Tips, Affordable SEO options, and Professional SEO and Social Media Marketing Services for Business Vertical or Local Market Domination. Services include marketing consulting, online marketing expertise, SEO marketing, internet marketing, search engine marketing, Facebook Marketing, lead generation, automated lead follow-up implementation, conversion strategies, and more.