You might have seen Hellobar popping up all over the place lately. I recently started playing around with it here, too (just look up ).

I don’t yet have any substantial testing results to tell you about with Hellobar, but what I really find worthy of note is the method of marketing.

I mean, just how did Hellobar get out there so quickly? Here’s what I notice…

#1 – Beta Invites

On the surface, some look at that and look at it as a barrier of entry and get annoyed. Flip it around, however. It is a brilliant stroke of psychological marketing as well as viral marketing.

When you sign up (very simple signup, too), you’re taken to a page talking about the beta invite. At this point, you’re a bit commited and you’re like, “Damn!”. But, the good ol’ “commitment and consistency” comes to play and you want to finish this process.

Well, conveniently, they give you a retweet button and a pre-written tweet where you can turn to Twitter and ask for a beta code. This is…

• Built-in viral marketing by way of Twitter.
• Built-in social proof, because now you have all these people asking for invite codes in a public space (Twitter). Which, of course, means…
• People want it.

It feels exclusive if you need an “invite code” (awesome use of wording there, too).

Plus, did I mention that they’re building a nice list here, too?

#2 – Branding

Every Hellobar is branded with the “H” logo. People don’t complain because the service is free.

Then, when somebody clicks on that “H”, it runs them through the whole process.

Plus, the name “Hello Bar” is so damn brandable, it’s genius.

#3 – Not Hypey

The design of their system is very “web 2.0″… even though I hate that damn phrase, I have no idea how else to best describe it.

Contrast this to something like Popup Domination. It also spread pretty well around the blogosphere, but the landing page is significantly more hypey and sales oriented. I’m not knocking that fact because the target market for the two products is pretty different and, as is obvious, one is free and the other is paid.

When you’re going after real viral marketing, though, you can’t hit them up with a sales page. So, I think Hellobar is doing it quite nicely. They obviously have plenty of monetization options with more premium offers on a monthly basis (similar to the Evernote model).

Final Thoughts

The most ironic thing about this is that Hellobar is really nothing new – at all. In fact, there is a Stripe Ad plugin from MaxBlogPress which does all of this (and more).

Hellobar just managed to make it sexy. And viral.

How can you apply this to your future marketing?