Customers As Your Viral Affiliates   by Gary Granai Private customer sales are very effective ways to get viral marketing started for your own web site. All that you have to do is provide them with a special incentive for that they can use, but also send to their friends and family. You do it by offering a discount on someone else’s products and not yours. You make money on someone else’s money. The process is straightforward. You offer your customers a discount on a third party’s products. They get the discount by using a discount code that promotes your web site and encourages them to send that discount code to their family and friends so that they too can get the discount. To get the discount when they want to buy something, they go to a page that promotes your company and further encourages them to send the discount coupon to their family and friends. When that happens, they are lead to your site and they are further encouraged to pass the discount offer on. As this process moves forward, you gather opt in email addresses of people who are interested in special offers. Periodically they are sent email with a special offer that brings them right back into the circle of viral marketing. You can see this process in action at http://www.qlbr.com/aff_master_page Key to your success is: the use of an affiliate program that uses discount codes instead of cookies, and the use of an affiliate program that provides you a customized page that promotes your company. Affiliate programs with discount codes are not that prevalent on the web because they are easy to set up and provide benefits to affiliates that many companies do not want to provide to affiliates. The biggest benefit that affiliates get is the ability to get long-term commissions and not to be affected by customers deleting cookies. If you can’t find one to your liking, you can set one up yourself very easy and use it as part of your own viral marketing plan. The whole program is based on using a shopping cart into which you can insert a discount code. That you can get in many places. And you can even get one free at http://www.chamberofcommerce.pl/own_store For a model, you can use the affiliate program at http://www.qlbr.com/aff_shoppoland_program . Use the concept and make your own marketing materials. Note that it just uses a simple free form for affiliate applications and the store that it promotes uses the free shopping cart mentioned in the paragraph above. But back to the private sale and your customers as viral marketers. There are many ways to get your customers started. Email, of course, is of the first. Just send the information about a special offer to your mailing list. Email is fast, direct and you can generally predict a response rate. A postcard is second. Postcards have legs. Unlike email that gets deleted, and web page addresses that are forgotten, postcards hang around. They get read, they get filed, they get put on refrigerators and they get results. They are particularly attractive when they make your customer feel important by telling the customer that this is a private sale. Customers respond. The real money comes with the follow up email or postcard with a special offer for a unique and special item that is available only to people who are on your list. As you develop your viral marketing business model, you will develop tactics and strategies that keep your customers telling others about the special deals that they are getting through you. And you will find that your customers are the best viral marketers that you have. About the Author Gary Granai is a publisher of several web sites that are related to international trade and sales. His first site went on line in 1995. It is at this link