Some Essential Viral Marketing Tools

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 2 of October , 2007 at 7:30 am

You know how I feel about viral marketing. It catches on!

You know that I like viral video and social marketing and I recently wrote a post on podcasting. E-books are another form of viral marketing that has been popular in the past. Another tool that you can use for viral marketing is your newsletter. Today, I’m going to share with you some of the tools that you’ll need to produce these items - at least, the ones that I recommend.

Viral Video

Camtasia Studio - Let’s start with viral video. There are two primary tools I’d recommend. The first, and most popular, is Camtasia. Camtasia is a software program that allows you to record anything you see on your computer screen. You can turn Camtasia on and let it record your mouse clicks and navigation on your own website so you can show visitors how to use your site or to demonstrate other useful experiences. Put out by TechSmith, Camtasia isn’t cheap. It’s about $299.00, but they do have a free trial version.

Digital Camera - If you want to appear on screen and talk then get yourself an inexpensive digital camera. It doesn’t have to be anything real big. Make sure the camera has video capability, or use a camcorder. With a digital camera and Windows Media Player, which comes with most computers these days, you can produce a rock solid viral video.

Viral Podcasting

Audacity - Easily the best podcasting tool is Audacity. Audacity is simply an audio program that allows you to record your voice, telephone conversations, and other audio files, and upload them to your computer or website. It’s really all you need. And it’s free.

Digital Recorder - Not as useful as Audacity’s editing platform, but you can take a regular old digital tape recorder and record yourself then upload it to your computer or website. It works the same way, but you’ll have to edit in Windows Media Player.

Viral E-books

CutePDF - Very inexpensive. About $50. You can convert any document to PDF format. You can go with the original Adobe platform, but it’s very expensive. Get CutePDF. It’s the cheaper version.

MS Word - Don’t want to shell out $50 for CutePDF? Use MicroSoft Word and convert to PDF from there. It isn’t as flexible as CutePDF. You have to do all of your editing inside of Word. CutePDF actually has editing features that allow you to do some things quicker and more easily than Word does.

Viral Newsletters

Constant Contact - Newsletters have been around for a long time. Constant Contact is a service that makes newsletter production simple. They have a 60-day free trial, but you’ll quickly want to purchase the service for $15 per month. If you decide to use Constant Contact, let me know. I can refer a friend and we both get a $30 credit.

MS Publisher - You can do a newsletter yourself with MS Publisher and convert to HTML. This is obviously much less expensive as Publisher usually comes with computers today, or with MS Office. Less flexible than Constant Contact and you’ll have to create your own autoresponders, but it produces great newsletters and you can’t tell the difference.

MS Word - Same as with e-books. You can create and convert to HTML. Inexpensive, but not as flexible as the other options.

Social Marketing

Really all you need to do any type of social marketing is a computer and access to the Internet. Network and bookmark your favorite websites.

One other viral tool that I left out was blogging. You can set up your own blog on a free blog host like Blogger.com. But I don’t recommend that. I recommend WordPress on your own domain name because you have more control over that. WordPress is open source and free and if you’ve never dealt with software before or you are technology challenged then you’ll need some help. But it’s well worth it.

Category: Social & Viral Marketing

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