Emotional engagement is the key to viral marketing success. People share their everyday experiences by communicating them to others in and outside of their network. This social sharing is more rampant when the individuals develop intense feelings like fear, disgust, sadness, joy, anger and surprise.

Of all these emotions, surprise is a necessary ingredient which encourages people to pass on information they come across. Now let’s look at what surprise is and its impact on viral marketing. As partial reference, I’ll use a study from the Journal of Economic Psychology, one that examines surprise and its relationship to word-of-mouth.

What is Surprise and What Causes it?

Many researchers consider surprise a neutral and short-lived emotion that is elicited by unexpected phenomena or what is known as a ‘‘schema discrepancy’’. A schema is a theory that each person has about the nature of situations, objects and reality. The disruption of this schema is what leads to the element of surprise:

In order to have a proper representation of reality, individuals continuously check whether their schema matches the inputs coming from the surrounding environment. This check is, however, relatively unconscious As soon as inputs diverge from the schema, surprise is elicited. Schema discrepancy is the one and only cognitive cause of surprise, but the latter may also be elicited by non-cognitive causes

In other words, surprise is an emotion that occurs when something breaks the habitual pattern of thoughts we have. Such a disruption may occur on a physiological level (e.g loud sounds) or it can be deeply mental (e.g. something that challenges your world view).

Surprise’s effects are immediate: An stronger focus of attention on the stimulus, a heightened consciousness, better retention of memory at the expense of other stimuli. All of which eventually result in curiosity and exploratory behavior. This arousal also intensifies subsequent reactions, the excitation from being surprised transfers over to other experiences.

After detecting the schema discrepancy, the individual will evaluate it: the emotion of surprise is often followed by a positive or negative emotion, what we normally call a pleasant surprise or an unpleasant surprise. An interesting point to note about surprise is that most people will assume that what is surprising to them will also be new/useful information for others.

Using Surprise to Generate Word-of-Mouth

Our everyday reactions to our environment is habitual. Going through the same shop in the mall, we select and purchase items with more or less neutral emotions. Buying a pair of shoes does not involve ’disruptive’ or ‘intense’ emotions. Nothing here encourages us to share this experience with others. But this can change if you add the element of surprise.

For example, if you’re offered an unexpected and attractive freebie (e.g. bottle of wine) along with the product, it short-circuits your schema and generates surprise. You’re now much more likely to talk about the pair of shoes you bought or your feelings about the boutique or brand.

The goal here is to think about ways to elicit positive surprise by enhancing the experiences of your audience in unexpected ways. Making them feel privy to an unique situation encourages them to share or recommend your idea/product/service/brand. What does this mean? Only that one needs to invest time on understanding your audience’s schemas.

Its important to note that surprise can be used as a tool in many ways. For instance, it can used in a stand-alone format, in the form of viral ad or online video with a single message or you can integrate it into your sales or fulfillment funnel. Think about each juncture when you interact with your customer and inculcate elements of surprise wherever necessary.

Surprise can be used in large scale million dollar, multi-media/multi-platform viral marketing campaigns (e.g. The Dark Knight) or in smaller, repeating gestures like birthday cards, freebies and other addons you can attach to the product/service. Viral campaigns are short-term and hence easier to sustain surprise, while other repeating initiatives may lose their power after the audience comes to expect specific behavior and hence, develop a new schema.

In the next post on viral marketing, I’ll like to look at various examples of ads and hopefully determine a generic formula that one can you use to elicit immediate word-of-mouth.

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Making big money on the internet may have seemed like a dream in the past but not anymore because there are really many ways to make you a successful online money maker. In fact, it is hard not to make money if you put in a good effort.

Below are the 4 methods I have used to make money online. There is obviously several different avenues online for making money but these are the methods that I have found to work the best for me.

1. Google AdSense

Ask anyone what is the best money making program on the internet, the first response you will likely get is Google AdSense. If you have a website or blog, simply put up Google ads on it and when your visitors click on them, you get paid a commission.

Tip: Choose the right niche, right keyword(s) and drive relevant traffic and each click on the ad will result in money in your pocket.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is nothing new in the online money making industry. It is a multi-billion dollar business. A lot of people are making tons of money on the internet from affiliate marketing. So how it does it work exactly? Well if you have a website or blog selling a product, simply direct your traffic to the their site with a referral link. When your visitors purchase something through your referral link, you will earn a percentage of commission from the sale.

Tip: Drive lots of traffic to your website and participate in popular affiliate programs that pay well. Recommended affiliate programs are Commission Junction, Clickbank and Amazon.

3. Online Auctions

Making money through auctions is a slow yet profitable way to go if you have the knowledge and the skill to locate the right product at the right price. Power sellers on eBay have been making tens of thousands of dollars every month from online auctioning alone.

Tip: Learn and adopt the right skill to make a profitable sale. Do not give up easily as it may seem really tough at first. Learn and improve yourself along the way.

4. Private Ad Sales

Private Ad Sales is a new way to monetize your website or blog and the profits can be huge. In fact, popular internet gurus like John Chow, have been making upwards of $11,000 alone from private ad sales with his blog in the month of September. In simple terms, how it works is to open up your website or blog directly for advertising. You make an income through advertising fees paid to you without going through any middleman.

Creating a list packed full of your affiliate marketing leads is the dream of all affiliate marketers. If you are really interested in learning how to build your affiliate marketing leads, you can do a search in Google and you will find thousands of different products that claim to be able to teach you how to build your affiliate marketing leads.

The main reason why most affiliate marketers never made it through their third month in their online business is due to information overload. Most of them are busy looking for the next best ebook that can help them to generate thousands and thousands of leads overnight and never really take some time to implement what they have learned.

In fact, there are over a hundred different ways you can build your affiliate marketing leads but it would take you years to try them all. Therefore it is very important to focus on the few tactics that suit your budget and your time.

Personally, I am using three methods to build my own affiliate marketing leads and they have accounted for over two thousands leads every month for one of my lists without the need to spend huge amounts of money.

Below are the three proven methods I used to build my list

1) Article Marketing: I can’t emphasize enough this method of lead generation, this is the most effective and zero cost way of building your affiliate marketing leads. I strongly recommend this to all marketers who are facing budget constraints.

All you have to do is to write an article every day and then submit them to various article directories, web 2.0 sites or your blog and it will help you to generate leads.

This method has proven to be very useful for me. There is a lot more to article marketing than simply writing any article and then submitting them to article directories. Therefore if you are really interested in using article marketing to generate affiliate marketing leads, you should consider getting yourself a product that can help you in this area.

Article marketing is a long term method of generating affiliate marketing leads and I even have articles I have submitted two years ago that are still generating leads everyday. (So you see the power of articles)

2) Create Backlinks: This is also another great method I am using to build my affiliate marketing leads. Some marketers believe that creating backlinks is hard tedious work. So let me break the myth for you today, any marketer can make quick work of backlinks if they have the right tools.

I learn all my search engine marketing methods from one of the products I have bought and all I am doing now is putting them into practice and constantly tweaking the techniques to optimize the results.

3) My Secret Lead Purchase Shop: Most websites that offer leads are selling you low quality and overused leads that usually don’t materialize. Personally, I have tried a few lead purchase sites and they have proven to be useless.

I was actually introduced to the lead purchase site I am using now by one of the internet marketing gurus. It is an autoresponder service, lead purchase service and and so much more rolled into one comprehensive tool.

- Personalization of emails
- Unlimited follow-ups
- Complete import and export features
- Send a broadcast email to your entire list all in one shot
- Attach files to any or all of your autoresponses
- Purchase Leads
- Track your leads and responses
- Your choice of 19 different domains names to send from
- Send HTML-enhanced messages
- Your own “confirmation” screen
- Selective broadcasting
- Block unwanted email addresses
- Bounce-back management
- Full activity reports via email
- Free, unlimited technical support
- much, much more!

In this way, you are provided good quality leads, you have the tools to follow up and build trust and you can track your results. All the key ingredients for success.

Independent studies have shown that follow up can as much as double your sales!

The answer to this question really boils down to one seven letter word: CONTENT.

Here’s a resource that can help you build targeted niche sites quickly called Article Equalizer

Article Equalizer helps you to quickly and easily locate relevant and targeted content for your subject area or your niche. It pulls these articles out and turns them into pages that you can upload immediately without any programming or time consuming research on your part.

This way you build niche sites quickly and save time without having to write the articles yourself. All you need to do is provide content, and it doesn’t matter who writes it. From here, you can then suggest and recommend solutions or products related to your niche.

Happy blogging.

When it comes to new internet marketing opportunities for your business, RSS just might be the answer you were looking for. Now you can monetize on your blogs and earn extra revenue. Here are just some of the new opportunities it can provide you with.

1. Generate extra revenue using Google’s AdSense program.

AdSense lets website owners with rich content and high traffic sites, make money without even selling anything. Place a Google search box on your site, and you can start monetizing the results from web searches. Google serves ads that relate to the blog’s content. Their spiders use a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served. Get paid by Google.

2. Earn commission from affiliate programs by displaying vendors products or services.

Many top e-commerce merchants like Amazon and Best Buy want you to display their feeds with products to market to your visitors. From every sale, lead, that has been generated from your site, you earn a percentage of a commission. Here is an informative ebook on a new approach of RSS publishing and marketing.

3. Frequent Content Updates

High frequency content updates, even on a daily or hourly basis, are now finally possible with RSS. No more need to hold on your important messages, press releases and other content for a week or even a month to include it in your e-zine. RSS allows you to update your content as often as you want… and your subscribers won’t mind.

3. Appcasting

This is great news for software developers. Appcasting allows you to deliver new shareware programs and updates to your existing clients, without them having to visit your web site every week for critical updates.

4. Real estate agents and mortgage brokers can quickly and easily alert their subscribers of rate changes or new home listings.

All of these are just some examples of what you can do with RSS. The possibilities for new content delivery & business development models are quite endless

With Google’s new Personalized Home Page feature, it has launched an online RSS aggregator that is easy and functional to use and opens up the door for RSS feed submissions directly to its indexes.

Those that are interested in increasing the reach and visibility of your RSS feeds, now have a fast and easy way to submit to Google directly.

To make your blog and RSS feed part of this new Google index, visit Google Personalized Home page and follow these instructions:

1) If you don’t have a Google Account click here and create one now. For existing users, simply go to http://www.google.com/ig and log in.

2) Create a Google account on the Google Personalized Home Page.

3) Locate and click the “add stuff” link in the header, top right.

4) Left column click add RSS or Gadget

5) Type in your RSS or Atom feed directly.

That’s is it!

Submit your blogs and RSS feeds to 58 of the most popular search engine and directories, automatically.

Blogging has been around for a few years now. Most people use blogs to record their thoughts and lives, while the select few use them as a free way to make thousand of dollars every month.

One guy who uses this to his advantage is Rob Benwell. Last year he dished the dirt on the tips and tricks to making a fortune in his ebook blogging to the bank. But as time passes the old systems become obsolete and new techniques are required. This is where his brand new, fresh off the press blogging to the bank 2.0 system comes into play.

For those who know who Rob Benwell is, you’ve probably made a killing using blogs.

For those who don’t, here’s the story:

Back in 2005 he was struggling to make money online, had dropped out of college and was getting deep into debt. He was trying all the techniques the gurus tell you and wasn’t getting anywhere fast. All of that went in the bin and he started using his own techniques and started making more and more money using simple blogs. In early 2006 he shared this with the world and had a great ebook called blogging to the bank. Tons of people got rich from using these techniques. He then spoke at Online Marketing Legend Yanik Silver’s underground Seminar where he revealed even more of his underground strategies.

But as I said earlier, the techniques used in that ebook are now showing there age. Some of them are not even working in the slightest! This is where blogging to the bank 2.0 comes into play.

It’s full of great new techniques that work online right now! Everything’s explained in plain English with all the fluff cut out. I got hold of an advanced copy of the book for a much higher price than what it actually sells for and it has been worth every single cent! I got it in the afternoon and by the evening I was creating new profitable blogs. Within a couple of hours of them being active I had made a nice little profit.

Blogging To The Bank 2.0 teaches you Robs new step-by-step blueprint to creating highly profitable long term niche blogs using the newest optimization techniques. There’s even a section on advanced Search Engine Optimization. Most people think SEO is difficult but Rob explains this nice and simply so even the blogging newbie will understand it.

This is a must have for anyone who wants to monetize their blog. If you already have a successful blog then this may not be for you. However there are golden nuggets in here even for those who may have thought they knew everything about blogging. You can’t lose with this one.

Blogging To The Bank 2.0 is a must add for your arsenal and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to make easy money online.

Click Here for more information about this system.

Title: Big Ticket Presentation - Webinar
Location: Your Home PC
Link out: Click here
Description: Hear undeniable proof that what you will see is the Internet’s most significant home business opportunity. Every M-Thur 6pm PST
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2008-10-01
End Time: 19:00

Liberty League is an Australian based company which operates mainly online and markets itself as a home based business opportunity. As a member you will market yourself and the LLI opportunity using various online marketing methods. Let’s take a closer look at what this company sells and how their compensation plan works.

The Product

Liberty League has 3 products which fall under the personal wellness and self development category. The first product is called Beyond Freedom, a 90 day home study course that teaches you how to believe in yourself and establish goals in your life, this item will set you back $1495.

The second product is the Liberty Conference, a three day seminar which promises to be a more detailed version of the home study course with inspirational speakers, designed to pump you up and get you out there to move product, and this little gem will run you $7,995.

The third and final product is the Summit Conference, a 5 day seminar held annually, this will set you back $12,995 it expands on the first 2, but is more focused on the keys to tremendous personal wealth.

The Compensation Plan

The Liberty League International compensation plan is that of a 2-Up system. For each successful personal product sale, you net an instant commission of $1000. The first objective when joining Liberty is to make your first 2 qualifying sales which gets passed up to the individual who sponsored you. Then you must continue to sponsor more people to keep income flowing.

What this means is that, in order to get started with Liberty League International, you must first pay $1495 to become a business associate and then give up $2000 ($1000 x 2) from your first two qualifying sales to your qualified sponsor. So all together you must give up $3495 before you can even begin to earn any money with this program.

Another drawback of the Liberty League’s 2-Up program is that you get paid on the first two sales of those below you and that’s it. Then your people breakaway from you (their sponsor) and actually end up becoming your competition! The problem with the two up or any pass up program is this, once you have passed up your sales, there would be no motivation for your sponsor to help you or for you to help your new associates since they will ultimately become competition.

Liberty League is a high ticket program and your earnings can be quite significant, but only if you have experience with this type of business, online marketing, and have the financial means. I certainly don’t think this program is for a beginner as it is a difficult program to market and has a high drop-out rate because of the costs involved before and if you see a profit. Also it is lacking the training and mentorship that is required for those who are new to the biz and new to online marketing. The team synergy that I personally look for in a business is pretty much nonexistent.

For those who are new to online marketing or who would prefer not to invest such a substantial amount of money, I recommend a more automated program that offers training, support and a team synergy. I personally stay away from 1-up, 2-up or other types of pass up programs.

For more on training, mentorship and a 98% automated home based business click here.