Sometimes the best sales force is an army of satisfied customers. Mike Smith makes a point along these same lines in his recent post "Word of Mouth Marketing: Thank your referrers."

I've had similar experiences with this blog and other projects.

Though I definitely have to worry about making sure the posts can be found by Google and other search engines and try to keep Technorati and updated on new posts, I think in the end continuous good on-topic posts keep readers/customers interested.

That means readers continuously coming back and telling other readers as opposed to me trying to seed every on line source imaginable with links and spending so much time on that I can't update my website with quality content.

Malcolm Gladwell depicts another aspect of this principle in The Tipping Point, explaining that whether we're talking about the spread in the popularity of Hush Puppies in SOHO or of a contagious disease, people (for good or ill) are the ones who make it happen.

And check out these thoughts by marketer Seth Godin about the reasons behind Google's success.

The idea of bootstrapping your business by word of mouth is important for numerous reasons:
• It saves money. Expenses from the hiring of a large sales force to the buying of expensive media ads just don't matter if satisfied customers can do the same work.
• It's more effective. There are numerous examples-Google, Apple-as well as examples of companies that spent huge amounts of money on advertising only to have their message ignored
• It's more efficient. One of the important things raised in Gladwell's book is the idea that ideas can spread geometrically among groups faster than if a single person were to deliver the message.
• It lets the customer decide. Imagine spending time and money promoting one aspect of a new product or service when customers find another aspect much more satisfying. Allowing customers to spread the word helps insure the qualities of your product they find most valuable are emphasized.

Photo Credit: Mary R. Vogt, MorgueFile