Andrew Chen writes a great blog on viral marketing and recently came up with a list of the top ways to ruthlessly acquire users (customers online). The top 5 were:

#1 - Email/IM features for invites and content

It’s obvious that you need to make it very easy to share content, invites, and other things for your site. So anything that might be an e-mailable article or detail page, put an “Email this to a friend” link there. Same for invites. And don’t have it just be e-mail, remember that lots of people use IM and you can use “aim:goIM” as a prefix to make it easy to send it to a AIM buddy.

#2 - Blog/MySpace widgets

Another super obvious feature is to widgetize the most core content on the site, and allow people to embed it into their blogs. They might do that because your site is solving something they want for their site (music-sharing/chat/slideshows), but it might also be something to help them make the site more sticky or content-rich (popular links, interesting news, etc.)

#3 - Auto-invite for email, social networks, etc

This is not new, but requires a bit more work. In the case of Flixster, after you sign in, it recognizes that you’re a hotmail.com or gmail.com or whatever user, and asks you for a username/password for that e-mail service. If you agree, it’ll go through and invite users from your address book and folks you’ve corresponded with. Annoying, but a great way to blast several hundred people all at once.

#4 - Auto-embed for blog widgets

Same for blog widgets - why trust users to copy and paste when you can get their MySpace credentials, save them, and make it a 1-click experience to add your widget to their spaces?

#5 - A/B tested signup pages

Using one headline versus another can create a 5x difference in signup percentages. If you want to make sure you’re not using a bad one, make sure you A/B test your signup pages. Try different value propositions - focus on Free versus Sharing versus MySpace versus whatever Web 2.0 proposition you have. Try them out, and keep a hidden field in the signup on the source. Then track them over time to see what works.

In fact, before you even launch your product, you can build a landing page through something like Survey Monkey. Then, drive traffic to it, and see how people respond to differences in layout, headlines, copy, and others.

Offermatica is the king of this kind of stuff. If someone would like to build a long-tail version of this used by bloggers and such, that’d be a great business.

Rounding out the top 10 were:

#6 - Smart adwords buying

#7 - Viral referrals

#8 - SEO/landing page generation

#9 - Push through RSS/Email, etc.

#10 - Reduce user “drag” through the entire funnel

How many of these methods have you tried? What has your success rate been?

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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