OK, now that title has probably got your attention. I was reading through the latest issue of Nature Medicine (Nature Medicine 14, 995 (2008) when I saw an article called “Condom ring-tone catches on”.
It turns out that the BBC World Service Trust, a charity organization run by the BBC, launched the condom ring-tone in India to spread awareness about HIV prevention. It is a Capella song that lasts just a few seconds and consists only of the word condom—repeated almost 50 times and has been downloaded about 300,000 times in the first month since its launch in August in India.
Create your own viral ring-tone
Ring-tones can act as link bait and even make money through subscriptions or paid downloads. They can also be used as viral marketing tools. There are free tools to make your own ring-tones and you can then make it available through your website.
You can either drive traffic to your site because of the great ringtone you have created or you can pay someone to make. You can also use your domain name in the ringtone. For example, ThroughTheCore.com could be incorporated into a jingle and just like having it printed on a tee-shirt, you would get free advertising.
Attracting one way inbound links
Imaginative ways to promote your online business are becoming more and more important. Asking for links usually results in reciprocal links which are not as valuable as one way links. Paying for links is frowned upon by search engine companies unless there is a no-follow used on the link. High quality, original content is still the best way to attract inbound links and an innovative ring-tone can work wonders for your traffic.
I wrote an article for one of my websites about a year ago based on an academic paper measuring how happy each country in the world was. I got hit with a very large amount of traffic when that article was picked up by a social network and it spread to political forums and many other places I would never have dreamed of. It taught me a lot about viral marketing and its impact.
Certainly it is not as easy as just banging out viral material and having it take off. There are lessons to be learned and even then the market is quite unpredictable. However when it works, it can bring some nice traffic, nice one way inbound links and hopefully some nice profits.
Ring-tones are something I haven’t tried yet but it is certainly something I will keep in mind from now on.
