Buzz Marketing and Viral Marketing are great ways to drive traffic.  However, they are hit and miss strategies that will sometimes under produce and sometimes explode your visibility.

Many people I talk to think that Buzz Marketing and Viral Marketing are the answer to their problems.  This is very far from the truth – because you have to know what you want people to do before you try to get their attention.  You might not get two shots.

So you have to work backwards.  Start with the outcome that you want.  Probably it is lead generation and/or online sales.  If this is the case, spend your time perfecting your lead generation tools online before you worry about viral marketing or Buzz Marketing Campaigns.

You may even have to go back further.  Have you done the proper market research?  Do you know what the real problem your potential customers want solutions for?  You do not want to sell what you want to sell, you want to sell what people want to buy.

If you have a lead generation process online and you know that it is converting at 5% or 10% or 20% …. then you are ready to explore how to increase targeted traffic to your website.    If you are trying to do viral and buzz activities, this may take a few trys, but you know that when one of your viral marketing campaigns hits big, it will actually create customers and revenue.

If you skip this step and hit big with a viral marketing campaign, you might feel good about the great traffic, but without converting some of those to dollars what good did it really do?