With advertisers constantly on the lookout for new ways to spread their message, the new social networking phenomena of the late 1990′s became a perfect venue. Viral marketing is a form of advertising that relies on the enthusiasm of the end user to actually pass on the message to others.

Using easily self replicated processes like individualized affiliate squeeze pages and interactive games or flash movies, the viral marketing ad can spread from the original ad to the friends of people who liked the ad or program. It is through this beyond-the-advertisement spread of interest in a product or service that gives it the name “viral”, like a virus spreading a disease.

Viral marketing techniques include researching who among the social networking websites has a high user potential. Then advertisements are formulated to appeal to this particular segment of the population.

It is hoped that with targeted marketing, the message will garner enough interest for the user to pass it on to his friends who might also be interested in it. While sample giveaways can be useful, one must make sure their viral marketing campaign is not in fact viewed as merely a publicity stunt.

There is a dark side to viral marketing that needs to be avoided. “Undercover” or “stealth” marketing involves having someone in the guise of a regular user promote and recommend the product or service to everyone he can.

If this tactic is discovered then the backlash from people feeling they have been unfairly manipulated can have lasting ill effects on future advertisements from the company.

As an added benefit beyond just creating good search engine optimization, the social potential on the Web2.0 makes it easier to target a specific niche and customize more precise and effective ad campaigns.

People are readily affected by sound and pictures so Viral Video Optimization has come into being used with the quantitative marketing algorithms to determine who has the highest Social Networking Potential, ads that entertain as well as inform stand the greatest chance of being passed on to others.

On a smaller scale viral marketing can be used in even simple places like the signature lines in forum posts. Provided you can add helpful information when you post, you will give the appearance of being savvy about the topic at hand and thus make your recommendations seem to be of greater value.

An effective e-mail signature line can also help keep the potential word-of-mouth advertising information passing around the web.

Whichever approach you take to fitting your advertising to a specific market, be careful not to disenfranchise other potential customers. Even though one niche may accept the risqu

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No doubt it is a super feeling to see money coming in from your internet business. That is, as long as the income is greater than your expenses. With PPC advertising campaigns having become in many cases quite expensive, as the cost of keywords are bid up, using low cost viral marketing techniques is an excellent way to efficiently market products. That is if you know how.

You may ask what is viral marketing anyhow? And why can it be so effective?

The term “Viral” is used to describe the use of marketing methods that once underway tend to multiply and spread themselves very quickly; like an infectious virus of the unwanted kind, say the flu.

The most common technique used by viral marketers is to create a product that has great perceived value and then give it away for free or at very low cost. Those who receive the product are only too happy to recommend it to their friends and Internet associates, who in turn recommend it to their friends, who pass it along to their friends. On the Internet this process can repeat itself extremely quickly with an ever more powerful effect as the number of folks making recommendations increases rapidity.

Thus the creator of the product only has to make the initial marketing effort and with the right product the product becomes self promoting. The key is that the product value has to be great enough, and the benefit to the referrer great enough, so that folks want to use and pass along information about the product right away.

The referrers recommendation may well be only the use of the product. Nothing else need be said. A good viral product has built in features for promotion.

If you want to really kick up the rate of “infection” with a viral advertising campaign make the product promote itself by the act of the users of the product only going about their normal daily Internet routines, like sending email.

One of the great viral marketing products of all time was Hotmail. The days of Hotmails explosive growth was back in the late 1990s when email was just taking off as a killer application for Internet use. Hotmail promoted itself only by automaticially inserting a link to Hotmail at the end of each email send out by its clients. All the client had to do to promote was to use the product.

As the number of clients grew so did the number of emails sent, each containing a little ad at the end promoting the free Hotmail email service. Hotmail went viral almost immediately and went from zero to a membership in excess of 30,000,000 within two years.

Another viral marketing technique often used to good effect is the use of “refer a friend” forms on website pages. Generally there will be room to refer from five to ten friends on one form. As friends are referred and they in turn refer their friends, and so on, the number of visitors to the website content that is being refered will grow exponentially.

Of course, this technique will fail unless the majority of the referred friends feel that there is value in whatever it is that they are recommending.

Which brings us the the key point about viral marketing. Unless the product is good enought to sell itself the promotion will likely fail.

What type of products meet that test today? Judging from the way video is taking off (Youtube for example) a funny or interesting video has amazing viral marketing qualities. A smart marketer using video can add a link at the end of the presentation and drive high amounts of traffic to his/her website.

Video seems to be the biggest “killer” application to hit the net since email.

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Viral marketing strategies are marketing techniques which once implemented take on a life of their own, they continually expand their reach across cyberspace drawing more customers and their cash into your net. They can spread like wildfire from place to place, luring, enticing and pre-selling prospective customers before they even reach your site.

Viral marketing strategies are so powerful that whole ebooks and courses have been written on how to implement and use such techniques to squeeze the most out of them. As once set up correctly you may never need to pay for advertising again…

So what types of techniques work?

Well as I said there have been book written on the subject, so here’s a quick run down of a few techniques which I’ve used to help create steady streams of traffic to my websites.

Writing and submitting articles such as this is a great technique for getting more links back to your site and for drawing in more visitors, as people publish them in ezines, on their blogs and websites and you’ll find them popping up all over the place. If you go to Google and type in “How to profit from your home business blog” you’ll find about 9,290 listings of that article which I wrote a while back…it’s also the most popular download at contentdesk.com with over 4200 downloads last time I checked. So if you’re not regularly writing and submitting articles, why not?

Power tip: Make your article viral, by adding at the end something like this to encourage distribution:

“(Feel free to use this article online and in your email newsletters as long as you leave it intact and do not alter it in anyway. The by-line and biography must remain in the article.)”

Putting together and distributing viral ebooks is another strategy I’ve used with good results. The key is to make them ‘brandible’ so that consumers can brand the ebook with their own affiliate links, this gives them an incentive to pass them on and on.

A few places you can give these away are, to your customers, website visitors or in article/forum signatures. Have a look at the link below for an awesome free viral ebook which is like nothing you’ll have ever seen:

Click here to download free, while you still can!

http://www.asuccesfullhomebusiness4u.com/viralsupertip.html

These are two strategies you can implement straight away. Other viral marketing techniques you could use are:

-Creating and distribution podcasts on your niche; turn your articles in to podcasts and you’ll add a new stream of visitors to your site, don’t forget to submit them to podcast directories.

-Create viral videos and submit them to google video, ifilm and other video related websites. Done properly, these are a very effective strategy.

-Add refer-a-friend scripts to your site, these are freely available just do an internet search, I’ve used “Spread The Word” which is a good free script. If you give away an incentive for referring friends (e.g. viral ebook) you can really enhance the effect of this strategy.

There are many more viral marketing techniques that you could use, focus on one at a time and keep working until you get the results you want. Decide now to take action and take your business to the next level.

(Feel free to use this article online and in your email newsletters as long as you leave it intact and do not alter it in anyway. The by-line and resource box must remain in the article.)

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Before we get into the meat and potatoes of how you can use viral marketing to help get a buzz going about your small business, let’s start with a definition of exactly what “viral marketing” means.

According to the Wikipedia, “Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even text messages.”

If you’ve ever had a hotmail, yahoo or G-mail account, you’ve participated in a viral marketing campaign every time you sent an email to someone – because the company inserted a small (and usually discreet advertisement) at the bottom of all of your outgoing emails – inviting the people you were communicating with to receive their own free email account.

So how can you put a viral marketing campaign together for your own business – and more importantly, do you even want to?

Let me answer that second question first, okay? YES! You definitely want to take the time to brainstorm your own viral marketing campaign – even if you don’t someday want to be as big as hotmail, yahoo or Gmail.

Why? Because according to a recent survey done by Forrester Research, people are almost 65% more likely to trust a review posted by a peer – or even a complete stranger – than they are to trust the marketing or sales information put out by the company.

Don’t believe me? Check out Amazon.com and I-tunes. Why is this the case? Because as consumers we tend to think that the average “Joe Blow” has less of a personal agenda when posting his review about the latest “Dixie Chicks” album and so we give it more weight.

And, by the way, this is a normal reaction – it’s one that’s kind of hard-wired into all of us. People have always shared the things they like – or hate – with their friends and family members. Back in the 50′s and 60′s, our grandparents used to talk to their neighbors over the “back fence,” call each other on the phone or tell their friends during lunch. The difference is, these days we use the Internet and cell phones.

What’s interesting though, is that with the popularity of the Internet, our trust – and believe in “social proof” – has become even stronger.

By creating your own viral marketing campaign, you’ll be doing more than getting the word out about your new affiliate product. You’ll be gathering social proof – and that will help your sales to go through the roof.

So how do you set up your own viral marketing campaign? The first thing to do is to get back to the basics.

Here’s the real “secret” to making a lot of money with affiliate products. Have the right product, with the right message to the right people in the right time.

So start with your affiliate product. Make sure that there’s a hungry audience for whatever you’re selling.

Then make sure that you’re sending out the right message – and in the right way. If you’re marketing a product to teens, you’ll want to make sure that it’s something they want – and you’ll have to reach them where they’re hanging out. That might be on MySpace, twitter or even Friendster.

What’s the right message? Maybe it’s a special report. But it could just as easily be a video. Or an audio mp3 file. Match your message to your audience. And finally, make sure that you’re getting your message out at the right time – when your audience is ready to buy it.

Make your viral marketing campaign stand out from the crowd – because that’s how it’s going to get passed around and become viral. By understanding the basics – who your audience is, what they want, how they want to get it and when they want it – all you have to do next is to create something that your audience loves – or hates – or finds interesting enough – to pass around to their friends. And because your product comes with an implied endorsement – social proof – those people will pass it around to other people – and the buzz goes on and on and on and you’ll start hearing the “ka-ching!” of your cash register going off a lot more often.

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In the beginning, e-mail was the one and only way to carry out a viral marketing campaign. Since that day long ago, viral marketing has gone from a marketing strategy to an art form and there are many ways to accomplish the objective of creating a successful viral marketing campaign. Seven of those ways are:

1. E-mail: It was first but it is still around and still used. It is, however, getting a little harder to use as more and more government restrictions are placed on it. Still … it does work.

2. Newsletters: This is an extension of e-mail but it a very effective tool. If you include enough timely and valuable information, a good newsletter can drive up the number of visits to your website.

3. Blogging: Providing the tools on your website to enable bloggers to interact with one another is a terrific way to get the message about your product or service out there and being talked about. Bloggers always have their ears to the ground for new products and services.

4. Chat Rooms: A chat room on your website can, and does, encourage interaction among your customers and that can’t be a bad thing. Also, you can use the chat room to schedule special events like having an expert available to answer questions on a given day at a given time.

5. Tell-a-friend Script: If you add this with a statement saying that e-mail addresses supplied will never be shared with third parties, you can increase your potential customer list greatly.

6. Video Clips: Including cool video clips on your website will keep the interest up and increase traffic.

7. Flash Games: Although they are a little costly to start, they are an extremely effective tool to get your viral marketing campaign going. Once they are launched, they require nothing more from you.

Visit our web sites for more in-depth information on the tools to make these, and other, viral marketing techniques a reality.

And here’s a BONUS – compound your success by using forums to do viral marketing. Here are some things that are required.

Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research.

1. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many types of forums could apply … everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home moms.

2. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this.

3. Choose forums that allow sig tags. If it’s possible read the rules before joining and pay attention to them. Your time is important, too. It is better to find out that a forum doesn’t allow posts with sig tags before you go to the time and trouble of joining.

After You Have Joined: OK … you have chosen two or three forums that meet your requirements … now what?

1. Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website.

2. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This all but a universal rule and only displays the marketers lack of experience if he does so. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors … at worst, it is grounds for being banned.

3. Work the room. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there and take the time to get to know the users. Take the time to introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic.

As a marketer becomes a regular member, they will hopefully develop a good reputation and without saying a word about their promotion, those who are interested in their product will approach them.

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What is viral marketing? It is an idea that is passed through the community much like a common cold. What is viral marketing? It encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others.Viral marketing is a fancy term for word of mouth advertising it is any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do.

Word of mouth is still one of the most effective marketing techniques, online or offline.As a result viral marketing is a phenomenon that occurs when the creative message you’re trying to convey resonates deeply with the audience you’re speaking to. If you’re doing your homework and adequately planning the right messaging, with some incentive that clearly benefits the consumer, then viral marketing occurs.Consequently it is considered as one of the most powerful methods of online marketing and advertising today.

This form of marketing is dependent on peers passing the information on to multiple others via online social networks. When executed well a viral campaign should spread rapidly and become referenced and talked about across multiple internet channels.

It is most powerful when it taps into the breadth of its customers’ weak connections to others. Therefore tapping the customer’s entire address book is obviously of more value than just reaching their best friend. Ultimately it is the way that ideas have always spread through communities If something has value then people want to share it.

These methods work when the product is something of value so efforts towards design, usability, and solving pain is most of the solution.It then becomes two efforts, creating the conventions from web 1.0 that people expect, share with a friend is an example and the unique web 2.0 strategies that are more social, using rss/blogs, etc.

Viral marketing creates a win/win situation for all parties. The user is provided a service or valuable information for free and in turn provides your site with free advertising.It is so successful because it creates the curiosity and desire needed to generate the demand for a product or service. It causes people to seek it out.

Hotmail used this form of marketing in a small way that produced big results. At the bottom of each of the emails sent, they included a small line that said something like “get your free email account with hotmail. Hotmail is now one of the biggest free web-based email providers, and one of the longest running alongside yahoo and a few others.

Ultimately hotmail piggybacked on personal emails from one person to another to publicize their free email service. At a time when few people had email,the first and only free email service in the marketplace was appealing and novel – hence their rapid adoption and spread.

Viral marketing existed way before ‘viral marketing’ if you were a marketer, I’d say it was doing your job. As it takes advantage of the millions of communities that all of us have built up naturally,that’s you and me .In reality it has been around forever, spreading the word through word-of-mouth was the world’s first form of viral marketing.

It will yield its best results if a valuable and tangible incentive is offered, that will entice individuals to forward an email message to their friends.However,marketers should limit the incentive to a specific quantity to avoid spam-like distribution of the message.

Viral marketing essentially relies on other people to get involved. You can learn the ways to help motivate them and can feed them the information and campaigns that are mostly likely to spark their interest, but ultimately you have no control over what they do with it.

Viral marketing still has the strongest effect if your product can be somehow incorporated into the communication between two people. This includes phone systems (mci), electronic postcards (blue mountain), free e-mail (hotmail), and the communications tool that someone is inventing in his or her garage as you’re reading this chapter.

It is always as effective as others say it is if only it would be done properly. It is effective, yes.However it does depend on a high pass-along rate from person to person.If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly.

Viral marketing extends this into the digital domain by harnessing the electronic connectivity of individuals to spread your message. It describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence.

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. Viral marketing is similar in nature to a contagious disease, in the way it spreads. However, it’s always beneficial to the business conducting the campaign.

Essentially it works best in combination with e-mail marketing, since e-mail marketing provides viral marketing with a great communication medium. You can use e-mail to spread the message as really it is a good bit about winning hearts and minds. Viral marketing is advertising that you voluntarily pass around because it’s cool, not necessarily because you want to help build publicity.

There is some noticeable overlap where a guerrilla ad that doesn’t quite look like an ad is so great that you end up telling other people about it.A notable survey was done recently on such an add and it showed a full 70% of people interviewed remembered seeing the ad so viral marketing if done right is incredibly powerful stuff.

It is creating an awareness of a product or a service, without really advertising it. For instance, you wear branded jeans with the name tag on the back.Therefore viral marketing helps to spread the word and can help produce a result.

Also it facilitates and encourages people to pass along a message voluntarily. Viral marketing is essentially the word-of-mouth or refer-a-friend tactic done through the internet. The concept is actually very simple: promote your brand, product or service by creating a message that is intriguing and entertaining enough that people would want to pass it to their friends online.

Viral Marketing is but one of many techniques that together have a cumulative effect in attracting customers and subscribers to your business – in attracting targeted visitors to your website. Momentum is gained by aiming every element of the overall strategy at developing the relationship with your visitors.

It has been able to successfully allow marketers to increase the value of free services online, because referrals are the major way that most people market with free services. So, these tools of internet marketing have been able to allow people to significantly pursue various affiliate programs in order to increase the value of these free services.

Viral marketing campaigns can achieve great success they just have to be planned out like any other marketing campaign. Undeniably it is considered as one of the most powerful methods of internet marketing and advertising today.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail,it counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. Clear market evidence shows it is doing it’s job on the consumers, it keeps them on-line and now with domino pizza, consumers are buying products just to get more marketing, a never ending cycle.

What ever happened to letting anticipation build just waiting for some movie to come out, that carrot in front of you face has gotten bigger and your wallet is getting smaller. It was huge in the mid-90′s before the dot-com bubble burst and everyone realized that eyeballs didn’t necessarily translate into dollars.

However Viral marketing if done right can be a cost effective way to get the word out about your business and get customers buying.Although it’s fair to say that alot of people talk about viral marketing,but they don’t do it very well. It also describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the messages exposure and influence.

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message from one to two to thousands , to millions.One of it’s major strengths is it uses the power of one customer’s recommendation to another.Therefore that helps to spread the word about a product or company.As viral marketing is a method of encouraging recipients to pass along the marketing message to other potential consumers. The impact of video email and the quality of the information presented can facilitate the proliferation of this form of personalized marketing.

Blogging started really taking off after the dot-com boom and bust. It started taking off after world-com and other corporate scandals. Blogs and other social software rely upon the trust of the reader, which is why links, references and disclaimers feature on many (not all) posts.

Transparency is key in the modern advertising-savvy marketplace.Blogs and the blogosphere in general have become an important tool in the viral marketing frontier. Many reputable bloggers are approached by companies wanting to advertise their services or products, all with the intuitive of instigating a viral effect.

Viral marketing is not only putting yourself out there with some free information, but its utilizing the
coolness factor by getting people to write about you and spread the word .It is beneficial in that it has the potential to reach large audiences very quickly meaning companies will potentially get their message to their target audience and beyond in hours. Viral marketing is a great tactic to earn revenue when promoting a product or service .

Article marketing is no doubt is an indispensable tool in internet marketing.There are many people who find writing articles to be dreadful, others may feel it is just too much work and or no one reads them. Article marketing is a process of writing meaty articles and submitting them to article directories on the Internet with the goal of getting traffic and get traffic you will if you do it right.

Viral marketing is the ethical means of driving more traffic to your website. Most of these techniques are free to implement although such will require hard work and commitment. However be very aware that it is a sophisticated strategy that requires considerable thought .

Essentially it is the technical term for what is commonly known as word-of-mouth advertising. Although viral marketing is as old as human civilization itself, the internet has brought its efficacy and reach to a new level, and the technologies that provide the motive force behind this movement continue to evolve.

Personally, if I’d been busted for being a poser and poorly imitating youth pop culture i would avoid using phrases like – Busted. I think pop culture and viral marketing have a lot in common as they are both engaging, creative, and unfortunately in the most part largely misunderstood.

I certainly feel word-of-mouth and viral marketing are one of the best ways to advertise a product to consumers as i feel it’s honest and really gives consumers the perspective from an unbiased individual.

Again, I stress that this is a legitimate marketing tactic which can achieve fantastic results if it is done correctly.As internet marketing is extremely competitive you should use all the avenues that are available to you in advertising your web site and products.

Experiment with the various ways of viral marketing until you find the ones that work best for you. Internet competition is a ruthless and competitive rivalry that shows no mercy.Therefore every means and methods of internet marketing should be used and employed.

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