The often overlooked importance of viral marketing..

Posted on December 31, 2006
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I admit that I occasionally spend too much time trying to crack the Google algorithm (or at least try to figure out which components are most important) and not enough time on other Search Engine Marketing (SEM) activities.  I had the importance of this brought home to me recently while rummaging through my site statistics.

Over a week ago, I happened to notice that I was getting more entries onto my golf slippers page on TheGolfCollection.  At first I thought perhaps I had moved up naturally on the search engines but a review of the referrer showed that many of these visitors were coming from GolfBlogger.com.  I didn’t know the owner nor had I ever heard of the site before so with a few clicks on the keyboard, I dropped on by. 

To my amusement, the owner had selected our golf slippers as his ‘rediculous golf item of the week’.  He copied the picture of the golf slippers and made that a link to our site along with a text link.  So his golf site was sending qualified visitors to my site.  Free of charge to me – what a deal!

Bob and I started a relationship with the site owner and we’ve now had our second item showing as a product pick.  More products – more visitors – more sales. 

This got us thinking.   Had we been missing the obvious all along?  Well, yes we had.  The next think I knew, Bob was logging into golf forums and searching for threads that would relate to products we sell and causually make a reference.  Now we get more qualified traffic and the cost is a little time and effort.

BTW, in case the SEO types are wondering, the text link on GolfBlogger.com was a “rel = nofollow” link so it was not doing us any good from a rankings perspective with Google.  However, the image link is a real link.

The final kicker is that today I noticed that GolfBlogger.com is starting to rank for golf slippers naturally in the search engines.  So we are, by the good graces of GolfBlogger.com getting more placements that will eventually send us,

yes, you guessed it,

MORE traffic. 

I guess that’s why it’s called viral marketing.

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