Five Ways to Multiply Your Customers

PROFIT : If you really want to multiply your audience rather than increase it just a little, you’ll need to think differently. Here’s five ways to design your product, service and business to get people talking about you and add bottom-line value to your business.

Direct Marketing is where businesses talk straight to the consumer.
Examples: flyers, catalogues, promotional letters.

Word of Mouth is simply getting people talking. We all do it every day. Word of Mouth Marketing is getting people talking to fulfil your marketing objective.
Examples: This Book Rapper issue is word of mouth for the authors and their books, just like Oprah’s Book Club.

Viral Loops can be simple and straightforward: design your product or your business process to invite your customers to refer other people.
Examples: Tupperware, Ponzi Scheme, Hotmail, YouTube

Viral Networks thrive on network effects: the more people that use your service the better it gets. For instance, the more people you know with a phone, the more people you can call. Typically, they grow virally because the users provide the content rapidly expanding the value of the network.
Examples: Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr

Double Viral Loops are a hybrid of both Viral Loops and Viral Networks. They grow exponentially because the user of one network may also create a new network on a different topic. Piggybacking and stacking networks is another way to achieve this.
Examples: Ning, PayPal + eBay, Flickr + Blogging.