Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a very powerful and results-driven marketing method. Not only is it extremely cost effective, viral marketing builds for the long term and when done correctly can gain almost unstoppable momentum.

Just what is viral marketing? Basically it is any kind of marketing presentations that encourage the message to be passed on from person to person – hence the description.
A classic example with internet marketing is a viral eBook or report. To start, you create an an eBook on something that readers in your niche will want to read about, and then in the text of  the book or report you place links back to your internet sites.  If the report contains information of value it’ll be passed on because your readers will want to share it with other people. The links or advertising contained inside the report will be visited for years and years after you originally created it.

Are there other types of viral marketing?
One of the most popular activities at the moment is internet videos. You only have to look at the wild popularity of sites such as YouTube to see the massive power of video as a way of marketing your internet company. The same principles apply to viral videos as viral reports – it needs to be something interest that your readers will want to share with their friends. Videos which are amusing, funny, or interesting tend to do well. You will need to get creative and produce something people will want to actually spend time watching.

A third form of viral marketing is email and your email signatures. The use of free email services can be teamed with viral marketing to great effect.  At the bottom of every email sent through the service was a link back to where users could sign up themselves. This became very successful as more and more people used the service to send emails.   Be sure to add your link to the bottom of all of your emails, encouraging visitors to pass on your link to others.
In order for viral marketing to be as effective as you can it is important to aggressively encourage people to pass on your materials. Make it straight forward for them to do so. If you’re creating a viral report, for example, a good strategy is to include a sales page with the report. Other internet marketers can then plug it in and distribute it to their customers without having to create any new product themselves.