

Ask HN: What are your favorite techniques for driving viral growth of a website? - temerity

The essence of viral marketing is making one customer sell to the other.<p>Here are some well-known examples:<p>1) Photo-tagging on facebook. Tagging is the primary means by which photos are made social: when a user uploads a photo, they can “tag” their friends who appear in the photo. Notifications are sent to tagged friends letting them know that a new tagged photo of them exists on Facebook, and feed stories are published on both the tagger’s and taggee’s profiles.<p>Users who receive a notification that they have just been tagged usually investigate the photo. If they don’t want to be associated with the picture, they “detag” themselves from it. Similarly, users who see a feed story about their friends being tagged in photos often check out the photo.<p>2) Asking a new user for permission to automatically send invites to all of their GMail contacts. When you register for twitter, you have the option of allowing twitter to automatically log-in to your GMail account and send out invites to all of your contacts.<p>3) One of the earliest known examples of viral marketing on the web was HotMail. Every email message that you sent from HotMail included a signature inviting the recipient of the email to join HotMail.<p>4) PayPal was another early example of viral marketing. With PayPal, you could send money to anyone with an email address -- even if they were not a PayPal user. However, in order for the recipient to claim their payment, they would have to open a PayPal account.<p>What are your favorite examples of viral expansion loops on the web? Have you used any of these techniques yourself?
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byoung2
Similar to the Facebook example, I've seen people use YouTube to drive viral
traffic. It helps if your video is related to a popular news story or meme.
Put a link in the description and overlay it on the video. One tip is to leave
30 seconds of just the url at the end of the video so the related clips don't
pop up right away.

