Viral Marketing: Remember Happy Hour at Dotster?

Today, March 8th, at Dotster.com a coupon to purchase a domain for 50 cents will be posted to the Dotster web site. The offer is good for the registration of any new .com, .net, and .org domain registration. There is a limit of one coupon per order, one coupon per account ID, one coupon per IP address. So if you’ve had a blog idea or wanted to start up a forum, cruise on over to Dotster Between 5 – 6pm eastern time and get your coupon code, which is available to the first 1000 customers.

Just a few weeks ago on Feb 14, Dotster launched a promotion dubbed “Happy Hour” – in which they gave domains away for $1 for only 1 hour on Valentines Day. The success of the promotion, which wasn’t advertised except for word of mouth broguht so many visitors to Dotster.com that their servers had trouble keeping up with the traffic. Marci Hansen, Dotster’s Director of Marketing, said, “We wanted our first Happy Hour to be just a small test to make sure the idea would resonate with people. We told a few friends and family, and the word spread like wildfire! The viral force of the Internet proved itself once again.”

This type of viral marketing has taken off recently –

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant at Web Marketing Today described Viral Marketing “Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.” Dr. Wilson has outlined 6 key ingredients to viral marketing success.

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

Increasingly it is getting much more difficult to place products in front of customers. Mainstream advertising such as email ads and banner ads is just not working anymore. Viral Marketing is the answer for most companies today.