If there’s anything I learned in my a few weeks in excess of a year of working online, it’s that the Internet is very viral for advertising.

You only need to look to the high school kid’s favorite website: MySpace or Friendster, and you have your Ad Agency in a can.

It may be unsavory to talk about, but porn sites have already been one up on the wholesome sites, in terms of viral marketing tactics. They have used the social networking websites to further their ends. Like weeds, they have sprouted on all corners of the Internet, popping up even where they are not wanted. On my YouTube profile, for example.

So, I suggest that wholesome sites and businesses take a lesson from the porn sites and make use of the Internet to further your marketing ends.

A popular thing in SEO is comment posting and link trading. Let me talk about comment posting first. While comment posting has some advantages, it also has drawbacks. Have you ever used the freelance bidding sites and hired someone from there to post comments and links for you? If you were unfortunate and you got a spammer in your hands, you would have jeopardized optimizing your site instead of helping it actually. Search engines tend to be unfriendly to spamming. If and when you hire a comment poster, do make it a point to keep it clear to him or her that his/her comments have to be relevant to the topic of the blog post he/she is commenting on, and not only your product. I’m an owner of several blogs myself, and I have to admit that I do delete the comments that are blatantly for marketing purposes. One time, I got a comment in Portuguese, and the comment was about shirts, on a blog post ranting against a certain religion! If you want to make use of comment posting as advertising, at least make sure your poster would post relevant comments. Chances are, the IP address of the computer he/she’s using may end up blocked.

Link trading is a better option. If you have “friends in high places,” meaning friends whose blogs have a Google PR of <1, you could actually have them link to your website, so your site can climb up the Google PR ladder. Just make sure your friends’ sites are of good content, because search engines tend not to favor unsavory sites.

But back to the tactics of porn traders. They use MySpace and Friendster to their ends. You know what other company was smart enough? Nokia. Yes, the cellphone giant Nokia. They have a Friendster account, and they’re even holding contests there.

Nokia was one of the first ones that caught on on the advertising bandwagon in Friendster, but today, so many local companies have set up their own ad campaigns and even profiles on Friendster.

As of this edit, the social networking bandwagon is somewhat this afternoon’s news. As we are hurtling on towards dawn, with Web 3.0, so many other marketing tools have arisen. There’s Twitter, Facebook (new generation Social Networking).. The possibilities are endless. The only thing you have to do, to tap this potential of the Intarwebs, is to start exploring the websites I mentioned. Just Google ‘em up, coz I’m a lil lazy to link them up today. Who knows, you just might hit advertising paydirt. :p

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